VARIED AND NOT

 

This posting picks up on the notion that the current polarization bedeviling the nation’s politics is not felt the same across the political landscape.  That is to say, at least in one of its aspects, Democratic party members and Republicans view the functions of their respective parties differently and that is because their constituency arrangements vary.  One has a “57 variety” feel to it; the other has a monolithic feel to it.

          The Democratic Party has set upon itself the aim to represent the interests of a large array of groups.  These include liberal whites, African Americans, Latino/as, Asians, most labor groups, and in general, low income groups and their advocates.  They do have religious groups supporting them, but they are not from one religious’ tradition.  Their advocates include Christians, Jews, Muslims, even atheists and Buddhists and reflect the more liberal theological tradition.[1]

          But here the sorting becomes a bit complex.  Democrats are sorted, in part, among whites that are not psychologically bound to traditional religious values.  But in terms of non-white groups that they attract, they include traditionally oriented blacks and other immigrant groups, that attach themselves to fairly strong community-based allegiances. 

In general, many in this latter group hold conservative beliefs and often find it stressful to accept the liberal, Democratic agenda.  They stick to the Democrats because of their repulsion of the Republican Party and its policy positions. This includes positions regarding many issues that affect these minorities in negative ways, such as the Republican party’s aversion to public services, such as in education, or its immigration policies.[2]

The Republican Party represents the interests of one basic group – white voters as they define themselves as an identity group with a strong subgroup, fundamentalist Christians.  Within this group of people, in inordinate numbers, there are businesspeople, who are generally attracted to the party’s conservative, pro-business agenda.  For example, the party has consistently stood against business regulations and taxes.  It also has a strong aversion to social public policies and instead favors market solutions.

Due to these distinctions, two very different party makeups have emerged.  The Democratic Party is more of a coalition of various elements and the Republican Party equals sameness.  Ezra Klein reports,

It means [for Democrats] winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina.  It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and the karmically curious in California.  Democrats need to go broad to win over their party and … they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power.  Republicans can afford to go deep.[3]

To support this distinction, Klein cites the contextual information that Americans generally consider themselves conservative instead of liberal (35% vs. 26%).  Yet, three-quarter of Republicans say they are conservative and only half of Democrats consider themselves as liberals.[4]  This betrays two important facts about American politics.  One it tends to be conservative and the polarization is better defined on the right.  It is the conservative voice that has the more targeted message in that it is less diluted by mixed motivations.

          How does this dissimilarity manifest itself in day-to-day politics?  Matt Grossman and David Hopkins in their book, Asymmetric Politics, study this question.  Generally, according to them, the Democratic Party, in that they are the more arrayed, factious party, finds commonality through a set of policy positions or goals.  The Republican Party, on the other hand, finds commonality in a binding ideology which is more abstract and generally phrased in their rhetoric.

          Republicans, consequently, have less interest groups expressing support for the party (about half as many as the Democratic Party has) and in their pronouncements, such as in debates, they tend to cite their ideology or principles at a much higher rate.  Democrats cite the various groups that support them, highlighting these groups’ interests and how the party’s policy positions support those interests.  Interestingly, this encourages them, the Democrats, to support compromise more readily than Republicans are but are more prone to expect results.[5]

          But an irony appears when it comes to the current state under a Trump administration.  While conservatives, as mentioned above, tend to be more ideological, they seemed malleable to the drifts of Trump’s rhetoric that aim to accommodate different audiences.  Klein reports that among conservatives, what was most important was not the offenses the president’s words have been to their ideology – or even Trump’s support of their ideology – but in how Trump defended them as an identity group or how the president defended their identity.

          To support this contention, Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, in a recent academic article, provide evidence of how Trump supporters accept the diverse messaging the president espouses.  In their study, respondents who identified with Trump, were disposed to pick up on Trump’s cues to align their opinions to match his.[6]

          The Congressman, former Republican, Justin Amash, puts it well,

A lot of Trump Republicans have this mindset that they have to fight this all out war against the left.  And if they have to use big government to do it, they’re perfectly fine with that.  So when I go to Twitter and talk about over-spending or the size of the government, I get a lot of reactions now from Trump supporters saying, “Who cares how big the government is”, or “Who cares how much we’re spending as long as we’re fighting against illegal immigration and pushing back against the left.”[7]

The message relevant to the polarization issue is that its parameters have transcended its original motivating force among those of the right.  It now has become its own self-consuming end. 

A civics teacher who wishes to portray in his/her classroom the current political arena, therefore, needs to deal with certain complexities that do not promise to become easier anytime soon.  Probably no aspect of that grand contest is its emotional evolution that is still in the making and is changing as the day-to-day political aspects of the nation change. 

For example, the current coronavirus challenge has added a whole new layer to what is found divisive among Americans.  It has gotten down to whether to wear a mask or not has become political.  And this all-encompassing passion for Trump has its own media outlet, Fox News, which will be addressed in the next posting.

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[1] “Theological liberalism, a form of religious thought that establishes religious inquiry on the basis of a norm other than the authority of tradition.  It was an important influence in Protestantism from about the mid-17^th century through the 1920s.”  - - “Theological Liberalism,” Encycloaedia Britannica (n.d.), accessed August 17, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/theological-liberalism .

[2] Jonathan D. Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington, Prius or Pickup:  How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

[3] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020), 231.  The general identification of issues in this posting can be attributed to this source.

[4] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized.

[5] Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics:  Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2016)

[6] Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, “Does Party Trump Ideology?  Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” American Political Science Review, 113 (1), February 2019, 38-54.

[7] Jane Coaston, “Justin Amash on Trump, Impeachment, and the Death of the Tea Party,” New York Magazine, July 3, 2019, accessed August 17, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/3/18759659/justin-amash-trump-impeachment-gop-tea-party-republicans .  This article is the reporting of an interview with Justin Amash conducted by Coaston of Vox.  In this article, Amash, a Tea Party product, offers a fine summary statement of the natural rights view:  “The purpose of government is to protect people’s rights.  And Congress should serve as a deliberative body that ultimately reflects the will of the people through their representatives.”  Yet, elsewhere he cites his allegiance to federalism but restrains that reference to the structural aspect of that construct, not its processes.