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.
[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.
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