Pious wishes won’t change realities of electoral politics
We human beings cling to dogmas long after they’re disproven. We tend to believe things that make us feel better or remind of us of a past that we miss. This is certainly true of our assumptions about electoral politics.
Among the myths that can steer us off course in the Trump era, three are particularly popular.
First, that political polarization is a product of how elites behave and not the result of real divisions in our country. Second, that a vast group of party-loathing independents can be mobilized by anti-partisan messages.
Third, that Republicans and Democrats are becoming increasingly and equally extreme, so they should be scolded equally.
All these pious wishes are false, as Alan Abramowitz’s latest book, “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump,” makes clear. A political scientist at Emory University, Abramowitz is perhaps best known for the idea of “negative partisanship.”
“Over the past two decades,” he writes, “the proportion of party supporters ... who have strongly negative feelings toward the opposing party has risen sharply. A growing number of Americans have been voting against the opposing party rather than for their own.”
People rate their own side about the same as they used to. On a 100-degree “feeling thermometer,” Americans gave their own party 71 degrees in 1978; 70 degrees in 2012.
But over the same years, their sentiments toward the opposing party turned ice cold, plummeting from 47 degrees to 30 degrees. When politicians are nasty to the other side, they are mirroring the attitudes of their supporters.
Democrats draw “their strongest support from the groups with the most positive views of recent social and cultural changes.” Conversely, the GOP is strongest with groups having “the most negative views” of those changes.
In another important new book, “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable,” the veteran political analyst Bill Schneider notes that while polarization did not begin with Trump, he “uses every issue, every policy, every tweet to set one group ... against another.” Divisions around immigration, race and culture serve the president’s interests.
Ah, but since increasing numbers of Americans identify as independents, isn’t there an eager nonpartisan middle waiting to rescue us from all this? Sorry, but no. As Abramowitz shows, most people who identify as independents lean toward one party or the other. When it comes to casting ballots, “leaning independents as well as strong and weak party identifiers are voting more along party lines than at any time in the past half century.”
Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers.
Abramowitz doesn’t polemicize; he simply lays out the facts. But the story he tells suggests the essential first step to getting past extremism and polarization is the defeat of today’s intemperate brand of Republicanism, embodied by the most intemperate president in our history.
Those who long for moderate politics find it comforting and convenient to cling to myths that allow them to keep their distance from grubby “partisanship.” They’re likelier to get what they want by accepting the unpleasant but also undeniable realities of our moment.