TWIDDLE DEE AND SOMETHING ELSE

A review of the prevailing polarization hanging over the current national political scene cannot be complete without addressing how that level of division is affecting the political parties – the Democratic and Republican Parties.  According to the journalist Ezra Klein,[1] covering that scene, especially from the perspective one gets in the nation’s capital, has fundamentally changed since the year Klein moved to Washington in 2005.

          Highlighting the work of Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, a pair of political scientists who usually work at a liberal think-tank, in the case of Mann, and a conservative think-tank, in the case of Ornstein, Klein reports that the duo became popular for their balanced, combined reporting.  They usually shared their findings and interpretations of polling information.  But of late, they find their jobs overly challenging in that while they are balanced, their “beat” became imbalanced.

          In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, they give their readers a sense of how imbalanced the political landscape had become.

Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier.  It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government.  The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties.  This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.[2]

While this blog avoids reporting, much less portraying a partisan stand, a review of polarization cannot avoid making observations about the current divide between the nation’s major political parties.  The closest it can sustain its impartial commitment is to share what these “balanced” political scientists have found.

          Yet, their findings, indicated by the above quote, cast the two as “controversial” by the prevailing media outlets and, Klein reports, they found themselves not being invited to the Sunday shows, such as Meet the Press.  But their book warned their audience of how extreme things were becoming.  And with the subsequent election of Trump to the presidency four years later, their warning had substance.  At least, that is how Klein casts Mann and Ornstein’s cautious tale.

          In another publication, the conservative, Ornstein, further warned how this polarization was being manifested in the outerings of GOP congress members, Tea Party radicals, and the inability of more moderate voices in the Republican Party to co-opt the more extreme actors.  In sum, the party was teed up to accept and promote Trump.

          By comparing the two major candidates in 2016, it provides one a clear distinction of what the divide looked like.  Trump expressed contempt of established norms, threatened to lock up opponents, and espoused or was friendly toward conspiracy theories and their advocates.  Hillary Clinton and her party didn’t engage in these sorts of broadsides.  One is left with the question:  if the above is true, why is it so?  Why does this divide exist in presidential and Congressional politics, at least to this degree?

          Here, this writer finds it helpful to review a model he has utilized more than once in this blog.  That is a model that E. E. Schattschneider describes in his book, The Semi-Sovereign People.[3]  It is a simple model that makes a lot of sense.  It basically reflects the commonsensical notion that if one is winning a competition and expects to win, one is unmotivated to seek and secure help from other parties.  Afterall, if one is going win, why share the spoils?

          Obviously, if one is in a disadvantaged position, relative to the opposition, one is motivated to seek help and usually that means seeking out and establishing relationships with other relatively weak competitors of other competitive situations.  While winning will probably mean sharing the spoils, successful partnerships promise the possibility of winning not just for oneself, but, as a result of reciprocity, for those partners in their competitive struggles.

          An example of the former situation is a large corporation, say the oil industry, doesn’t need help in advancing and protecting its interests.  Usually, through the common practice of campaign donations and lobbying, it seems to fair quite well.  It doesn’t actively seek help from, say, the tech industry.  Each moneyed interest minds its own affairs and happily enjoys the fruits of its own victories.  Of course, the isolation is not a hundred percent. 

For one thing, it needs the support of a political party.  And that party is the one that associates itself with business interests, the Republican Party.  It generally advances policies that honor, if not promote, this isolation by opposing, among other things, government intrusions. That would especially apply to the markets, such as with regulations.

On the other hand, there is the side, represented by the Democratic Party, that does seek alliances among the weaker actors.  They include such groups as civil rights organizations, labor organizations, environmental organizations, organizations established to protect and advance public services like public schools, etc. 

One main attribute that this side has is that, by just counting heads, they have far more people to draw on as potential members or allies and as voters.  There are far more people with meager resources than there are who have an abundance of resources, especially financial resources.

But there are other interests, outside of money, that influence how people see their political choices.  There are, for example, religious interests or there are feelings concerning race or feelings concerning one’s nation.  And here is what Klein identifies as the main motivating force behind what propels polarization, i.e., identity in its various forms.

This is this writer’s interpretation:  the political party that lacks appeal in the general population when solely considering economic questions, has to make up that deficiency by catering to people in other realms of interests.  That motivates the decision-makers of that side, that party, to cater to other natural drives, such as those that reflect the concerns over identity. 

Usually, if one analyzes the language of that side one finds craftily formulated messaging.  Effective combatants – those within that side’s political party – use an appeal to identity, in some form, and that appeal lies below the surface.

Why this subterfuge?  Because appealing to identity, by its nature, smacks in the face of the espoused national theory that Americans hold about themselves, i.e., the support for equality.  Advancing one’s identity group, say race, to the expense of another – especially when it comes to public policy – deprives, to some degree, equal accessibility to resources that public policy should extend to all individuals, say educational opportunities.

A concrete example in the nation’s history and even today, is unequal access to these opportunities.  And the policies that promote this unequal access need to be hidden to some extent by coming up with all sorts of qualifiers especially after the federal government enacted the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s.  Examples are funding school policies or requirements for teacher certification. 

This general strategy, though, has become more and more difficult to maintain.  Therefore, the efforts have become less and less subtle.  The result is two-fold:  more targeted policies that in effect limit equality and the use of language that has become less coded and more direct.

Given the above, certain consequences come into play.  Klein writes,

Democrats [those of the weaker-actors’ party] have an immune system of diversity and democracy.  The Republican Party doesn’t.  This has not left the Democrats unaffected by the forces of polarization, to be sure.  But if polarization has given the Democratic Party the flu, the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.[4]

It seems that this once subtle strategy has gotten out of hand, it has metastasized.  This, in turn, has disrupted the political arena and by doing so, has endangered the general array of political norms and values.  Polarization is dangerous and might threaten the American way of politics that has sustained its democratic institutions for over two centuries.  More on this to come.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[2] Ibid., 226.

[3] E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People:  A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York, NY:  Hole, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

[4] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized, 229.

A TRUE SELF IMAGE?

 

Polarization, a bedeviling state of affairs affecting the current American political scene, has been attributed to a sense of identity.  The journalist Ezra Klein makes that connection in his book, Why We’re Polarized?[1]  And no aspect of identity is more intensely felt then when it comes to racism, the bugaboo of the American story.

The social scientific work that has been most linked to the study of this problem – the scholarly study that painted this problem’s broad implications – is An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal.[2]  That two-volume work (over a thousand pages) has, through the years, had an enormous influence on public policy especially during the Johnson Administration.  But as the years have gone by, one of the work’s central – albeit unproven – thesis has been subjected to increasing criticism.

That criticism, if true, gets at explaining a central motivating force feeding the current polarization; but that is getting ahead of the story.  Myrdal in his work – and that of his extensive team of social scientists that combed the South to acquire the raw data upon which his study was based – assumed that Americans had/have a set of richly espoused values and supporting beliefs in an American Creed.

That creed has been composed of certain substantive qualities; those being liberty, justice, and equality that would be demonstrated by extending fair opportunity to everyone.  This, in turn, casts Americans as being a moral people harboring a moral consciousness of the realities that runs counter to this creed. 

Yet, his study documented the obvious and extensive realities African Americans experienced in their daily lives within the area of study, that of the South.  That existence was characterized by a social/political/economic existence that resembled nothing approaching liberty, justice, and/or equality.

All Americans needed to do to become unconflicted with this “dilemma” was to stop discriminating against blacks, which the study proposed was the main cause of that minority population’s deplorable conditions.  Maribel Morey writes,

As he prepared the final manuscript, Myrdal collected countless studies and memoranda illustrating the leading role of racial discrimination in creating racial differences in the United States.  He commissioned original memoranda from over forty leading social scientists on topics including racial stereotyping, patterns of racial segregation, and black labor.[3]

Under the current state, many question this self-imaging many Americans seem to have about the type of people they are.

          The primary cause for the state of race relations to this day, some would argue, is not so much a lack of living out one’s espoused values.  The disease is more entrenched.  To have a viable ongoing issue in a viable polarized state of political affairs, one needs a significantly established set of beliefs that counter this higher “moral” character.  Why did Myrdal, a sophisticated, “impartial” foreigner not see what many today judge to be obvious?

One can look at Myrdal and the individual situation he and his wife were experiencing during the development of this work to understand potential ulterior motives or biases for the slant the final product took.  They were Swedes in America while Nazi Germany was imposing its unspeakable crimes on Europe – but that’s another story.  Leave it to suggest that the Myrdals wanted to project a more humane image of America that could more boldly counter that of Germany.

          What is relevant here is that this higher moral view of the American psyche underestimated the strength and united commitment by many to allow the wrongs being imposed on blacks.  It seems to have missed the strengths of senses of right and wrong that went counter to this alleged noble democratic creed.  And this was not just in the South but in the North and West also.  Evidence?  Well, one need only look at the state of blacks in the ensuing years until today.

          Yes, there have been improvements, but are they of the degree to prove what Myrdal postulated?  Morey quotes Yale sociologist, Maurice Davie, “Though the treatment of the Negro is without doubt the greatest challenge to American democracy, the conscience of white America does not appear to be as aware and disturbed as Myrdal thinks it is from the rational moral standpoint.”[4]  And she further reports on the work of Ernest Campbell.

          That work tested Myrdal’s assumption on three-hundred Southern university students.  He found that this “moral,” deep-seated disposition is not passed on to significant numbers of people when it comes to dealing with people of another race.  “Further, a segregated system provides its own set of counter-norms, a rationale, that justifies the system while it helps the actor in the system to compartmentalize or re-interpret the American Creed.”[5]  One, so affected, senses no resulting contradiction, therefore, he/she feels no angst over the obvious state of incongruency.

          What this current state of polarization has done, a message earlier stated in this blog, is to help lay bare this incubation of a problem – in this case stemming from such rationalizing or sustaining a “moral” view that justifies the inequality in the treatment of blacks.  But what is worse? 

Is it a belief that Americans will ultimately not tolerate inequality and champion a fix – i.e., that ends discriminatory practices – or is it this rationalization or counter value system?  If one believes the fix will inevitably come, to be successful, one is in effect ignoring an opposition that finds segregation as either irrelevant or in line with the nation’s basic principles.

          That is, the Myrdal assumption underestimates the challenge.  What seems to be needed are extensive conversations over basic attitudes, values, and dispositions that in a polarized atmosphere seems well beyond what is possible.  Yet, what better atmosphere to start these basic discussions than in civics classrooms that impart a curriculum favoring the federation of its citizens of all races, ethnicities, gender, ages, etc.?

There, in those classrooms, one can hold sacred an American Creed as defined by Myrdal but understands there are competing images about what Americanism should be.  This blogger would add it is not enough to identify the gap between the creed Myrdal identifies and competing images of another American value system, but that the sought-after image needs to be fuller and more comprehensive of the forces at play. 

There needs be a reasoned rationale for the creed’s existence, as one offered by federation theory.  And pedagogically, that should lead to a developed content and instructional processes to handle the entailed challenge, not in an accusatorial tone, but one that invites inclusion.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press).

[2] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, NY:  Harper and Brothers, 1944).

[3] Meribel Morey, “Are Americans Really Champions of Racial Equality?”  The Atlantic (April 12, 2015), accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/are-americans-champions-of-racial-equality/389826/ .

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.