Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.
not sure why you were so dismissive of this point, the reason to add PR and DC is not partisan, it's that those are citizens who deserve representation like everyone else
That may be your reason. And it is a good one. But: If PR was solidly republican, and DC was solidly democrat, do you think we would be hearing about statehood for both of them? Or would the blue-tribe news talk about one and not the other?
There are many things in the world that we should do because there are good arguments for them. The news selects a subset that are good for "their side" and talks about those things. The red tribe is right to be suspicious.
PR last governor was Republican, so I don't think the partisan politics are as clear as you do, but I really don't care if it helps the blue team or red team. Unless you have a good reason those citizens don't deserve representation in congress, it should be done and it should be done tomorrow.
These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful - "would the police have been so kind to these coup-rioters if they had been brown?" and "would Democrats believe in expanding the vote even to conservatives?" are equally unhelpful, except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
> These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful ...
> except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
I find them to be helpful in the following way: They clarify what part of a person's position is a universal standard they truly believe in, and which part is a convenient club to hit someone they dislike for other reasons.
Example: A person says "riots are never acceptable". They apply this rule to riots for the political party that they dislike, and not their own. This tells you something important: Their true belief is that riots are okay when the cause is "just", for however they define "just".
That's true and something I was considering adding in another comment. It feels gross to ignore the basic, obvious object level good that is representative democracy and treat this issue like it's just partisan. Yes, the Democrats have the moral luck that they benefit from the good-for-general-democracy-reasons position, but that doesn't make the position itself any less virtuous.
You have to consider the context in which it was raised. The point was that it should be done so that Dems could conquer, not that there are these poor people suffering in D.C. without substantive national political representation
I notice that retrocession — giving Maryland the land back that was carved out for D.C., minus a non-residential federal district with the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, etc. — is never weighed against statehood.
We already did retrocession back Virgina, it’s why the bottom-left border of D.C. is Potomac-shaped. The city used to be a quadrangle.
Retrocession would be a compromise that would probably meet immediate agreement from Republicans, since it would keep the current balance in the Senate while granting maybe one solid Dem seat in the House.
But Democratic advocacy for D.C. statehood is not about representation, so the Democrats won’t entertain retrocession.
I'm definitely open to ideas like that about DC, although I've heard good arguments against this. I actually had a longer comment written about DC being a more complicated case than PR, but I lost interest halfway through writing it. I don't think you're right about Republicans immediately accepting it though, it doesn't seem like straightforward compromises like that are actually possible in Congress right now.
nor do I think this decision should rest on a compromise between current political interest. politics change. The decision should be about the best thing for the citizens of DC, but I wouldn't rule out that being some form of retrocession
Is it not also an important goal for American democracy to have the representatives of the people be the winners of the popular vote?
Currently Republicans are over-represented in the Senate, so they're getting more power than they have earned in votes. The state lines seem like a pretty arbitrary thing to me, and it seems very bizarre to give extra power to some random rural regions just because of the peculiar history of the country.
It seems quite obviously unfair that your vote is simply worth less if you reside in a city.
Sure what's good for the citizens of DC is important, but this issue could also be a good tool to correct this republican overrepresentation which arguably is a bigger issue.
I'm a liberal, and I'm in favor of retrocession. As I understand it, the sticking point is that Maryland doesn't want it because they don't want to take on D.C.'s problems. (But Baltimore is worse than Washington).
Out of curiousity, are there other tools or suggestions to fix the power imbalance in the senate.
I guess what i'm wondering is, if retrocession wouldn't miss out on an opportunity to correct the Senate imbalance which is actually more important for everyone (including the residents of DC).
I'm not american, by the way but I think as a person living in the world, because of the US's power, it feels like I'm basically being governed by Republican senators from some rural state. Like for example: I feel like the whole world is doing way too little about climate change because certain republican senators like the oil industry.
None of the peoples or governments of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want this. Forcing them to merge against their will as a "compromise" rests on the assumption that this is a partisan exercise and that what the actual people in question want doesn't matter.
But there's lots of ways to give them representation without making them states, e.g. with two Senators.
PR could just be added to, e.g. Florida. DC could be given back to the neighboring states.
It's suspicious that 'they deserve representation' is somehow always followed by 'they should be made new states'. It's hard not to think that the arguments were form backwards, i.e. to justify a hidden 'bottom line' that was decided first.
A key test for "is this a good way to give people representation?" is "do the people on the receiving end of this want this to happen?"
None of the governments or populations of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want their governments to merge or to share representation.
Your second example, merging Puerto Rico into Florida, is actually likely an even better outcome for Democrats than making PR a new state - but it's still a bad idea because neither Florida nor Puerto Rico want that.
If "do the people who are seeking representation think this is a good solution" doesn't factor into your analysis, you're missing the point of representative democracy.
Why assume that the point of representative democracy is representing people? As far as I'm concerned, the point is ensuring that bums get thrown out with reasonable frequency and civil war is averted because everyone expects to get their turn before too long. Some fairly substantial amount of representation is instrumentally necessary, but I'm not in favour of optimising for representation as an end goal.
Come on – that's just not something that should be weighted very highly. Unless you're also open to succession – in which case, sure, that's nice, but is even (much) less likely to happen than statehood.
Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
This is how we've admitted every state up to this point. It's the basic idea on which the idea of states being united was originally built. It's literally in the name of the country.
> Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
Yes, that's literally how the process of admitting a state works. The representatives voted on by the people of those states vote on the question.
> And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
No one wants that. I don't understand how this point about how in a democracy what people want matters keeps eluding you.
> Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
Adding states that want to be states is good. It would probably be a good idea to set a minimum population requirement, but otherwise, assuming there aren't extraneous complications (e.g. Kurdistan wanting to join as a state would involve probably too many complications to be viable), entities that want to be states should be considered for statehood.
Merging Puerto Rico into Florida does seem ridiculous on its face, but I think something under-considered in the retrocession argument is how self-serving Maryland and the richer (and therefore more vocal) DC residents are. Maryland doesn't want to take on the poor Black people in DC, despite being a very rich state, and progressives in both DC and Maryland a looking at the Senate.
In any case, there will be something distasteful about a city-state for a large number of people. Puerto Rico has more people than Iowa, even after losing tons of people post-Maria, so that makes so level of sense to the average person. DC (besides being synecdoche for the federal government and therefore completely associated with it in people's minds) just recently passed Vermont in population, and, because it's the most Democratic-voting place in the country by a large margin, seems like a power grab.
I also think "what the people want" when it comes to local people deciding something that has national significance is unimportant. We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way. DC statehood isn't a local issue; it's a federal one
"something distasteful"...are you making predictions about polls or trying to argue on the merits? Because on the merits "DC shouldn't have statehood because it consists largely of Black Democrats" is an embarrassingly bad argument with nothing of substance to refute. I don't even know how to respond to an argument of the form "you can't let *those sorts of people* have a state".
> We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way.
This is the same war in which West Virginia just decided it wanted to be a state and the rest of the country agreed. Yes, the way to admit states is via the democratic process of voting on it in Congress. As a straightforward ethical matter, the preferences of the people in the proposed states should weigh on those deliberations. I honestly don't understand how multiple people seem really confused about this. "The process of adding states requires the endorsement of the current representational system" is obviously true and has nothing to do with the fact that the people in that process should consider the basic principles of democracy and representation in making their decision.
DC maybe. I'll grant you it's at least more complicated. Adding PR to Florida makes no sense. You can be suspicious of whatever you want particularly of Democratic establishment motivations. I'm telling you I'm personally motivated by puerto ricans getting proper representation, and I don't see any alternative to statehood being a viable solution. So you can have a secondary debate about motivations if you want, but I'm more motivated by the substance here.
I was responding to what seemed like a principled stand, i.e. the people of PR (and DC) _deserve_ representation. And it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
I believe you're sincere about PR deserving proper representation and statehood being the _best_ way to do that.
I appreciate the additional details about why you think statehood is best! I genuinely did not know why 'representation' was being 'rounded to' statehood.
> it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
"rounded to" seems willfully obtuse. They literally can't have voting representatives in congress without being a state. What else would representation mean?
I'm replying again because I'm not sure you realized what your PR+FL proposal implies. It would be a massive win for Democrats, turning 2 lean-R Senate seats lean-D for a D+4 net and potentially swinging the electoral college to favor Democrats again. It would be a massive, massive win for Democrats, far beyond adding PR as a state.
That no one is arguing for this implies the *exact opposite* of what you're suggesting. The tell is that you don't see any of the Republicans who want to coerce DC and VA or MD together advocating for PR joining FL as well, even though that would be a consistent position. They realize that would be a political disaster for them, so they only apply this logic to DC.
The Democrats have the luck of a position that is both just and politically advantageous. The Republicans can't even keep a consistent answer on the two questions because there is no consistent answer that maintains their advantage other than "no representation for American citizens we don't like".
Great point on the politics, but PR as part of florida doesn't make much sense on any level imo. It should just be a state. Republican legislators are working in many states to just make voting more difficult, as the party seems to have decided people voting in general is just not in their interest. That strikes me as quite bad in a democracy, and the party really is quite lost.
Yeah, like I said above, coercing PR into FL is a terrible idea on the merits (like coercing DC into another state). But that Democrats aren't proposing this undercuts the idea that this is all a cynical ploy by Democrats. There are more advantageous cynical ploys than the straightforward democracy-is-good position Democrats are advocating.
If you were to add 4 Dems today you'd have 54 of 104 though. Particularly in the context of DC being liable to give properly partisan Democrats, you've suddenly got room for a Manchin or a Sinema or someone to defect if the rest of the caucus wants to swing for the fences on a reconciliation package (or kill the filibuster lol)
Thinking through the derivative is of course something plenty of people will get stuck on, but "more Democrats is good for the Democrats" is the important takeaway.
Whether or not Puerto Rico would actually send 2 Democrats to the Senate is another story (a 1-1 scenario is honestly fairly likely), but we'll see what happens (assuming that the 50 existing senate Democrats can even pull it together to let us find out).
It makes some difference, but even a solid blue Puerto Rico and DC would only move the senate bias from R+2.9 to R+1.4. It's the same sort of narrow marginal difference you would get from, say, the effect Democrats taking the Texas state house in 2020 and blocking partisan gerrymander would on the house - noticeable for people who build careful election-forecast models but not really enough to sway the long-term balance of power, and something that would be a sidenote at best in most political history books.
In the context of the 2022 midterms that could surely be the difference between Democrats or Republicans controlling the Senate!
And if the lean had been shifted that much regarding the 2020 senate races then we could hypothetically have had 51 senate Democrats today instead of 50 (this is the dumbest of counterfactuals to be working through but bear with me). Having room for Manchin and Sinema to take turns defecting would be a big deal.
"Does Biden get to appoint any judges to the courts?" is a fairly important question.
So it does have some effect in a narrow horse-race politics sense. What I mean is more - when you look at the history of polarization, it has this huge trend from relatively low polarization to almost everyone in the country hating the other party (and often their own). The big trend in polarization is several orders of magnitude larger than the difference between an R+2.9 and an R+1.4 senate.
Also even in the horse-race sense - you're right that it could make a difference, but the probability that that makes the difference isn't that high (it's a bit less than the difference between 2018's ~D+8 environment 2020's ~D+6 environment). "Dems would only need a very good year but not a total outlier to win the senate" is an improvement, but not a game-changer.
Everyone discussing whether statehood is a good idea or who it'll benefit is missing the point. How would it reduce polarization? There's no plausible mechanism. The real reason Ezra Klein includes it in his book is because he wants to increase the power of his tribe, and/or because he thinks the people deserve representation and statehood is the best way to achieve it. Not because it'll reduce polarization.
Its an extension of median voter theorem. To simplify, both parties want to win, so will adopt the set of policies and campaigning to get 50+% of the senate seats. Moving the balance of the senate left, and closer to the median voters, doesn't mean the democrats win eternally, but that the republican party reconfigures to appeal to more voters, moving closer to the centre
how quaint and how surprising it is to hear somebody discussing polarization as an issue between Democrats and Republicans.The polarization is between those who know we are ruled by a corrupt oligarchy intent on bankrupting a majority of the country, and those who like to pretend we live in a democracy.
That's because of the fact that it's an issue between Democrats and Republicans (or the political left and right, at least), and the "corrupt oligarchy" is at least half mythical.
They all have the same donors. They all vote for consistently for imperial war. They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. They all vote to shovel money to rich financial outfits and corporations at every opportunity. They all forbid criticism of Israeli policy and regularly swear obeisance to a foreign state. They all (still) hate Trump in an irrational manner. They all not to talk about deficit anymore. We haven't had such unanimity in the ruling class since the 50s. This is simply a matter of voting records and published policy, not myth.
Underscoring their point about the irrational level of hate. Trump largely served the interests of the elite, making the uniform revulsion of him seem strange. Was his low-brow persona enough to rile stir their ire? I think there's more to it that we don't understand yet.
He's gauche in the extreme and played the powerful for fools. The entitled were not amused. Sadly, he basically sat around tweeting shit that went way off-script and playing golf for a couple years, but his existence laid bare for all to see the uniparty for the corporate globalist plutocracy that it is. Note how quickly they moved with EOs to "restore order" and declare "America is Back." Can you really believe Biden is capable of this? He's clearly just a front man they prop up in front of a camera from time to time. Ezra Klein keeps the the script.
It's one of many things. He made it very clear that he was Not One Of Us. Not just by his personality, but also by aggressively attacking them at every chance. (And to be fair, probably half of those attacks were deserved). And of course, he's a terrible human being, an incompetent insecure martinet of a leader, and frankly just annoying to listen to.
The funny thing is, only true believers and partisan democrats payed any attention to him. He was easy to ignore, and I was always shocked when a friend starting going off about something Trump had said, suddenly furrowing their brows an spewing flames.
Why yes. Who put Jared in charge of that file, again? Was that person blindsided by the fact that his son-in-law was Jewish? Because it sure looked to me like Trump was extremely proud of those deals, and of being a strong supporter of the Israelis.
The donors are much more polarized than they used to be. See https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors - the first one to donate more than $10k to both parties is #32 on the list, and only 10 of the 31 above him donated even a single dollar to each party. In the top hundred, the single most balanced donor is a couple who gave $231,046 to Republicans and $3,380,179 to Democrats, over 14x more. (And almost all of that GOP money was to a PAC that tries to push pro-LGBT views among Republicans, not a more typical Republican group)
The military budget peaked in 2011, and fell for four straight years after that, falling by a total of one-sixth in nominal dollars. Obama left office with a lower budget, in nominal dollars, than Bush did - once you adjust for inflation and population growth, it fell by 27% during his term. (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2021-TAB.pdf, pages 60-61 of the PDF, looking at the top line of each)
They do shovel a lot of money at banks - I can't argue with you on that one.
"Forbid criticism of Israel" in what sense? It's hardly illegal.
I agree that some hatred of Trump is irrational, but some is perfectly rational. He's an overgrown 13 year old with a penchant for sexual harassment and clueless bombast. He is hilariously thin-skinned, taking mortal offense at things that any other politician would ignore. He's incompetent at managing any organization unless he's an absolute dictator. And he did kind of try to steal an election on basically zero evidence, just a couple months ago. But despite that, there's a huge gap between the parties on Trump - the GOP has mostly bent the knee(with a few exceptions), while the Democrats hate him with a fiery passion.
There's a little daylight between them on the deficit. Democrats say that deficits are awesome, and spend accordingly. Republicans say that deficits are terrible, and ignore that when it's spending time. (Only a little daylight, in other words)
So which voting records and published policies are you referring to?
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all still going. Biden is likely to add Iraq sooner rather than later. MSM won't print criticism of Israel or publish pro palestinian views. Hatred is never rational. The rest of this rant isn't worth a comment.
Afghanistan was before Iraq, and Iraq I discussed. Libya was pretty flagrantly illegal, and Obama did it over Congress' objections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Libya%2C_2011). Syria seems to have been approved on the understanding that it was just support for rebels, not an actual deployment, and that trust was broken. But in fairness, both Trump and Obama did that, so you can call that one bipartisan.
More generally, you miss important detail by filing it all into "they support imperial wars". If the Republicans want to triple the military budget and the Democrats want to double the healthcare budget, they're both supporting roughly the same amount of new spending, and you can say that both support big government. But that's still a pretty huge difference in practice, and lumping them together would miss the point.
(Of note: Those were literally the top Google results for "cnn israel" and "wapo israel", and those were the first two outlets I looked up - I didn't need to go digging for those links.)
Hatred can be quite rational. You're actually supposed to hate sufficiently bad things.
And the points you refused to address because they were a "rant" were two data sources that clearly prove you wrong, me 100% agreeing with you on one point, and me agreeing with you (with a small quibble) on another. So is it me agreeing with you that's a rant, or is that I linked to solid data sources?
The thing about this seemingly-enlightened take is that it makes predictions that don't bear out in reality. Rich people would prefer more immigration, especially high skill immigration. Immigration remains pretty locked down, especially high skill immigration. Rich people would also prefer for there not to be extremely restrictive zoning rules in cities so they could build more things, but we don't have that either.
The world we live in looks like it suffers from a lot of dumb populist impulses, not a shadowy elite pulling the strings behind the scenes.
So you speak for all rich people, do you? Immigration, particularly "skilled" immigration, has gone up every year. I know because I oppose it and Trump unsurprisignly did not deliver on his promise to stop it. Are you actually complaining that you can't destroy parts of cities you don't like and replace it with something else? It makes me wonder what kind of people are on this list.
Immigration has not gone up each year. It has actually dramatically declined several times. This chart doesn't have the 2020 data yet, but when it does it'll show a dramatic dropoff:
H1B (the major high-skill immigration pipeline) has been capped for years, which were restricted further by the Trump administration so that a few thousand more talented people were forbidden from working in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Modifications_in_2020
Regarding development: I am complaining that the same basic free market mechanics that made smartphones ubiquitous aren't allowed to operate on real estate, resulting in catastrophically expensive supply shortfalls and skyrocketing rents and property values. When there is not enough of a thing, I think it's a good idea for people to be allowed to consensually buy, sell, and develop goods to create more of that thing in response to market forces - in this case, housing.
And you'd already know about this stuff if you'd attended the seminar on how to speak on behalf of all rich people with me.
H1-b visas ceilings continue to go up every year, which is what I believe is relevant here, not permanent legal residences, which may very well have gone down, IDK.
The comment about what kind of people are here appears to be an implication that zoning prevents people from destroying other people's property. I don't think that's an effect of zoning, which mostly affects what you can do with the parts of cities you already own.
If extremely restrictive zoning laws were repealed, more housing stock could be built in those cities. And yes, some rich people would presumably do that and make money. But that increased supply would reduce the rental and sale value of existing housing stock in that city, already owned by... Who owns that again? I forget.
Right, I think this is getting to the root of (this) problem: not the billionaires, but the hundred thousandaires. The 1% can't overrule the locally-optimizing incumbents who can vote.
Developers and investors want to build, technocrats want to build, but the upper middle class doesn't, and the populists want to hurt the developers and investors. So the upper middle class and the angry populists team up against the rich and the technocratic to make sure that everything stays expensive and terrible forever.
Maybe we're thinking of different base cities to some extent, but it's making it hard for me to find the hundred thousandaires argument compelling. I know zoning is a huge problem in SF, too, with more traditional residential housing. I'm from NYC.
When I sit in a 60-story residential skyscraper in NYC and look out at the smaller buildings below, and wonder who'd want those adjacent lots not to also become highrises, the first people I'm thinking of are the people in the already-developed building I'm sitting in. Way more new units in the same spot (impeding these units' view) would tend to hurt the current skyscraper owner more than the 4-story owner. The 4-story owner can flip their lot for a lot of money if it's gonna become a high-rise. Renters obviously want there to be more housing stock so landlords can't bend us over the barrel quite as hard.
The people living in the buildings I'm thinking of are definitely millionaires, and obviously their developers/owners are many times more wealthy than that. You don't think there's literal and figurative rent-seeking behavior happening from the Trump/Kushner set? It's hard to think billionaires are my natural ally in this situation. If I'm a developer, why not keep the zoning laws in place generally and just secure specifically favorable treatment for myself vis corrupt means? Then I have the best of all possible worlds. This has happened in NYC for decades.
Because it's hard to get all the rich people in the world to cooperate on a rule that only helps a few of them while denying opportunities to the rest. Jane Q. AmoralInvestor just wants to make money however she can, and if that's by financing the construction of a new building and renting out units, who cares if it cuts into John P. Incumbent's profits?
Competition is the secret sauce that turns greed into everyday utility. It's why I'm composing this reply on a device that would have been an impossible miracle a few decades ago that now costs me under $1/day including amortized device cost, electricity, and network data fees.
Zoning restrictions end the competition before it starts - so greed instead channels its energies into extracting the most value it can from the fixed situation. But the answer to this is just to let greed fight greed and walk away holding all the profits greed had to give away just to stay in the game against itself.
You don't have to sell me on competition being good, and that's not the question I was asking. At least we agree, it seems, that John P. Incumbent himself isn't going out of his way to kill zoning restrictions. Certainly we agree Jane doesn't care if his profits stay up.
But let's say I'm Jane Q. AmoralInvestor... it's also my incentive to buy lots whose value is depressed by current zoning laws, and then secure rezoning for myself. Once I have that stuff, I don't want to abolish zoning law entirely (unless I just bought the whole city), just the zoning law that impacts me. Because as soon as I get that, I'm Jane Q. Incumbent, and new development not undertaken by me is also to my detriment. (I guess I married into the family, under these naming conventions).
> Klein links this polarization to "vetocracy", the idea that it's impossible to do anything nowadays because somebody will prevent you. Sometimes this is a literal presidential veto. Other times, it can be something as stupid and venal as the party out of power using filibusters and every other dirty trick to make sure nothing improves, because if something did improve the party in power would get the credit
This seems a little scrambled to me. More polarization actually could make things move! "Nothing" gets done now because in a closely-divided Senate, there are a few holdouts on both sides - Collins, Manchin, and the like. If they gave into polarization, the majority would be able to ram through its agenda.
Partisanship and Polarization are not quite the same thing. People can be intensely loyal to their own party whilst in practice the two parties do not differ substantially from each other.
This is because of a) the fillibuster, and b) different parties often controlling presidency/house/senate. It's incredibly rare for either side to have a filibuster-proof majority, so they almost always need votes from the other party to get anything non-budgetary through the Senate alone. And then if you don't control the House and the Senate you need the permission of the Chamber controlled by the other party. And unless you have a big majority in the Senate you need the President not to use their veto as well.
These structural features of US politics are really really important in explaining why nothing gets done (insofar as it doesn't.) In the UK parties are strong and ideologically sorted, but we usually have one of them with a majority in the single chamber that can basically make laws all by itself (Commons can always overrule Lords after a delay). So for us polarization hasn't led to paralysis. (I know we've had two coalitions recently but neither have involved the need for co-operation between the two main parties that hate each other.)
I'm struggling to understand the 'loss of geography' section. In particular:
> As cable TV, Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment, it turned out that almost everyone in Kansas was more similar to everyone else in Kansas than any of them were to people in New York, and so Kansas went solid Republican and New York went solid Democrat. But a national Democratic Party that has to include Kansas Democrats under its tent is a Democratic Party that's going to naturally be a bit conservative, a bit sensitive to the interests of religious people, a bit sensitive to the interests of farmers, etc. Once you move from within-state sorting to national-level sorting, things get a lot more sorted very quickly.
Wouldn't this *decrease* polarisation at the national level? I think I get the first bit: when people are focusing on local or state-level politics, the Kansas political parties find their way to the Kansas center, so that ~half of Kansas voters see themselves as Democrats; but when people start focusing on national-level politics, most of the Kansas Democrats realise that they lean right relative to the rest of the country, and so they become Republicans. But I can't figure out the last two quoted sentences.
If the national Democratic party was half Kansans and half New Yorkers, and Kansans are all rightist and New Yorkers are all leftist, then the national party is half rightist and half leftist and probably compromises on being centrist. If the Kansans leave and more New Yorkers come in, then the national party is all leftist, and moves to the left. So moving from geographically homogenous to geographically sorted increases polarization.
It's weird to describe that with the phrase "loss of geography" - but I think this is an issue that comes up in a lot of these related discussions, because what we see is that regions no longer matter, but urbanism does. One aspect of geography (that is arranged in a chunky way) has stopped being relevant, but another aspect of geography (that is arranged much more fractally) has become extremely relevant.
The point is that while you may impose a new geography on it, the only thing *required* for Scott's hypothesis to work is that the old geography no longer holds sway. If instead of being along an urban/rural split, democrats were now 60% of New York at random and 20% of Kansans at random, his proposed mechanism would still work.
Huh, if we instead think of it as the Democratic party exchanging the left half of Kansas for the right half of New York, then this actually doesn't guarantee that the party will become more uniform. That happening is dependent upon the right half of New York for being more left than the left half of Kansas.
But I think this factor mostly goes away when we imagine more than two states. If I picture a bunch of bell curves, with medians uniformly distributed around the origin, then it's pretty intuitive that exchanging the left halt of bell curves to the right of the origin for the right half of the bell curves to the left of the origin would result in more uniformity within the parties.
Even better if, instead of exchanging halves of bell curves, you just put a uniform cutoff at the origin. There is still a Democratic tail in Wyoming and a Republican tail in Vermont, but they're only about a third of the state.
I think what he's saying is that in the pre-communication era, the e.g. Democrats would have to incorporate the Kansas Democrats in their platform. And the Kansas Democrats would be more to the right than the national average perhaps, dragging the Democratic platform a bit more to the right. Whereas now, ~everyone in Kansas is Republican, so you don't have that effect.
It's the difference between taking the average position of the most liberal half of 50 random populations, some of which as a whole are more conservative than others, and just taking the most liberal half of the entire population. In the first scenario, the pre-communication era one, you still get some signal (within each state, the Democratic party is more liberal than the Republican), but it tempered by the difference in the base local orientation.
Another way to phrase this point is that politics became less a way to get things done locally than a game or entertainment for self-expression.
In a way, this lowers the stakes, and makes people less immediately accountable for indulging in pure partisanship.
If indulging in partisanship means the local library or road won't get built, I might rein myself in. If the effect is more diffuse, I have less incentive to do so.
While this is an argument some people might make, it is not the hypothesis Scott put forward, so you should avoid saying things like "Another way to phrase this point" that imply the two hypotheses are similar or isomorphic.
Its not necessarily a entertainment vs. "getting things done" split. On a purely self interest level, whether the national government implements universal healthcare or not, or crashes the economy, or starts wars, etc. has a massive impact on my life, bigger than local issues. And people's judgements aren't purely self interest but include moral/ideological preferences, if in another part of the country something bad is happening, then I would want to vote to stop it, even if it doesn't influence my daily life.
I read this book earlier this year and I found it very engaging (read it in 2 days), but was overall unsatisfied with his proposed solutions; particularly it did read to me that he was saying that the cure for polarization is for the Democratic Party to achieve complete and total victory.
'Total politics' - I'm sure that someone has coined this before but it seems a good term for the optimize-for-short-term gain Scott talked about.
Also interesting are the parallels between the 'cure for polarization by going *through* polarization to a total Democratic victory' thread you pick up on and the post-Landian discussions around accelerationism. Klein could be read as espousing a very moderate form of left-accelerationism (or perhaps a moderate u-accellarationism, if that is even coherent).
I think what you have to remember here is that we have a two-party system, and over time that system will always self-correct so that both parties have roughly equal access to power (averaged over decades).
If you change a rule so that Democrats have a big advantage (like, popular vote), Democrats may win the next election cycle by a lot, but that but means it's time for Republicans to re-adjust their branding and strategies to be competitive under the new rules. The system re-adjusts to equilibrium.
So, the question is, is the re-adjusted system better than the old one?
For instance, from Klein's perspective, does the new Republican party that wins under the new rules do so by being less focused on white identity politics, or less hostile towards sexual minorities, or some other compromise with centrists/mild leftists, in order to grab more of the centrist voters who were on the fence? If so, that's a win for the country from Klein's perspective, even if the Republicans end up winning elections again next year.
I think Klein is mistaken about what would improve Republican chances of success. Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
Yes, but he still did abysmally compared to Biden.
This is sort of like the 'eating burnt food increases your odds of cancer by 50%' thing - that's from .000001% to .0000015%. I'm not sure how meaningful it is to any larger discussions of population-level trends.
Trump actually won majority Hispanic parts of Florida & Texas vs Biden. And he'd already done better than prior Republicans with minorities when he ran against Clinton, so this was a continued trend. He lost this time because suburban whites shifted against him.
'hispanic parts of florida and texas' is getting into local weather records territory (eg, 'highest recorded windspeed during a storm of 2-5 inches rain/hour during March in Minewok, Illinois).
Given the number of different minorities and the number of different 'parts' (ie small geographic areas) across the country, you could easily get many thousands of such groups to measure. You should expect some of those to be outliers just by random chance, assuming anything like a normal distribution.
I'm not saying there was zero real effect - I'm just saying it was small, and cherry-picking the very specific places and measures on which it looks largest doesn't actually make it more impressive.
> Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
I'm having a very hard time seeing metrics where this is true, other than something facile like "raw number of votes received not adjusted for turnout or total population". For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?
To the core point, Trump outperforming GOP candidates that lost isn't quite tautological but comes damn close. It also isn't to surprising if there is a regression to the mean due to Obama's extremely strong minority support in '08 and '12.
That url isn't to twitter, it's to a news article. The news article does contain one tweet, but goes through a lot of data in an exit poll which was not in that tweet. Could you provide a citation regarding Adrian Gray retracting anything?
Apologies, that was an epistemological "where" instead of geographic. You can absolutely pick individual areas that have trended one way or another (and this is useful data for ground-level operations), but it's a large enough degree of freedom that it kills your statistical power. Broad claims about demographics absolutely require aggregated data.
As someone who went from complaining about polarization/broadly skeptical of liberal orthodoxy to a 100% unmovable Democratic partisan in the Trump era, that's basically my take.
It's not possible to settle on a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium with people who cannot accept the bare results of an election: they are playing 'defect' right up to the destruction of the game itself. As of polls *after* 1/6, 70% of Republicans thought the results were illegitimate. (The number was nowhere close to as high - 28% - for Democrats even when their ultimate boogeyman Donald Trump was elected. Source is Morning Consult polls as cited at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/)
Actually, this might be an interesting question for the next survey. Conditional on partisanship, how many people think the 2020 election was fairly counted?
The (IMO) unconstitutional election law in PA says to me that it wasn't run fairly, but I have reasonable confidence that the ballots were properly counted and probably weren't fabricated. (Modulo the usual trivial screwups)
I recall reading some comments that a high % of Democrats actually thought there was significant election fraud in 2020 as well, like 25%+, which I find bizarre
There is not a good chance they actually believe that. It goes down overtime. Its also worth noting that majority of democrats believed that russia hacked machines to win the 2016 election.
I vote mostly for Democrats but I don't know if this is the best idea. States like California where this has happened aren't exactly all that well governed -- and being a de facto single party state gives voters less influence & represents less healthy competition. The Republican electorate isn't about to go away, and Republican senators/representatives mostly seem more thoughtful and reasonable than the electorate they represent, so wrecking the GOP might just see those people replaced by true believers.
Probably I should have some strong opinion on this, but I'm still focusing on the part where Ezra had a staff of eight for his blog. Not in a negative way - just trying to think about what I could do with a staff of eight. It would probably be a disaster - I don't have his managerial talent.
You joke, but that's basically how a lot of small businesses based around a particular talent (musician, writer, artist, etc) work. The talent works on their area of expertise, and has someone else to do the "business stuff". Whether that person is notionally their manager or their employee is somewhat irrelevant as they are the main source of revenue.
Here's my issue with the Zach Goldberg chart: If you made one of those 60 years ago, most of the issues would have been stuff like interracial marriage, Jim Crow laws, damming the Grand Canyon (which Goldwater proposed). Go back another 50 years and you have child labor laws, women's suffrage, workplace safety laws. Go back further when public libraries, national parks, belief the Chinese will never ever assimilate, and the question of should humans be allowed to own other humans - were the hot button issues of the day. Stuff we basically identify now as progress.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now. Same with healthcare - of course the US shouldn't be the only wealthy nation on earth to deny people healthcare based on pre-existing conditions - that's just common sense. Of course [X group] will assimilate, and of course immigrants aren't a net drain on society.
History leans progressive. Many of the hot button issues of today become common sense of tomorrow. You can always make a chart that makes it look like progressives are going off the rails.
The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
The chart is agnostic as to whether the direction the Democrats are moving in is progress or insanity, it's just conveying the point that the Democrats are moving in a direction and the Republicans are staying still (or moving slowly in the same direction), rather than the sort of polarization where both parties move in opposite directions, or the Republicans get more conservative and the Democrats stay still, or anything like that.
My point is if you don't take into account basic incremental progress that all society undergoes, of course it will always look like the progressives are going off the rails to the left.
If we're going to say it means something that Conservatives won't budge while progressives change their opinions and move left, then let's take it back further to the hot button issues of yesteryear. I think most would consider it fairly radical for someone to still be against interracial marriage today. Yet if it's somehow illustrative to look at who moved and who didn't - I guess the person who is still against interracial marriage gets some kind of credit for being the one who didn't change? If not, then why are we implicitly giving Republicans some kind of leg up here for being the ones who didn't budge on gay marriage or pre-existing conditions?
Refusing to budge on slavery in 1860 is pretty radical when you take into account what the rest of the world was doing at the time. Who changed their opinion on the issue and who didn't really isn't illustrative of anything. Or if it is - I would contend the group who doesn't change their opinion generally comes out the worst in history on most issues - which I am pretty sure is not the intended point those charts showing Dems moving left.
The point isn't that there hasn't been social progress over the years, the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong. If you include the issues from yesteryear, what you'll see is that the Democrats have gotten significantly more liberal on them, and the Republicans have also gotten more liberal. Obviously, slavery is outside the Overton window right now, along with your other examples.
What the chart shows is that Democrats have gotten much more liberal on a host of issues, while the Republicans have gotten more liberal on some, and more conservative on others (with a long tail towards more liberal, just eyeballing it). Adding older issues would just make the Republicans look more liberal-trending, which is the opposite of the original claim, that the Republicans have "gone completely off the rails".
I understand that. But my point is if you could somehow subtract out basic progress, it could easily look the other way. You might see that Democrats are basically drifting with the current of progress, while Republicans are actively fighting against it. That's the reason I don't find these "who moved where" charts very meaningful.
I'm not sure what you mean by subtract out basic progress. How would you construct a chart that makes it look like Republicans are going off the rails while Democrats are remaining constant. Do you mean adding points like "view of gay marriage vs the societal mean" and showing how those are trending more conservative (because the mean changed while the Republicans stayed put)?
Republicans and Democrats used to generally agree about increasing the minimum wage over time. Nixon and Johnson both did it. Now, Democrats still think that we should increase the minimum wage over time, while Republicans don't. A similar framing can be used for basically all of these issues.
Imagine the underlying chart was moving to the left (as progress does). Now Democrats are just drifting with the chart and Republicans are actively moving against the chart. All of this is based on looking at past hot button issues which became the common sense of the next generation and extrapolating out that stuff like gay marriage will be the common sense of the next generation.
Obviously there's no real way to quantify it. But then again these charts are pretty subjective to begin with. If you want to make a point you can always run the study enough different ways and cherry-pick the results you want. I used to work for a statistical consulting firm. That's all we did.
The dataset can be shifted to make the republicans look like they are going off the rails instead of democrats.
If we plotted the Democrats' and Republicans' viewpoints against the average trends in peer nations like Canada, Germany, Uk, etc., then we would end in a chart where the Republican's are swinging further and more extremely to the right, and the democrats, are all also shifting more slightly to the right.
So including and focussing on the above chart where Republicans stay the same, is implicitly suggesting that America n years ago was some kind of ideal that its good to stick with. Choosing to compare against other peer nations shifts the values to a more progressive set.
So I guess you can just choose which chart you want. You want the Democrats to look like they are going off the rails, then compare them to the Democrats 20, 50 or 100 years ago. If you want the Republicans to look like they are going off the rails, compare to similarly wealthy nations.
I feel like people sometimes willfully forget how comically right-wing the american left-wing is by international standards.
>the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong.
But as I understand it, that's very much *not* the claim.
The claim is something closer to 'Democrats are relatively stable, and Republicans have gotten really crazy over the years.'
If social consensus/civilizational advancement is trending in one direction, and one party stays in step with it while the other gets further and further away from it, then this would seem to loosely support *that* argument.
Your argument is based entirely on rejecting Republicans as being part of American society:
'Democrats are rapidly moving to the left, so society is moving rapidly to the left, which means that Republicans are radicals for not moving along with society.'
Yet if you accept that Republicans are as much part of society as Democrats, then this framing is absurd.
Yes or no, average approval rating towards legalizing gay marriage across all Americans has increased dramatically in the last 30 years?
'Republican voters' is not half of the population; in a year with record-breaking turnout, Trump got 75million votes, or about 23% of the total population of the US.
It's very possible for Republican voters to stay still, and for society as a whole to move on without them. Even when you average them into 'society'.
Yes, if you set the frame to move at 20 mph, then the progressives moving at 22 mph look stable and the conservatives moving at 5 mph are veering into a ditch.
If you set the frame to 0 mph, then the 22 mph progs are in the ditch and the 5 mph cons look stable.
And the best part of all is that where you believe the frame should be set will be determined by, you guessed it, whether you're a con or a prog and the prior associated with each.
I think its a mistake to try and map polarization to some particular set of issues. Better to map it to what the views of the population are. As the median voter has shifted more "progressive" on the issues you mention, the democrats have also become more progressive, staying slightly more progressive than the median voter. Whereas if the set of beliefs the republicans have the unchanging, but fewer and fewer people in the general population hold them, then they are getting further from the average voter
By "the rest of the world" do you just mean the British empire? Because they were forcing what we would now call the third world to give up slavery. It didn't have to be abolished in continental Europe because it had already been replaced by serfdom there long ago.
It depends on the framing! If your question is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no". If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no".
But surely that framing, which uses a nominal dollar amount, is just silly, right? $7 in 1980 isn't $7 in 2021. The first "Inflation calculator" I happened to google says it would be $22 in 2021, and even if that specific number is off, it would certainly be much higher than $7.
You make a mistake in this analysis focusing on particular policy positions. The reason Republicans are seen as going off the rails is their relationship to the truth and democratic systems, not because of their positions on capital gains taxes or infrastructure spending. Storming the Capitol, rejecting election results, believing a deadly virus is a hoax, arming as if for war, embracing violence, casting their opponents as pedophiles — these are the things “going off the rails” means. The Republican Party has been less and less concerned with public policy (Republicans didn’t bother to draft a platform in 2020), and more and more concerned with maintaining power, with or without democracy. Malcolm X wasn’t considered radical because he sought expanded civil rights; so did MLK. It was because he advocated doing so “by any means necessary.” The Republicans are analogous.
These actions are attributed to republicans by democrats. You describe fringe group activity and falsely attribute it to all republicans. This is nonsense.
Since the vast, vast, majority of recent GOP voters prefer to go along with this dreadful, anti-democratic, lying, racist coalition than to vote for a Democrat, the comment is far from nonsense. Latest polls say a big majority of the GOP still believes the last election was stolen. So what are the rest of us supposed to make of all this collective behavior?
On this issue, a majority believe there were serious violations of constitutional law, software "glitches," and ballot shady ballot harvesting that may have and probably did effect the outcome. There are statistical arguments warranting an investigation, of which there was none to date. This is a legitimate concern, though your use of that slogan, though catchy, isn't helpful. The other things you mention are in fact edge cases not much crazier than the last four years of screaming Russia did it talk and investigations that came to nothing from Democrats.
There was quite a bit of investigation - several dozen lawsuits, most obviously. Zero of which won, and quite a lot of which were thrown out for a lack of evidence before even making it to trial - basically, that's judge-speak for "Even if everything you say is true, and the other side doesn't show up, you /still/ couldn't prove your case".
I'm fine with investigating, and defended Trump's right to file those lawsuits. But let's be honest, the investigations turned up nothing more than dry wells and stupidity.
I'm curious, did any Democratic house or senate members ever condone the violent part of the protests/riots?
I don't know the answer to that^, just genuinely curious.
To me it seems like maybe Trumps actions immediately prior to, and during the jan 6th thing were on another level.
What I mean is, from what i know most Democrat representatives have tweeted support for Black Lives Matter. But did they, knowing send messages of support for rioters during a riot, when members of congress were being threaten with nooses, etc? There's also the difference of communicating from the presidents office, being the one who is supposed to call the national guard and keep the peace, etc.
Not to mention stoking tensions and inflaming your base, by drilling lies about stolen elections into their heads for months.
I also dispute that "leftist riots" are to blame for all the terrible things you mentionned. Its a well known and well documented fact that police used aggressive and violent escalations against protesters and turned many peaceful situations into violent ones. Who's to blame for that?
There are many videos of police kettling protesters, tear gassing them for no reason, knocking them down for no reason. Just remember trumps bible photo op that he did.
And the left is seen as going off the rails because of things like riots, destruction of property, CHAZ, Covid restrictions selectively enforced against religion, conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, Title IX, Biden getting a pass with #metoo, etc.
If some people believe that travel restrictions are racist, thats an independent claim that could be evaluated on its own. You could look into whether there's a clear scientific basis for the travel restrictions, or whether experts are recommending it, and you could probably come to a conclusion.
its not related to some other people thinking a deadly virus is a hoax. that's a separate thing.
What's key here as well is the radicalization of the right following the widespread overreaction to 9/11. I suspect Republicans' stances on issues like accountability for war crimes, torture, surveillance and the place of Muslims in US society have shifted pretty far "to the right."
Aside from the thematic conflict of the metaphors involved, I don't think that 'staying in one place' and 'going off the rails' are mutually exclusive.
Consider evaporative cooling of group beliefs. As the beliefs of a group are either proven to be flawed or merely go out of fashion, we expect a lot of people to abandon those beliefs. The ones who still hold them in the future may be much more abnormal (in ways that could be called 'off the rails'), and they may hold them in ways that are very different (more fanatical, more oppositional, less data-driven, more conspiratorial, etc).
X years ago, it would be pretty normal for most enlightened scholars to believe in phlogiston. But if a scholar today believed in phlogiston, it would be very likely that they were 'off the rails' in some important way, even though they 'merely stayed in place' all that time.
It has dawned on conservatives that "staying still" -- in the form of blocking any and all processes of government has no policy downside from their perspective (since government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub anyway). Any risk is strictly political to them -- which they have grown more and more confident of being able to manage with assorted hardball tactics, and "owning the libs."
The point is that they have enjoyed a default advantage when it comes to accepting gridlock and even popular disgust with government, while liberals have to keep convincing voters that government is not the enemy. The question is whether the majority is finally fed up with the conservative strategy and their unholy alliances.
I do think the current battles are more profound than Klein suggests (but I haven't read the book), which is why the divide today has become so dramatic. Seems to me we are literally, again, debating competing native worldviews about survival-of-the-fittest-ism (say, Ayn Rand vs. the increasingly socializing/equalizing trajectory of the past five decades). Because the stakes seem so high, conservatives today have largely abandoned what the rest of us have been seeking agreement on since the age of enlightenment: reason, facts, and truth as the lingua franca of the civilized age. This is untenable to us liberals, and, so, a "middle ground" is a nonstarter.
Democrats aren't about to allow the Republicans to achieve any policy goals that their base actually wants, so the best they can really do is stay still.
Republicans had the "trifecta" from 2016-2018, and it seems like they did achieve their goals.
"Republicans did indeed secure their big high-end tax cut. They also got a major boost in defense spending, though mostly via appropriations deals with Democrats that gave them corresponding generosity in domestic spending the GOP would have preferred to reduce. And they did indeed use the budget reconciliation process for both their tax and Obamacare-repeal legislation to sidestep the Senate filibuster."
I suppose it was also a long term republican goal to avoid acknowledging climate change is real so leaving the Paris Accord was a major achievement?
And I suppose that having fresh new conflict on the border of turkey and Syria was another accomplishment?
Its a bit hard to know exactly what Republican's goals are some times. But i guess we can assume that a Republican's actions are achieving Republican goals.
And they captured many of the courts for the next million years which I guess is considered progress towards their policy goal of overturning Roe V Wade and maybe getting of workplace protection for LGBT people.
I guess they didn't build as much Wall as they wanted.
My question is to you: If there was some big, long-term policy goal that Republican's are trying to do, did they propose it in 2016-2018 and it failed?
In my opinion the Republicans simply don't have that many grand shared policy goals and seem more interested in obsessing over pop-culture social issues.
> The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
Staying where you are in a time of such rapid change *is* radical.
The Amish stayed where they are for the last century and a half or so. I don't think anyone alive would say they aren't the very definition of a fringe group. So why doesn't the same go for the religious right?
At one time, everyone thought smoking was fine. Then we found out it wasn't. Someone who refused to update their beliefs about smoking and continued to claim it doesn't cause damage would rightly be considered a dangerous lunatic today. So why doesn't the same go for climate-change deniers?
Polarization may not be the right word for it, but to stay where one is is not a passive act. For a person who is informed, it requires an active choice to take the knowledge one could gain and reject it. It isn't sitting still in a calm sea, it's swimming against a clear current so as not to move with it.
They made the comparison between smoking and climate change. The comparison is extraordinarily appropriate and extremely common, because second hand smoke and carbon emissions are negative externalities illuminated by scientific research.
Carbon emissions are also positive externalities. They decrease deaths from cold winters, increase crop yield through CO2 fertilization, make more land warm enough for humans to live in. The popular catastrophic climate change rhetoric counts only the negative externalities and makes no attempt to actually calculate whether the net externality is positive or negative, as an actually knowledge-based argument would do.
I am skeptical-at-best of these claims, but I don't think we even need reach them. The value judgement has to follow the acknowledgement that (a) the planet is warming and (b) human emissions are why. Virtually all experts with any knowledge in the area agree on these facts. But the public does not.
84% of liberal Democrats say human activity contributes "a great deal" to climate change; only 14% of conservative Republicans agree (it scales smoothly from one to the other, source: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/). Conversely, 59% of conservative Republicans think natural forces contribute a great deal; only 14% of liberal Democrats agree.
Again, one of these positions simply is in line with overwhelming scientific consensus, and the other is not.
So is second-hand smoke, right? Also a positive externality? Because some people like the smell. And it keeps away people who would whine about the smell, which many appreciate.
Sorry I'm having trouble figuring out why "but this could also be good in some ways" means we can't call things negative externalities anymore. My belief is actually that emissions are a *net* negative externality.
Is your complaint in this reply, then, that I have to say "net" whenever I say negative externality now? You haven't really specified in this reply whether you just want to point out that many have failed to do a cost-benefit analysis, or whether you actually think warming nets out positive.
Wouldn't a knowledge-based argument accept that we simply don't know or can't know the entire effects of Climate Change at this point?
Is it really possible to sum up all the pros and cons of co2 emitting activities?
I think the consensus on the left is that its bad to take enormous unnecessary risks that could potentially cause enormous amounts of human suffering.
I mean, potentially that suffering will never occur because someone will invent some amazing tech solution next year that blocks sun rays, or captures carbon from the air, but that doesn't change the fact that the wise thing to do now is to take the careful route with less risk.
But by staying still they are getting further from what the median voter believes. So are more polarized in the sense that they are getting further from that midpoint. Whereas the democrats may be further left than the median voter, but they are staying consistently the same amount further left, and updating as the middle moves.
Seeing the things you list and others as being part of a singular tradition is your interpretation of them. Certain people on the center right will insist that the modern definition of racial progress is antithetical to the definition of racial progress as concerns the civil rights movement. old school Feminists being outflanked by Tran rights issues is another example where depending on your outlook, progress 1.0 and progress 2.0 run parallel, orthogonal, or opposite. This hasn't happened quite yet but the very notion of universal healthcare in the US might be undermined by the idea that race-based-means-tested government healthcare is morally superior to universal healthcare.
Moral outlooks, including and especially those of the last hundred years, are not mathematical conjectures that are suddenly proven by some academic and then accepted for the rest of human history.
It's certainly true that all intentional change which catches on gets called 'progress' retroactively, regardless of it's actual direction on any number of axes.
That said, society does *change* consistently, in one way or another; anyone who doesn't change with it is out of step with society for some reason, and that trait of being out of step is likely correlated with a lot of other traits that might be of interest to this discussion.
It isn't. There is a sort of natural selection of ideologies and policies, where the victors get to be called progress and natural order of things, and the defeated - backwardness and villainy.
I think one of the reason for polarization that isn't often mentioned is the total ideological victory of the West in the Cold War, led by USA. The Civilized World was happily united in their fear and hatred of the Obviously Evil Extremely Dangerous enemy for many decades, and then suddenly it disappeared, or at least was greatly diminished for a time.
There was a brief euphory about this, The End of History and all that, but it turned out that the West still had many problems and no obvious enemy to blame and hate, and so it began hurting itself in its confusion.
> Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
I'm pretty sure this just isn't true, and that's why they both needed strict police states to keep their own populace in check. But I'm not a historian, so I won't argue it.
But nothing I'm saying here is about right vs wrong. It's merely an observation that people who are many standard deviations away from their culture's accepted norms and values tend to be weird people, regardless of what those values and norms happen to be.
I'm not really smart enough to grasp what all this means. I just like to keep it simple and go with examples I can wrap my head around. Off the top of my head here's a list of progressive causes in the last 200 years in the US that were controversial hot button issues in one generation, and common sense in the next:
40 hour workweek
child labor laws
women's suffrage
ending slavery
ending Jim Crow
ending poll taxes and literacy tests
desegregation
toll-free interstate highway system
national parks
public libraries
miranda rights
Medicare/medicaid/disability insurance
unemployment insurance
OSHA
USDA
Americans with Disabilities Act
Labor Day
Clean Air and Water acts
California emissions
workplace harassment laws
interracial marriage
gay marriage
minimum wage
smoking bans
seatbelt laws
nutrition labels on food
calorie counts in restaurants
killing onerous bank overdraft fees
lemon laws
pre-existing conditions shouldn't make health insurance impossible to get
.
.
**Now here are the ones I think went wrong:**
Prohibition
55-mph speed limit (although we probably should have stuck with that for our grandkid's sake)
rent control (maybe causes more problems than it helps)
That's my list. What am I missing?
.
I'm not talking about something someone yelled at a protest, or a scientific fad in the 1800s when science was basically in its infancy and doctors still used leeches. I'm talking about actionable progressive policy - like the examples in both my lists above - that went wrong or right. I get the idea of survivorship bias. But surely we should be able to come up with a few more actual implemented progressive policies that went wrong, right?
It looks to me like several of those in your list are still being opposed, or are being given lip service while being commonly evaded, and not just by those on the fringe.
Official (legally required) segregation seems to have been replaced by an individually chosen form of the same old thing. Jim Crow also seems to be protean.
Minimum wage is routinely opposed - by some respectable set of US right wingers. And some economic orthodoxy.
Workplace harassment laws seem to me to be frequently seen as on the one hand, excuses for empathy-less HR reps to make trouble for innocent people - and on the other hand, to be a toothless tiger for any employee seen as sufficiently valuable, particularly managers, executives, etc. At least in a subset of companies, some of which are notorious. (Uber is my go-to example of such a reputation.)
The "Americans with Disabilities Act" is another case of a bureaucracy decried for imposing meaningless requirements to accommodate hypothetical people - while at the same time Apple's architectural award winning new headquarters building had to have retrofits for simple things like access to washrooms for people in wheelchairs.
And I haven't noticed any reduction in absurd fees from rapacious banks.
And oh yeah, public libraries are great - but there's very often no room for them in the civic budget. I tend to be pleasantly surprised - and spend a lot less at e.g. Amazon - when I live somewhere that has such a thing.
And poll taxes and literacy tests seem to just get replaced with other ways to keep the "wrong" people from easily voting. I.e. lip service, from most, but inadequate implementation. again.
Clean Air and Water acts - it's politically mainstream in the US to decry the EPA for imposing excessive costs, delays and uncertainty, in favor of species that aren't cute or photogenic and thus don't matter. Few people want the river they live near to catch on fire, or smog to the point of measurable impacts on life expectancy <em>for them</em>. But they seem a lot less clear about the environment that other people live in.
I think you're much too quick to dismiss survivorship bias, honestly. There have been thousands of ideas brought up by what we might now call progressives that have been rejected for various reasons. This often happens in their infancy, killed by other progressive types who know it will not work. Often it happens when the ideas are introduced to a wider audience and their flaws are identified.
In a functioning society, very few ideas will live to get implemented without a thorough vetting. When that happens (prohibition), it's often regretted and reversed.
Your list appears to be an attempt to recommend further progressive policy, but may in fact recommend the thorough vetting of thousands of ideas more than it recommends cart blanche approval of progressive planning.
I'm late to the party, but I think you're missing Social Security as something that went wrong. Regardless of whether you are in favor of such social programs, the implementation was based on faulty premises: the larger, younger population will transfer money to the smaller, older population; that population will generally continue to increase; that 30 years working is enough to fund indefinite retirement.
We now know that it's a better plan, generally, to have forced savings. If each individual's Social Security taxes were instead invested for the benefit of those paying them, then the plan could never run out of money.
As a conservative, I think people should be responsible for their own retirement planning, and am against the government getting involved in it. But I accept that many people don't know even the basic principles of financial planning, and that liberals want to provide help to everyone. As a compromise, then, I understand the need for government intervention. But the implementation of Social Security is fundamentally flawed.
From where I sit, that's merely a US conservative talking point, that they hope will be believed if they repeat it often enough.
The advantage of social security and similar schemes, is that they distribute risk. In particular, the risk that you will live longer than expected, and outlive your savings. When planning for retirement, I had to save as if I might reach 95th percentile or even higher life span. It's equally likely that I'll only reach 5th percentile. With any kind of pooled risk scheme (like social security, or old fashioned private pensions) that risk averages out, and the amount needed per person is only the 50th percentile amount. (Perhaps a bit more, to allow for potentially increasing lifespans.)
The rest of the common talking point is social security running out of money, for what seem to me to be primarily political reasons. If politics doesn't allow social security to be managed providently, or contributions to be increased, or for that matter the country to import young adults to pay into the system, that doesn't mean that an entirely different type of scheme would be better. It means that US politics is dysfunctional.
In the pew research link you sent, there's a chart breaking down support for gay marriage by political party between 2007-2017.
Republicans go from 20%to 47% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
Democrats go from 49% to 76% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
It looks like they both parties followed the same trend and went up 27% to me. So i'm a bit curious on what you mean by:
"democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm".
I guess you mean that the whole population is changing its mind faster on this issue, than it did for interracial marriage?
Then maybe a new question is: how fast should progress go?
I would argue as fast as we can while maintaining strong democratic institutions. Its hard for me to think of a way to make this specific though. Did we go too slow changing our minds on interracial marriage or too fast on gay marriage?
How fast do we want the other party to be able to move?
"In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now" I think the same-sex marriage vs interracial marriage equivalence doesn't work.
You have religious and cultural traditions about marriage going back thousands of years, which are still adhered to by a majority of people in the majority of countries in the world; the idea that those traditions are wrong is (to a great extent) a historical novelty, an idea which is less than a century old, 20 years ago most people in first world countries opposed it, and even now, the majority of countries still have majority opposition to it.
By contrast, interracial marriage bans are much more of a historical anomaly. You can count on one hand the number of countries that have ever had formalised bans on interracial marriage – the vast majority of countries never have. It is not an idea with thousands of years of heritage behind it, in fact it only really dates to the 17th century.
Overturning something which has existed for a few centuries maximum, and only ever in a handful of countries, is a lot easier than overturning something that goes back thousands of years, and is found in the majority of countries around the world.
In 20 years time, there will still be a substantial minority opposed to same-sex marriage. It quite possibly will have shrunk somewhat – although the high birth rate of religious ultra-conservatives counteracts that – but it certainly will be a lot larger than the minority opposed to interracial marriage will be.
Just to be clear your position is that interracial marriage bans are easier to overturn because they only existed for a few hundred years, while you believe formal gay marriage bans have exited for thousands?
Because the interracial marriage work was done first. Part of the gay marriage argument was "this is the Civil Rights of our time!" and part of that was deliberately making the comparison with interracial marriage. So people who had grown up with "ban on interracial marriage wrong and bad and evil" were much more likely to be persuaded on "ban on gay marriage wrong and bad and evil" because the deliberate comparison had been made "you don't want to be a *racist*, do you? of course not! but being anti-gay marriage is the exact same thing as being a racist who was anti-interracial marriage!"
That argument only really works in the US though, because it is one of the few countries in which a ban on interracial marriage existed and became a big political issue. The vast majority of countries never banned interracial marriage; even in the few others that did, it almost never became a major political debate. (A good example of that is France, which had on-and-off-again bans on interracial marriage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they often went unenforced, and eventually finally disappeared without most people even noticing – indeed, most French people forgot they ever existed, if they ever knew they existed to begin with.) It probably also has some salience in highly Americanised Western countries (especially English-speaking ones), but that says more about the cultural dominance of the United States than anything else. I don't think you'd get very far with that kind of US-centric argument in most of the Middle East, Africa or Asia.
I know your topic is specific to marriage, but how does your thesis account for what appears to be the greater overall stubbornness of racial discrimination in the United States? It's been 165 years since the end of the Civil War, yet racial discrimination and bigotry hang on stubbornly. Marriage equality and other civil rights for gay Americans seems to be gaining acceptance at a much quicker pace. Seemingly, if the taboo against homosexuality, because it is so ancient, has a stronger hold on the culture than bigotry on the basis of race, there would be far higher resistance across a host of issues. But that seems to be the opposite of what we see.
So one big difference is to what extent we are dealing with a US-specific phenomenon versus a global phenomenon. Interracial marriage bans were largely specific to the US, few other countries have ever had them, and their defenders in the US found few supporters in other countries. By contrast, a majority of the global population – even in 2021 – still supports limiting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Conservative American Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have been receiving support from Christians in Africa (and other parts of the world) where opposition is still the clear majority position, and there is no certainty it won't still be in 20 years time – witness the strong support African Anglican churches gave to the conservative ACNA breakaway from the US Episcopal Church, and their strong support for a global Anglican alliance in defence of traditional sexual morality, GAFCON. By contrast, American Christians who defended interracial marriage on religious grounds found very little support from overseas Christians. I think globalisation and increased diversity of immigration add to the picture – conservative American Christians can today call on support from conservative Christians in the Global South, in a way in which they couldn't have in earlier decades even if those Christians had been inclined to support them (which on the issue of interracial marriage they were not). And I think broadly the same point applies to some other religions as well, such as Islam.
If you made one of those charts in the prior progressive era, it would have included major progressive issues like eugenics and prohibition. It's easy to construct a narrative saying that things are coherently moving in a certain direction if you ignore everything inconvenient to its narrative. It's a teleological view without a clear telos, and a historiography, quite frankly, based on flattering the preconceptions of people like you.
History leans Christian. And at least a Christian view of history has a clear telos. Yet somehow I doubt you believe that Jesus is coming back.
Sure, that is how we view it now: quack science seized on by racists. But plenty of intellectuals of the day championed it. Maybe people a hundred years from now will say similar things about any number of progressive issues out there right now. My point isn't that X issue is good and Y issue is bad.
My point is the opposite: some perspective and epistemic humility make it quite hard to view something as progress before you really know how it will turn out.
The fundamental problems with eugenics aren't scientific, even though the science used to support some specific implementations of eugenics has been rubbish.
There's no fundamental scientific problem with the idea that people would overall be better off if more people tended to be born with genes for better health, fitness and intelligence, though. The problem is in translating that into an actual policy that isn't somewhere between "horrifying" and "really really really horrifying".
Eugenics is a classic "progressive" policy. "Progressive" policies tend to be about boldly making big changes to society because they sound like a nice idea at the time while giving insufficient thought to the unintended consequences which in practice tend to always outweigh the intended ones. Eugenics is one of those idas that sounds like a great plan when you've thought about it for five minutes but turns out to be horrible when you've actually done it for two decades.
The reason that I'm (mostly) a conservative is not that "progressives" are always wrong, but because they often are, and because I think the world right now needs more people capable of saying "Hey now, stop right there, think about the unintended consequences" and fewer who say "Hey guys I have a radical proposal to fix everything!"
Being quack science seized on by racists doesn't mean it's not a progressive issue. It was promoted by progressives as part of a progressive ideology to remake society.
The science wasn't the problem — some human characteristics that matter are heritable, and humans have been changing animal strains by selective breeding for a very long time. And the people who "seized on it" included Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, ... . Its principal opponent was the Catholic Church.
"History leans progressive" is an illusion created by survivorship bias. Only the issues on which progressives eventually win get branded as "progress".
When the "progressives" win, things change, and this is branded as progress. When the progressives lose, nothing changes, the issue is forgotten, and the change for which they fought is retrospectively rebranded as "not progress".
I was really struck by this when I started reading GK Chesterton. Now, GK Chesterton was a fusty old conservative even in his day, so in a world where "progress" was a genuine direction in political space you'd expect his writings to be busy defending ideas that nowadays seem ridiculously old-fashioned. And yet he's not, he's mostly out there defending sensible principles, because the "progressives" of his day were in favour of forms of "progress" such as the abolition of private homes and families for the benefit of a government-mandated eugenics program.
That doesn't mean that the current beliefs of progressives will become the common sense of the future. For example, racial 'blindness' was the progressive standpoint of progressives of yesteryear (see MLK's most famous quote), but current progressives advocate judging people by their race. So either people who had similar beliefs to MLK were radicals who didn't have 'common sense', or the current progressives are radicals who don't have 'common sense'.
You entire argument hinges on your claim that you know that the current beliefs by progressives will become the common sense of the future, which you cannot know. We can certainly point to others who falsely thought the same thing, like communists.
'Progressives advocate judging people by their race'. This is something of a strawman. It probably fits well with how some social justice types on twitter actually behave on twitter. But virtually no one actually defends 'form a judgment of how virtuous any individual is on the basis of their race.
Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. I don't think anyone would call them anything other than progressives.
That framing in that article-treating this as something white women do as a collective rather than as something individuals have done-is bad and racist and bigoted (doesn't *necessarily* mean the phenomenon it's talking about isn't real: compare a racist on the right talking about high crime rates in black inner city areas) but it's not advocating for the position 'judge individuals on the basis of their race' but rather saying that there is a problematic trend in white culture with using the idea that black men are a threat to white women to control or drum up violence against black men. I actually think very few bigots on either the left or right *ever* advocate directly for "judge individuals on the basis of their race', post-Jim Crow, apart from actual Nazis* and Nation of Islam black supremacist-types. King's famous remark in the I Have a Dream speech made sense because he was talking in the context of laws that forbade *all* blacks from doing certain things, but that's seldom advocated for these days against either whites or blacks. (At least at a legal level.)
*Even not all of them maybe. The son of the guy who runs Stormfront once said in an interview with the NYT about him abandoning white supremacy that his parents were generally fine with people of colour on an individual level, and that there
'Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. '
Again, not really (regardless of one's views on the wisdom of affirmative action, a topic on which I don't have strong views.) They usual defences of Affirmative Action are that it will a) make society equal overall by giving blacks more power (on the assumption that they currently have less than their fair share), b) will somehow compensate blacks as a group for past injustice, c) will lead to greater "diversity" of experiences amongst the student population and hence a richer educational experience (maybe no one actually believes this one, but officially this is the *only* legal justification for affirmative action) or d) help compensate for the fact that the grades of black students don't reflect their actual levels of talent because of racism. Now maybe all of a-d) are total bullshit, I'm not taking a stand on that, but none of them involve deciding that whites are worse students or worse people because they are white.
The most obvious big miss was economic, not social. Prior to the the 1980s or so, it was absolutely standard for progressives to be all-in on communist economics, massive nationalisation programmes, class warfare etc. The British government between WW2 and Thatcher was very far to the left economically. She rolled all that back and the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant, that no political leader since has seriously considered bringing it back with the exception of 70s throwback Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced.
The whole gestalt of progressivism throughout most of the 20th century was totally abandoned, hence their now near-total focus on identity politics.
This is my observation too. I've tried to think: "If I take an outside view and place my self randomly sometime in the last 200 years, were the liberals or conservatives more likely to be correct / moving in the right direction?" And I found that both sides are likely to be wrong about a ton of things, obsessed about a ton of things that really don't matter, but when they have clearly articulated differences the liberals are probably more right about social issues and more wrong on economic ones.
There's plenty of exceptions. But if you're trying to figure out what your priors should be: liberals are probably right on social issues and more likely than not to be wrong economic ones is probably a good place to start (then obviously update on the evidence in the specific case).
That is indeed a problem with trying to judge the correctness of social issues. Economics at least has somewhat objective metrics that you can use to compare different societies - the USSR collapsed and adopted capitalism (sorta), the USA became an economic superpower. 1-0 to the conservatives.
With social issues like the importance of free speech, gay rights, feminism etc it's not really clear how you'd objectively judge them, especially within the system. It's easy to do so subjectively: isn't it clearly better and happier that gays are no longer oppressed? Well yes, but, that's a circular social judgement - the societies that oppressed them believed by doing so they were creating the better world, and arguments on both sides would boil down to feelings (though I suspect oppression of gays actually had some sort of economic roots to do with needing children that were voided with the arrival of the welfare state).
"the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant"
Actually the majority of British people today would welcome a massive nationalisation programme – at least for rail, water and energy. See the survey below. "State ownership is still the preferred option for a majority of people across most of the industries we asked about."
Everyone is in favor of lots of stuff when responding to surveys and costs are not factored in. This is true of every pet project of any camp - not just nationalization. Ask people if they want better sports stadiums on surveys and they are in favor. Ask them in the next election if they want to implement a tax hike to pay for better sports stadiums, and they vote it down (at least here in the US). Thus, the joke about Abortions for Some, Free tiny American Flags for Everyone!
Well, for rail at least they got it thanks to lockdowns. The UK rail industry is effectively nationalised now.
Online panel polls seem to have a bias towards any answer that can be perceived as pro-social, and this is apparently a known issue to pollsters (source: random internet comments from people claiming to be ex pollsters, season liberally with sodium chloride). So am I skeptical the population really wants this to the extent these polls claim. Ditto for lockdowns.
I also suspect people's views on rail could be shifted radically should it ever become a popular topic of debate, because there are strong arguments in favour of privatised railways but politicians don't bother making them. The only time any serious politician advocated for nationalisation the Tories decided to focus 100% on Brexit, which was clearly the right choice. Look at the graph of railway usage over the history of the system. It is V shaped, with the bottom of the V being exactly in the years when the system was privatised. That graph alone is pretty compelling
The polling problem is suspected to be a mix of factors, one of which is that people are paid to take part and this seems to create a bias towards saying "yes" to things because a fraction of users believe if they don't give the answers the question asker wants to hear, they might not be invited to take part anymore.
Another problem is simpler: what kind of people spend long periods in their evenings and weekends answering long online surveys in return for trivial sums of money? (a) People who are time rich but money poor e.g. people on benefits, students, etc who tend to be left wing. (b) People who feel answering polls lets them influence government and the news (YouGov explicitly advertises this as a benefit of joining). The left is more into influencing people via media, hence the greater prevalence of left wing media outlets than right wing. Rich conservative business execs with 3 kids aren't going to spend time answering long surveys in return for 10 quid, so will inevitably be under-represented.
'Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced'
This is true, but a bit misleading. Corbyn fought two elections not one, and although he got crushed the second time, he did quite well in the first one, only losing narrowly and improving on Labour's performance 2 years earlier. Indeed, Labour gained their largest % of the overall vote since 2001 in the 2017 election. Further, what changed between 2017 and 2019 was not Corbyn's leftist economic policies (it was something of a factor that the 2019 manifesto promised more spending, but by no means the most important) but the fact that anti-Brexit people had become radicalized and didn't see Corbyn as anti-Brexit enough while (more important) pro-Brexit voters now saw him as trying to overturn the referendum.
You're take that Corbyn lost because ordinary voters saw that his economic policies were crazy-because-socialist is suspicious, because it implies voters vote on policy, and there is very little evidence that that is true. I have to say that when Corbyn was elected Labour leader, I thought his leftism would doom him, because people would trust the mainstream media's claims that he was extreme (which of course, in one sense he was, he did represent a big shift to the left, love it or loathe it). But after 2017, I stopped thinking that this was anything like a strong enough effect to guarantee that a politician as far-left as Corbyn couldn't become PM.
To be fair, it is a little hard to say just what 2017 indicates, because the Tories ran a famously shitty campaign, resulting in Labour soaring in the polls relative to where they were at the start, when they were 20 points behind and it really did seem like 'Corbyn too socialist to achieve anything other than massive defeat' was the right take.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married.
Maybe. But what about bet on other progressive ideas? What is your bet on efficacy of "defund the police" movement and overall policies on crime? What about progressive ideas on how to solve homelesness and drug addiction problem we see on West Coast? What about progressive ideas on housing crisis? What about progressive ideas on fighting systemic racism by implementing large scale diversity trainings? Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?
I think most of these will fail spectacularly and then will be just whitewashed. "No true Progressive" believed in these ideas back then. They only believed in ideas that proved to be successful.
"History leans progressive" isn't even true for one country (America) in one short time period (1960-2020). Economically, public policy since Reagan is significantly to the right of where it was in the 1960-70s. The anti-tax movement is one of the most successful political movements in American history. Unions are far weaker than they used to be; the minimum wage has plummeted when adjusted for inflation; state control of the economy is largely anathema, replaced by a neoliberal consensus that both parties subscribe to.
Following up on my previous comment, it's definitely not true that history leans progressive overall. History is fundamentally unpredictable. In 100 BC, Rome was a semi-democratic republic where you could more or less express your political opinions and believe in whatever religion you want. Its philosophers tended to be rationalists, skeptical of religion and smiling on its absurd pieties. Then the centuries-old republic fell, replaced by the Augustan autocracy. Then an obscure religion rose out of a backwater desert in the Middle East and took over Europe. By 500 AD, this religion had an iron grip on politics and philosophy; the rational skepticism of 100 BC turned into the all-consuming theological autocracy of the Middle Ages, an orthodoxy enforced by the mob, the kings, and the clergy. Christianity was spreading so fast that Christians must have thought it would take over the world. Then a random orphan in another brutal desert invented a new faith and united the tribes of Arabia; shortly after his death, his followers destroyed one superpower (Persia) and nearly destroyed the Christian Roman Empire within a single generation.
What will happen in 500 years? There's no reason a theocratic autocracy enforced by mass digital surveillance can't happen. Insert your favorite boogeyman as the religion (Christianity, Islam, social justice...)
I hope someday you sincerely try to tackle the "why cant we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" question.
It seems to be the most pressing current question. Unfortunately, It does not appear to me that the left takes it seriously. The left answer appears to be "more of what we have been doing, and do it with new people."
On the right, there are some who write directly about the question and try to sincerely answer it, though very few people of stature bother to address the arguments.
I would love to see you take a serious shot at answering that question from the ground floor.
You should read the left more. "Everything stopped working around 1970, because neoliberalism" is basically dogma on the left; "why can't we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" was <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/issue/failure-is-an-option">the theme of the most recent issue of Jacobin</a>.
Of course you might think that the left diagnoses are wrong, or that their remedies would make it worse, but that's separate from the left not taking the question seriously.
I probably do not pay enough attention to the non-neoliberal, non-woke left. Though my impression is that's just communism with more epicycles, which may be wrong. I would be interested in going down the rabbit hole. I wish your link wasn't paywalled.
On the link: if you scroll down some, you can click on most of the articles
On the left: there's a wide range between the US and communism that leftists tend to advocate for. Nationalized health care is obviously a big one, and one which most of Europe is to the left of the US on. There are a number of individual-focused changes like parental leave, vacation time, and work hours. Leftists also often advocate for more societal-focused changes like nationalizing natural monopolies, increasing the funding for public transit on a national level, increasing the power of unions, or mandating that company boards have workers on them.
Those are all policies that could entirely be part of a capitalist society, where businesses are still generally owned by individuals instead of by the state. Of course, many on the American right would describe those as communism (apparently Joe Biden is a "communist"!), but doing so isn't really an accurate description of anyone who would call themselves communist. And some on the left certainly are communists, calling for a revolution by the proletariat and an abolition of private property, but that's a small minority.
I assumed the Seth Ackerman article that's paywalled was the one addressing my question. Which of the others addresses the issue squarely? There are quite a few.
Just so we share a mindspace, I've read Oligopsony's comments on SSC for 10 years and am aware of non-US politics.
I am extremely extremely doubtful that the problem is variations on policies such as parental leave, funding levels for various nice social programs, or making company boards more diverse. I am curious how you think your examples would result in some general improvement in government capacity? Would government with the various policies you mentioned be able to tackle COVID effectively?
The problem I identified in the original post extends to basically all of the western democracies. Europe spectacularly failed on responding to COVID and also generally appears moribund and unable to act efficiently or effectively. Perhaps its not as bad as the US, but there does appear to be a general phenomena in the west on this front.
Ah, I was mainly answering what the "non-neoliberal, non-woke left" has that differs from communism.
The Ackerman article talks about how most of the systems at the top of the American political system are set up to stop change. The Supreme Court can override the legislative branch, the legislative branch needs the president to approve, the president needs the legislative branch to create laws, and House and Senate need each other to agree, the Senate needs a supermajority to get past the filibuster, and so on. Thus the system as a whole can't actually produce any significant change that hasn't been wanted by a large majority of the US population for a long period of time.
That's obviously not entirely true, but it is true for a lot of the issues. 67% of Americans want a $15/hr minimum wage[0], but it's looking doubtful that it will happen, despite the president and most of the House being in favor. Similarly, 69% of voters want Medicare for All[1], but there's almost no chance of it.
Of course, that doesn't explain Europe, other than perhaps saying that they too have too many checks and balances, and that they need a more unilateral populace-based control. But, on a lot of issues, European governments do have a lot more government capacity. The US pays a lot more than Europe (other than the UK) for building public transit, for instance.[2] Leftists would probably explain it as partly caused by privatization.[3]
Sorry for the paywall, but glad I inspired some interest!
On the contemporary socialist-or-social democratic left (I won't say "non-woke," because that's a very elastic term, even moreso than socialist) I'd say there are two schools of thought on the stagnation question: the fatalist Marxist response and the anti-neoliberal response. The first is generally a bit further left than the other, but not perfectly so (because there are other issues at stake.)
For the fatalist Marxists like Michael Roberts, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Cockshott, things are slowing down because of capital accumulation. Specifically, rates of profit are falling, and *have been falling*, for a very long time, in accordance with the dynamics of capitalism. This long-term secular trend was slightly obscured during the middle of the twentieth century, which had plenty of new places to build and destroyed old things to rebuild, and which was throwing a lot of growth into consumer goods rather than capital accumulation - there's your epicycle, if you like - but then reasserted itself. These agree with the anti-neoliberal social democrats that the slowdown is associated with the shift to neoliberalism, but see neoliberalism as a way of reasserting profitability by privileging capital - a response to slowing growth rather than its cause. (Although the politics are quite different, you might notice a similarity to some of Tyler Cowen's explanations in a steady decline of low-hanging fruit.)
For the anti-neoliberal social democrats like Branko Marcetic, Thomas Piketty, or many of the MMT types, neoliberalism led to a slowdown by shifting the income distribution upward and encouraging that upward wealth going towards financial assets rather than real production. A change within capitalism - one that empowered labor unions and governments alongside shareholders, and that increased the share of effective demand coming from consumers as well as investors - could change the incentives structure of production towards more long-termism. These groups also tend to see public goods as underinvested in. A nice blog series that outlines some ways of thinking about how neoliberal solutions can be anti-growth - written in the kind of insight porn that SSC readers are likely to appreciate - can be found at https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/category/coasian-hell/
I'd say Jacobin is a good place to go to start keeping tabs on the left, not because they're perfect by any means - they can often be quite shallow, as any publication that tends towards mainstream success can be - but because they represent a nice sampler of thought in this sphere without presuming that you've memorized everything about some particular weird inter-left debate. Getting from there to less shallow stuff is often as simple as following an author to their private blog.
If you had to recommend a book length in-depth treatment of the "fatalist Marxists" position (or just another long running blog i could pick through) I'd be very interested to read it.
I've read picketty, i wouldve put him in my "neolib" camp, lol. whoops! I'll read harrowell.
Michael Robert's blog, or for a book-length treatment, Andrew Kliman's "Failure of Capitalist Production" may be helpful (though Kliman is a cranky fellow in both senses and can be somewhat exhausting to deal with at book-length.) Roberts also has edited a book of papers from this perspective entitled "World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability."
I don't know what Substack's linking policy is, but you should be able to find these wherever fine books can be found.
I'm probably missing something here, but I'd always heard that profit margins are pretty high now - how does this interact with the decreasing-profit-margins case?
The decreasing profit margin on building something tangible... Physical capital. Instead, the system is now set up to be more profitable for those who invest in financial instruments.
Profit margins are the ratio of sales to profits, whereas Marx was talking about the ratio of capital investment to profits. So, if you invest $10,000,000 and sell $5000 of products, but $4000 of that is pure profit, your profit margins are great, but your rate of profit (profit relative to capital investment) is appalling.
More generally, I *think* a big conceptual disconnect is that Marx is working on the labor theory of value. The claim is that capitalists can only make a profit by capturing the surplus value created by human workers, so as the ratio of human workers to automation falls, the ratio of profit available for capture to overall capital investment also falls.
The claim also explicitly includes the caveat that capitalists can temporarily fend off this fall in profits by exploiting the workers harder - longer hours for less pay, worse conditions, etc. I think adherents to this view would vaguely gesture at graphs of wages not rising for a long time, wealth inequality spiking, etc. as evidence that capitalist are doing exactly this right now, allowing profits to stay high, but that this is not a stable system and can only lead to a long economic bust when exploitation reaches intolerable levels.
The relevant distinction here is between capital share of income (how much new wealth goes to capital, currently high, as far as things go) and rate of profit (how much income you expect per time period per amount invested, currently low, as far as things go.) Ceteris paribus raising one will raise the other, but if rates of growth are low - precisely the situation we're trying to puzzle out! - then you can have low rates of profit even with a high capital share of income.
Importantly, he compares countries that embraced neoliberalism to a greater vs lesser degree rather than just having everything after some date represent neoliberalism while everything prior to it doesn't.
I think your point is a little lost because I have no idea who you're referring to on the left or right. Are we talking about mainstream Republicans and Democrats, in which case I dont see any attempt at big diagnosis on either side, or a bit further to the poles?
I didn't want to get into a debate on the relative merits of these authors and their politics, I was just noticing a trend that may or may not be real. I was not speaking from a mainstream politician perspective, but the various intellectuals that address these questions.
For example that may prove the rule, Matt Yglesia does write about this issue, and he gets quite a bit of flack for it. His most recent book One Billion Americans book can be considered a "take" on this question.
Something that bothered me about the book is that it doesn't link the people's affective polarisation with the political parties. There's definitely an increase in political polarisation across the world - incl Marine le Pen in France, Brexit, German far right parties rising fast, India, Hungary and more. I'm not sure how to square that seemingly benign affective polarisation chart with the political outcomes. And while Dixiecrats move would've had a role in creating a better party mix, I'm not sure why that would've led to more polarisation relative to all the other party mixes that have happened in the past.
One option, which I wish the book had discussed better, is the rise of mass media. Media creates a transparent information economy for the whole country. It ensures the speed of information transmission is rapid or instantaneous. So any political action you take has to have an immediate and positive effect. If that's the case, then naturally compromise gets harder, because you compromise to get something you want later. But the immediacy of feedback makes us all hyperbolic discounters. Makes us do things like McConnell not giving everyone $2k even though that would've won him all 3 branches of the govt.
Ultimately it makes us all greedy algorithms. And that's not a US specific topic, it's true around the world.
So I don't know too much French history, but if Le Pen really is more extreme and more polarizing in France than previous politicians, wouldn't you expect to see an increase in French people with a negative opinion of her party? (and, among her supporters, more hostility towards Macron)?
So to clarify, what I meant is that you should see a reduction in people who think both major candidates are fine, and an increase in people that really hate one (or both) of them. If you assume the alternative to Le Pen is a more mainstream centre-right figure who appeals less to the fringe, then you would expect to see less net hostility to the mainstream alternative than you do to Le Pen - and if we're assuming Le Pen's predecessors as the main opposition figure were more like that, then Le Pen should get more hate than they did.
I can't see the body of the articles because paywall - going by the headlines it looks like Le Pen is seeing more support? But that's not necessarily a sign of more partisanship (or of less partisanship - you can have a Reagan-like fringe politics figure or a Biden-like mainstream figure both pick up a lot of support against the incumbent, for opposite reasons).
Ah I see. That makes sense. Sorry about the paywalls.
But this is one of those cases where defining "polarisation" is interesting. You could see it as the chart above re Rs and Ds creating a nice bimodal distribution, or you could purely look at % of people with antagonistic views towards the other party, or you could look at the level of pushback against the "mainstream" parties in the middle of said distribution. My point was that most of the world is seeing the latter.
But yes, if MLP were more moderate, the reaction would be to cause less net hostility to her. But she's not, which is what creates the furore. So MLP does get more hate than her predecessors. But she (much like Trump) also gets more love for her extreme views. Whether this is a strategy (get visibility through extreme views, moderate to get acceptability) remains to be seen.
Also, to your point, to me the interesting aspects would be to see how it plays out too - there's a likelihood that her route from strong minority to majority relies on relaxation of some of the views, which could be a victory (much like Scott writes about the Democrats).
To me whether or not a party becomes polarising is therefore more easily explained by the efforts of the party to have clear, simple policy positions, and ensure that the media-feedback-model shows them as always on the attack + never giving in. It's less about the specific person, and more the fact that such political polarisation is not purely a US phenomenon.
Brexit isn't an aspect of political polarisation. I understand it's often framed that way in the USA, but in fact all three major political parties at the time were dead set against it, and either suppressed or sidelined euroscepticism for years.
The only reason the referendum happened at all was because of the rise of a small third party (UKIP), which threatened the incumbent right wing party just enough to convince Cameron to promise a referendum he - and everyone else blinded by the Westminster consensus-quo - was convinced he had zero chance of losing. Cameron saw in it a chance to unite his party, because beyond UKIP the only serious outpost of euroscepticism was a minority amongst his own ranks. The choice of a plain Leave vs Remain call was made specifically to crush the eurosceptics completely by forcing them to advocate for an option some of them didn't actually want (i.e. a lot of eurosceptics would have preferred more distant relations but not a total exit), to lose, and then to give up completely. Polling gave him plenty of reasons to believe that.
Well, obviously it didn't work out that way. The Leave camp made better arguments and won a large number over to their camp, but more importantly, the Remain campaign turned a lot of people off, as it became clear that the supposedly warm and fuzzy EU project was in fact motivated by feelings of fear and helplessness. The fear based campaign was also justified by polling - polls that asked voters to split three ways, along remain, "leave at any cost" and "would leave if there were no economic consequences" showed that a clear majority wanted to leave, and it was fear of "punishment" that was motivating a lot of the remain vote.
Summary: Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and the formal Conservative party were ALL pro-Remain, with just UKIP and some splitter rebels in the Conservatives arguing pro-Leave. Describing what happened during that time through the lens of party-related political polarisation is thus very difficult. Leave was represented by only one of many political parties, a single issue party with only a single MP (a defector from the Tories), and no real power. Once the vote was won that party basically collapsed. Leave voters came from both the left and right, motivated by a variety of issues.
I take all your points. It's a very fair characterisation.
However by that metric can we classify anything as polarising? It'll always seem like "this is a fringe view" until it wins and then the Overton window shifts, and the PM and the Tories now take Brexit on as 'their' issue, so it means we're never actually polarised, it's just that a new view has emerged.
Not saying that's incorrect btw. But by this thought process, polarisation on any one issue is the normal way for any idea to become popular. And if multiple ideas start getting held together by the same people, then overall polarisation, which is a sum of people's preferences that seem autocorrelated, also rises.
So for example it would be like if Brexit view becomes correlated with other policies like immigration, taxation, social services etc, partially through the sales pitch and partially because it's the same people. And if any "popular" issue gets adopted by a party, and you have feedback loops that make their position entrenched (because you can't back down etc) then it'll seem like polarisation would naturally increase as time goes on.
To be clear, I would classify Brexit as polarising (obviously!) but not along party-political lines, and not caused by a two party system or the Rise Of The Right or anything like that. The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I expect this issue to become much less polarising with time and traditional left/right politics to re-assert itself, partly because I expect the population of people who strongly identify with Remain to shrink a lot. This would mirror what happened in other rich countries. Consider Switzerland where their original join/not-join referendum was even closer than Brexit was, at less than 1% margin of victory. So Switzerland was split perfectly down the middle, but with the passing of years joining the EU shrivelled into being a fringe position. Likewise there's no serious movement to fully join (as far as I know) in Norway, Iceland, etc. Fundamentally the EU is an unattractive proposition, and it became polarising because of what some people thought it represented and said about their identity, rather than what it actually is. Now that Remain has become Rejoin the set of arguments involved become entirely different and much harder to win, so eventually this will become an obscure issue again and left/right politics will re-assert itself.
Thank you - you've made me rethink the polarisation theory. Which is fun because I wrote about it a while back so good time to revisit :-)
My amended thought is that people have a grabbag of positions. Say
x1 = f(a, b, c, ...z), same for x2 all the way to xn as people, and a to z as 'positions'. and f() just multiplies each position with a coefficient from -1 to +1 and creates an array.
Initially let them be randomly distributed.
First comes a level of media that helps everyone know what the general consensus is on positions a, b and c. So some folks start updating their own positions towards either extreme.
Then comes new issue z, which originally wasn't an issue, but now is. z now moves from being a 0 on everyone's scale to now be bimodally distributed (this is Brexit).
If z, or any other position like a, b, p, becomes bimodally distributed, and it's public enough that enough people now know it's bimodally distributed, people will start sorting "for" and "against" it, and within each of those camps the positions start becoming similar. The 'a's update towards becoming similar to other 'a's and so on.
That is the argument for overall polarisation. Admittedly it's an observational argument and not a deductive one.
The next step very well might be that new issue comes up and preexisting polarisations get dissolved, or they sort into existing camps. That part's harder to predict. Just like it's harder to predict if Republicans will go full Romney or full Margaret Greene.
> The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I don't think leave/remain will ever replace left/right. But I do think a cluster of issues and positions that is crudely encapsulated by leave/remain -- but crucially does not actually include rejoin/don't rejoin the EU -- may well replace the current left/right.
If the Tories move closer to a pre-Thatcher conservatism with a stronger focus on the nation and an acceptance of a role for the state, and lock in the change by making a success of "levelling up" retaining some of their northern gains they could redefine the meaning of right wing to something you might describe as "leave". There's some signs to be oquptimistic if you like this stuff. The success of the vaccine taskforce taking the sting out of the words "national industrial strategy", the failure of the global marketplace to deliver PPE and success of moving production back onshore. My reading is that the party is divided, Boris is pro this shift and Sunak is less so. But I'd say there's a reasonable chance it happens.
If this happens the question is how does Labour respond. Does Starmer try to copy the plan leading to something like the very unpolarised Blair/Cameron years - https://www.youtube.com/watch/PPgS7p40ERg. Or does Labour position itself as it's anthesis and embrace globalism and, dare I say, anti-Britishness. There's definitely a faction in Labour that want to (witness the reactions to Starmer saying he wants to see more union jacks around) but I can't see the party letting that unelectable faction take power... again.
You should really, really, really read Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He makes a pretty compelling argument that the things you are pointing to are due to the current communication infrastructure where "NO!" is easy to get behind but proactive solutions are easy to get behind. Then those ultimately fall apart once the NO! take effect. In the US, Occupy and the Tea Party were two faces of the same coin... that ended up changing nothing. He has many international examples. For a small taste, check out his Pairagraph: https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686cf7fce19/1
I think both the comparison of whether Democrats or Republicans are radicalizing more, and of the relative success of their "rebel flanks," might be improved by separating economic and cultural issues.
QAnon and "it's racist for white people to eat sushi" have something in common: elites think it's dumb, but it doesn't really affect their bottom line, so they're willing to play to it when the polling says they can pander to those activists without weirding out normies.
Social democracy, much less a more vigorous model of socialism, *would* threaten the people who run the Democratic party. So Democratic leadership is willing to move left on race and gender, at least on the representational aspects of those issues, while making sure to keep the economic and foreign policy left out of control of the party.
But Democrats have moved left on economic issues - see e.g. $15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A.
That said, I think there is something here, except the "people who run the democratic party" isn't politicians or oligarchs, it's journalists (or occasionally younger office staffers), who grew up UMC, went to fancy ivy-league schools, and spend too much time fighting culture wars on Twitter. And the things they control aren't so much actual politics as the narrative around politics - you see this a lot with Democratic politicians trying to talk about healthcare and social security, and the media bringing everything back to race and idpol.
It may be significant that the two issues you list "$15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A." are both, at the moment, purely theoretical. Neither has happened. Biden has now explicitly called for a delay on a $15 dollar minimum wage and long ago ruled out backing M4A, explicitly promising to veto it if it passes.
Not saying it won't happen, but if it does it will be after a great deal of delay.
You may be surprised to hear that FL, land of conservative rubes and yahoos, passed an amendment last election instituting a statewide minimum wage of 15/hr by 2026, I believe it is, with more than 60% approval. The republicansin the state legislature concerned primarily with corporate profits would never have approved this. We'll see what happens. Medical Marijuana was approved here a few years ago in the same process, but the state found a way to delay or prevent it's implementation.
I'm not sure a $15 dollar minimum wage affects too many democratic voters? I'm pretty sure I haven't taken advantage of any labor that was less than that in the last year. Lots of poor people take advantage of low income labor by shopping at Walmart or such but not really welathy professionals. And my sense is that employers of people at less than $15 tend to vote Republican but employers of wealthy professionals tend to vote Democrat.
Ignoring the last year being COVID, would you have eaten at any restaurants that aren't fine dining? Bought food from a grocery store? Those are both minimum wage jobs.
I've been ordering out so not counting waiters. Probably there are dishwashers I should have included? I've been doing a lot of ordering things online through Amazone but I have actually used a CVS so that's actually probably another less than $15 job. Still, not too many of them.
What planet are you from? A very large percentage of democratic voters are dirt poor. And Walmart gets the gov't to pay the expenses of its neglected work force though food stamps and medicaid and so forth. An argument for the $15 wage is that this would greatly reduce the need for gov't programs due to this scam Walmart currently runs agains the American people.
That assumes the raising the cost of low-skill labor has no significant effect on how much of it is hired, which is unlikely. If half the minimum wage workers get a raise and half become unemployed, surely the need for government programs goes up, not down.
Walmart, or MacDonald's, or any other employer faces tradeoffs. Capital can substitute for labor — consider the increasing use of self-service checkout lanes. Skilled labor can substitute for unskilled labor. Walmart uses unskilled labor instead of alternative inputs if and only if doing it that way costs less.
The same is true between firms and products — if MacDonalds gets more expensive because it has a lot of workers whose wages have been pushed up, that may mean people buy more TV dinners and fewer Big Macs.
What you observe at any instant is the solution to an elaborate optimization problem. It's natural to assume that if one of the factors changes, everything else stays the same, but that isn't what happens.
To add to Dr. Friedman: regardless of whether Walmart can replace a worker with a machine, they can and will fire a worker if they can no longer employ that worker profitably. If you hire someone for $11 an hour and get labor out of them that is worth $14 dollars to you then that's great: if you suddenly have to pay them $14+ dollars an hour then you're just losing money on the transaction. And who goes through all the trouble of hiring someone to lose money?
I think what you mean is that Walmart cannot operate as large a business (in terms of stores, amount of goods sold, etc) if they fire half their workers. Which is true: that just means they'll have to scale back if they can't employ them profitably.
Americans support M4A consistently at about 60% or above. It is no longer a partisan issue, if it ever was. It's the Insurance industry lobbyists against the American people. The congresspeople of both parties simply do as their told by the lobbyists to thwart the will of the American people. From Obama onward DNC pics promised it in some form then reneged once in office.
This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost. Trying to make a version of it that penciled out (which required raising taxes and limiting coverage) sunk Warren in the democratic primary.
The polls are consistent on this -- it isn't just democrats, it's everyone. The poor aren't concerned about having to pay more in taxes, and plenty of studies show how much cheaper single payer is than the mess we have now.
> This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost.
Which is ironic, because the US already spends more per capita on health care than any other country. Arguably, having a single payer conveys more bargaining power to negotiate lower bulk pricing, so Americans would probably end up spending much less overall under M4A.
So there's a case to be made that it could help (I do support some form of M4A overall), but I doubt it would bring American costs anywhere close to in line with other countries' - there are a lot of other reasons US healthcare is expensive. Some of those are general cost-disease reasons (which implies we shouldn't expect M4A to significantly lower prices), but others might be due to the issue where the US government has massive spending for worse results compared to other rich countries (see e.g. transit, infrastructure, education), which implies that socializing healthcare could potentially make it more expensive overall (because the US government is bad at cost control). The Sanders plan specifically seems to go that way - it differed from other government-provided healthcare plans in that it basically planned to cover everything for everyone (for comparison, the NHS only covers things that fall below their Pound/QALY threshold).
I'm Canadian, so I'm well aware that socialized medicine typically doesn't and shouldn't cover literally everything, but from my understanding, Medicare already doesn't cover everything, so M4A wouldn't either. I think Americans would be happy with M4A that doesn't extend coverage any further, with the option to supplement insurance with a private insurer.
I think one of the reasons the US government is bad at cost control is because they try to implement half-assed pseudo-market "solutions" in an effort to appease numerous special interests rather and give the illusion of choice, rather than simply and directly implementing what makes sense (too much money in politics).
So they could do a simple but bad M4A where all of the existing insurance companies continue operating as-is, and they just bill the government for standard coverage. That would be horrendous and I agree, it probably wouldn't cut costs, because the unnecessary bureaucracy is still there and the pricing is not standardized.
Doing it right means bargaining with the hospitals to establish standardized pricing for what's covered (all emergency care should be covered), and creating an independent agency to pay the bills issued by hospitals.
I can't imagine this wouldn't cut costs, because it eliminates all of the bureaucratic and administrative red tape, hospitals can no longer just make up a bill for whatever they think you'll be able to pay to make up for shortfalls due to non-payers and no need for collection agencies, and negotiated bulk rates would be cheaper.
But I share your skepticism that the any administration for the past 20 years, including the current one, would actually be effective at achieving such an outcome.
Democratic donors are left of Democratic voters on economic issues too.
The idea that political elites could or would put down otherwise popular ideas because they would lose out on money falls apart as soon as you notice that politics doesn't pay very well. Almost everyone in politics could make more money doing something else. Senators don't rent out dilapidated townhouses in DC to share because they're in it for the money - it's because actually care about some issues, institutions, or have an egomaniacal need for the validation that comes with winning elections and having titles next to their names.
But it's almost never about the money. If money rules politics, immigration policy would look much better than it actually does.
Also, is this Democratic donors in total (which would include small donors- including the enthusiastic Berniecrat donors) or is it Democratic donors *weighted by size of contribution*? When people talk about donors in this context, they surely mean people who make donations, at minimum, in the tens of thousands- really at least the hundreds of thousands.
The problem is- unless I'm misreading- it doesn't seem to be weighted by contribution size. When people talk about the donor class in this context they're really talking about the small portion of the donor class whose contributions are so individually significant as to give them a palpable degree of power as an individual or corporation over politicians.
This feels like cheating, but it's a strong data point: Sanders vastly outraised Biden in the primary running to his economic left. Sanders is an overwhelming economically-oriented candidate, and pretty close to Biden on social issues.
Biden nearly went broke in the primary, and none of the economic moderates came close to Sanders in fundraising - in number or total raised.
I think when people talk about donors in this context, they're primarily talking about big players who make very large donations with specific policy strings attached- or at least on a money for access basis. Small donors are a wrinkle in this narrative, but they're relatively new, and so their effects have been modest so far, plus they'll never have the leverage of the big donors, because their money is spread out between far more heads, making it harder to bargain.
But the even more decisive argument is that Bernie lost. For that reason, his small donors are effectively cut out of influence.
So I think it's sensible to talk about a "donor class" re: the dems that doesn't include Bernie's small donors.
Doesn't this seem like a just-so story? If Bernie won, it would have proven how important money is. But since he lost, it just proves that only some kinds of money matter. Are there any possible observations that would cause you to update in the direction of money not being very important?
I don't think it's at all clear that donor money is important- I'm very open to the possibility that it's other factors that discipline politicians. Personally I'm probably 50/50 on it. I just think that if we're going to grapple with the idea that it is important, that hypothesis is usually focused on a very specific sort of donor- the kind of donor that has conversations with politicians in smoke filled rooms.
When people talk about "donors", they often blur the lines between whether they are talking about the small number of megadonors that fund the SuperPACs, or the large number of small-dollar donors that fund the parties. I'm not sure that one of those groups gives more money in total.
Also, there's a specific set of issues that Democratic megadonors are right of partisan activists on, but on most issues they are still left of the median Democratic voter (but not left of the median Democratic small donor).
The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly.
The "Neutral vs. Conservative" post was more about the dynamic, and how the lack of neutrality of the mainstream institution plays into things. Klein's argument (I imagine) is more about the fact that this pattern exists. (Klein maybe also puts more of the responsibility on the rightward offshoots rather than the left-neutral institutions which inspire them, but that seems like a secondary question).
"The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly."
Not sure how true that is anymore in present year. Fox started the open tribalization of media outlets, sure, but when "neutral" outlets run lines like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" amid a backdrop of burning buildings and "antifa movement seeks peace through violence", we're pretty squarely in the realm of reality-distorting partisanship, not just neutrality with some preference for one political camp.
It's not a huge issue with the article, but the impression I got on the first read through was that at the start of part 3 you were only linking Ezra Klein's article as an offhand reference, as you often do. So I did not expect the next paragraph to be outlining what Klein said in that article instead of his book stance, which you had been almost solely quoting him on up to that point. It took me until most of the way through the paragraph to realize my misreading, thinking at first that you were going to detail Klein's argument for something to the effect of "Polarization causes problems but the alternative is so much worse."
I like Ezra Klein, but this sounds a bit like "The problem is that the outgroup is too polarized."
I guess there's no such thing as a completely objective and neutral analysis of this stuff though, so I'll probably still read and enjoy the book, and just price in the fact that he's a Democrat to my own biased interpretation of it.
That is pretty close to what he's saying, modulo s/too polarized/responsible for the current polarization, and fwiw I think he's more right than wrong. I think it's dangerous to use pattern-matching to dismiss "the problem is that my outgroup is acting badly" without consist the object-level issue - many conflicts are not six of one and half a dozen of the other.
"One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be. "
If anything, I think causality might flow the other way, if there's any relationship at all. IIRC, Fox is by far the newest of the bunch; all the others have been around for many decades, and Fox filled in a gap starting in the 90s by being the only one that wasn't extremely liberal. (Perhaps part of the polarization story should include why all the major news networks were liberal by that point in time! Were they always that way? Did they follow Congress, but precede the public? Has media trust decreased over time? My impression is yes, but I don't know, but it might be relevant.) I think the most likely explanation is really "there aren't enough conservatives who want to go into journalism to support more major networks."
(If you're interested in questions of media bias, I recommend the book Left Turn by Time Groseclose).
But also, I would want to see data indicating Republicans actually are less ideologically diverse before accepting that there is anything to explain. I don't trust Klein's impression, since Republicans are his outgroup, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity exists. Speaking of, you discussed party identity, but perceptions about the other party might be more important than the reality: http://gsood.com/research/papers/partisanComposition.pdf
That paper suggests perhaps the easiest intervention for decreasing polarization, namely literally just tell the truth about both parties: "When provided information about the out-party’s actual composition, partisans come to see its supporters as less extreme and feel less socially distant from them."
Moreover, if journalistic bias contributed to popular polarization, could academic bias have done the same? Academia is probably even more liberal than journalism (e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264003803_Political_Diversity_Will_Improve_Social_Psychological_Science) and it looks largely like liberals and leftists pushing conservatives out rather than conservatives choosing to leave. Much is made of the "decline of trust in expertise" but if major institutions are increasingly biased, isn't distrust a logical reaction?
On the question of ideological diversity within the parties ... . Throughout my lifetime, libertarians have tended to identify as Republican, although less so recently. Insofar as the Republican party had an ideology, it was fusionist, a hybrid of libertarian support for laissez-faire and conservative support for traditional values. I'm not sure the post-Civil Rights Act Democratic party contained as sharp a split.
Perhaps the polarization was mostly kicked off by the Democrats finally stepping on a couple of middle Americas sacred cows and middle America deciding to dig in. Specifically in regards to Christian moral values being the guiding factor in our cultural/political norms and American patriotism/nationalism/exceptionalism no longer being a widely accepted truth. That split seems to more or less have solidified around 2005 with the Iraq war and lgbt issues being a couple of the main splitting points.
I'm honestly surprised that you missed two related, enormous, obvious-in-retrospect things:
1. Polarization among people tracks with the development of a right wing ecosystem, starting with talk radio in the 90s, then Fox, up through today. This ecosystem, in particular Fox, were explicitly built to cultivate a monolithic partisan voting block. It worked and continues to work. The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
2. The GOP didn't get more *ideologically* extreme, but more *institutionally* extreme - or rather, anti-institutionally. The GOP of 20 years ago would have balked at sending out checks, but Trump backed it. Third is because the GOP is ideologically rudderless, and not really more conservative than it used to be. The old GOP also wouldn't have encouraged an angry mob to attack the capitol by perpetuating bald-faced lies about election fraud. This is the dimension on which the GOP has gotten much more extreme - dangerously so, as Klein correctly points out.
The institutional degradation under Trump was genuinely new and concerning, along a dimension completely divorced from liberalism/conservatism. If that's the only lens you look at things through, you're missing most of the story.
How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Also, what are your thoughts on my claim that polarization was mostly driven by Democrats going further left while Republicans stayed the same? And if it's true, what would that look like in the absence of FOX News? The Democrats go just as far left as they did, but the Republicans come with them and so maintain a lack of polarization? Or would the absence of FOX somehow have prevented the Democrats from going left?
(pasting to reply to the still-existing version of this comment)
You're still thinking about this in ideological terms. I don't know what happens to the party platforms in that alternate universe, but I'm fairly confident that the disagreements focus more on policy and less on the fundamental nature of reality, and consequently don't result in a level of reality-disconnect that leads to a large crowd taking control of the Capitol in an attempted coup because they think the election was stolen.
Guess: Median voter theorem suggests that the absence of a GOP monoculture means there are more conservative voices in mainstream media that are incentivized to appeal to a broad audience instead of a radicalizing subculture that's tuned out mainstream sources, while mainstream sources are still incentivized to appeal to conservatives as much as they can. So that would tend to suggest that at least some conservative ideas would fare better than they have and ideas on the left would get more (sane) pushback than they have in the world where the GOP exists in a parallel media reality.
Do you mean to suggest that this amplification is taking an under-appreciated fact and bringing it to light, or taking an appropriately-appreciated fact and making it seem bigger than it is?
Not the OP, but I'm pretty skeptical of it being the Democrats moving left that generated polarization. There are two things that might be measures of how polarized a group is:
* the physical party platforms, which mostly doesn't matter
* how much your people hate the other people, which matters a lot
What Fox and talk-radio made widespread was the fomenting of targeted hatred at Democrats, rather than any particular voting bloc. In an era of bipartisan news, people still hated people, but hatred was more based around stereotypes, or local issues, or race or ethnicity. Now you just hear about all the awful actions of either "libtards" or "trumpies" and that's that.
You haven't dealt with the Right's attack on empiricism. Or the market forces there. It's the line from hpmor about telling one lie and the truth ever after being your enemy.
Take something like global warming. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive. Two parties should have tracked eachother on this. There was some policy dispute... but the Republican party mostly went to the "global warming is plot by grant hungry scientists and evil globalists in support of agenda 21). That's not.... "The right stayed in the same place". Nor does it contend with how right wing media served the Republican donor class.
Walter Cronkite didn't have Phillip Morris on to promote cigarette use... Therefore he's a raging liberal.
The directionality goes the other way.
"Tune in to hannity where we interview a scientist who says that he was told to publish climate research because he was told that it would make Christians cry."
This is cherry picking. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive that different gender outcomes are due to a strong gendered difference in interests.
Yet even saying that among leftists is going to get you branded as a hateful person.
>How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Well, for starters, there is the fact that one of them happened before the other: Fox News started in 1996, and you've argued the polarization of regular people started in the early 2000s.
> How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
I don't have a test but perhaps a mechanism.
You already told the story of how local news (& politics) was subsumed into local news (and politics). When Kansas had their own newspapers & TV stations, they were able to tailor their stories to local populations and could be as conservative as they needed to be. As those local media outlet disappeared (because of the internet & cable TV), there was a need for a national, conservative media outlet and Fox filled it.
Someone else up-thread addressed the point that the culture all over the western world has been moving left on (e.g.) SSM, healthcare and a host of other cultural issues for decades. Perhaps we should be measuring the movement of progressives and conservatives relative to that current rather than to where they each were 50 years ago. The cultural river has flowed since then.
>The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. If you disagree w/ the American right on 90% and agree on 10%, they will invite you to come learn more.
That common observation predicts that Biden wouldn't have had a chance in the primary and Sinema and Manchin shouldn't exist. It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. The common observation definitely implies that the most popular and widely respected leader of the blue tribe wouldn't go on record telling people to cut out the woke scolding, but Obama did just that.
This "common observation" is wrong because it extrapolates from the most obnoxious people on twitter, which is not real life. Everyone's takes will improve when they recognize that the social dynamics of Twitter, while real and important, only describe a small part of the world.
You're mostly answering a different question here. It's perfectly coherent to say that the American left will ostracize you for dissent, *and* that dissent wins when we use a secret ballot. As for Obama, he's among a very small number of people who've been able to get away with saying stuff like this, and they've also been going for his blood recently.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter" seem to be having a substantial influence on Biden's admin: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression-fc4 Twitter is the social media that comes closest to being our "public square", where politicians, academics, company founders etc. spend unhealthy amounts of their free time posting under their real name. It is very much not the case that "what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter", and a quick look at recent US history confirms that.
There's also the question of how stable this situation will be. Have you seen any of Christopher F. Rufo's reporting on critical theory trainings in elementary schools and places of employment? It could be that the "dissent wins at the ballot box" thing is mostly a function of an older generation that was raised on different values. This stuff was previously dismissed as "just crazy college students", but those college students are graduating and exerting major influence on their workplaces etc. What do you think the endgame looks like? Overall your objection seems a bit like saying "global warming isn't a problem because the Earth hasn't warmed up very much yet".
Odd to say the right isn't keen on punishing people who agree on 90% of issues, since literally in the last week they've been voting on whether to expel one of their congressional leadership who agrees on everything except the question of if Trump should be impeached. And were threatening to kill the literal vice president, of their party, because he didn't agree the election was stolen.
It sounds like you're saying that in your personal experience you enjoy hanging out with Republicans more than Democrats.
What does it mean to be "ostracized" from the American left?
Like they're not inviting you to dinner parties or something? Or they post mean twitter comments at you?
The current governing Democrats includes a pretty wide range of viewpoints, from maybe AOC on the left to the more centrist representatives from swing states. and they're working together i guess without ostracizing each other.
If you mean in terms of the workplace or something, then yes i think both the left and right often make work decisions informed by politics, religion, and other personal beliefs. Like firing someone who refuses to use a colleagues' preferred pronouns on the left, or a church group refusing to hire Lesbian or even just female preachers on the right.
You didn't mention it in this review, but does Klein discuss the transition from delegates picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms to open-primary systems where every step is determined by the popular vote? To my eye, one of the primary drivers of polarization has been politicians becoming more afraid of primary elections than general elections.
I actually have no idea how this happens in other countries. How do the UK/Commonwealth parliamentary systems decide who stands in West Eastershire or whatever?
In New Zealand, the majority of politicians get there through the party list, which means that they personally did not receive the votes as a candidate but their party did, and they are chosen by the party to fill the seat. I don't think there is a particular way parties have to construct that list, in practice most parties do it differently, but parties have very low membership in New Zealand so it's a lot more akin to the closed door agreements than a public contest.
The UK Labour party famously had a change in leadership selection procedures in 2014, from unions and parliament having 2/3 of the vote to having none of the vote, which promptly led to Jeremy Corbyn being selected leader:
But it's not clear that the new system caused anything, because Corbyn won by so many votes that he would have won under the old system, or at least come close, depending on assumptions about new voters. You might suppose that voters didn't know that and were afraid of "throwing away their votes," but the previous system was a ranked choice system with little cost of expressive voting for the token left-wing candidate. Something weird happened and I think many people are too quick to draw a lesson from it.
(Incidentally, you could say that unions lost their special votes, but you could also say that they were promoted from half votes to full.)
In the UK, the various parties have very different systems for choosing their leaders.
In the Labour Party, the electorate includes all members of the party or of affiliated unions. Around half a million votes were cast in last year's leadership election. The Lib Dems have a similar system.
By contrast, Conservative MPs hold most of the power. Conservative party leaders are chosen by multiple elimination rounds by MPs only until there are only two candidates remaining. All party members vote in the final round but, even then, the conservative party is much small and only 140,000 voted in the last leadership election.
Crucially, the four biggest parties in England require that their leader be a member of Parliament so you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Leader of your party the way that Trump and Sanders did.
The way that parties choose local candidates has changed a lot in recent years. It used to be that Conservative candidates for parliament were chosen by local conservative parties but the rules were changed to require that candidates be selected from a central approved list.
Labour had this rule until recently but now gives local parties more autonomy.
Again, you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Labour candidate for East Westchester.
Parties have internal selection procedures, which aren't entirely stable. In the UK the Conservatives mostly delegate to local chapters.
I think the primary system used in the USA is probably better. The less democratic system used in the UK creates a number of problems.
One is that it creates a lot of groupthink. As I've written elsewhere on this thread, Brexit was not actually about party-political left/right polarisation, even though it's often depicted in foreign media as somehow a part of a general rightward trend. To the extent it was about polarisation at all it was a polarisation between an out of touch groupthink-dominated political class and the general public. Open primaries allow for outsiders to come in and shake up the political consensus, as happened with both Bernie and Trump. In the UK the closest equivalents were Corbyn (only able to become Labour leader due to Labour adopting an equivalent of open primaries), and Nigel Farage, who had to re-make his own political party to get things done.
A less obvious problem is that when positions are dished out via internal mechanisms, on the left the result has become that men are banned. Biden is no exception - Labour and the Lib Dems use explicitly misandrist policies that ban men from standing in some constituencies.
I'd go as far as saying that the only places in modern politics where men can get and hold powerful positions are where the selection process is competitive and democratic. The leaders of political parties are usually selected this way, but other positions aren't, and this leads to leftist institutions filling up with a lot of extremely weak people. This is to the detriment of everyone.
The USA has this problem right now with Kamala Harris but the EU has the same thing, where von der Leyen was picked via opaque means, but supposedly one of the criteria was that the next head of the Commission had to be a woman. She then insisted (in violation of the treaties) that half the commissioners selected by the member states had to be women. Just months into the job she's being called on to resign due to rank incompetence and dishonesty, but she won't, because there are no primaries or even elections at all for the role of Commission president. In the UK Labour has a variant of the same problem amongst their front bench where people like Diane Abbot were made shadow ministers for race/gender reasons despite being unable to achieve the most basic functions of opposition leadership, like remembering what your policies are. One of Labour's problems is that it's still being regularly undermined by its very weak group of MPs.
Probably both. Abbott is a famous example because of her mind-blowing interview with Nick Ferrari, but even under Starmer they have a lot of remarkably weak female MPs who struggle with the basics. I don't mean this in a "I disagree with their politics" way but in a "they need to learn MPing" kind of way.
Just a few random incidents that pop to mind: the current Shadow Chancellor showed in an interview she has no idea what the current support arrangements for businesses are, she has no idea how much money her party would spend on a third lockdown if they were in charge, and even her parties own voters think she'd make a worse chancellor than the current one. Left wing voters prefer a right wing chancellor to their own! Another MP gave a speech where she produced a list of crony contracts supposedly awarded to Tory donors and allies, except one of them was for ventilators from a firm that has actually donated to Labour but never to the Tories. So she was attacking a medical device company and her own donors in public, without even realising it. Another one turned up to a Zoom call drunk and then couldn't remember the name of her party's Scottish candidates (her answer: "you're not recording this, are you?"). Another was recorded on Zoom praising a pamphlet and when later asked why she supported those ideas, asserted she never did and it was all absolute rubbish, apparently either forgetting her previous position or not realising it'd been recorded.
This sort of thing isn't even rare, it's a regular occurrence.
Truly competitive processes in a healthy institution would eliminate most of this.
In the UK although the candidates are chosen by the parties, The Party as an organization is much more powerful. The US is fairly unusual among developed countries in how candidates raise a huge amount of personal funding and run on personal brands.
Parties as institutions have more incentive to be moderate than individual candidates, because they need to win with the general electorate. So the party being more powerful means you tend to get more moderate policies, and the successful politicans are mostly the ones who buy into them.
Other European countries are broadly similar in that respect
The U.S. was fairly polarized pre-1920s, which was definitely still the smoke-filled rooms era. Presidential candidates George McGovern and Jimmy Carter weren't in a polarized era, but Mitt Romney was.
McGovern and Carter were the two candidates that took advantage of the new party primary system, and are often seen as major left outliers from the party at the time, because of their knowledge of how to run under the new system.
Klein does discuss it (unfortunately my copy of his book is at the office so I can’t cite chapter and verse). But it is clear that he thinks the old smoke-filled rooms with party stalwarts picking candidates is better than the primary system. Partly this is because the only voters who turn out for primaries are hyperpartisans, a fact which leads them to vote for more extreme candidates.
with some GOP commentators who claimed that [around t=23 min] a) From 1988 onwards, the winner of almost every Republican primary has been someone who assembled a coalition from the center and left of the party, b) Trump was most supported in the 2016 primaries by voters who described themselves as "somewhat conservative" or "moderate." I don't know what to make of this - on the one hand it sounds like primaries are having a moderating influence, but on the other if "moderating" means Trump gets elected than that's not very reassuring...
I can't put much credence in a paper published in 2010, because 2010 was the start of the big Tea Party wave in which an unprecedented *three* incumbent Republican Senators and dozens of representatives were knocked out in the primaries, and culminating in 2014 when they took down the party's number two House leader and heir apparent to Boehner. This in turn cemented a shift among the GOP from Clinton-Gingrich deal-cutting to white-knuckle obstructionism because any compromise was seen as selling out. Perhaps it's open primaries combined with some other factor that caused them to be an actual threat as opposed to incumbents mostly cruising until then.
A bunch of people are replying to my comment as though it is about Trump and responding with observations about Presidential primaries, but it's not. Trump's "radicalism" was largely a matter of affect and disregard for process. He ended up signing pretty much every bill Congress put in front of him and only really vetoed restrictions on Gulf arms sales. The real difference has been seen in Congress.
hi everyone. i'm a "it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium" guy. so i just wanted to chime in to say: i think it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium.
it's a good question. i sort of implied the "it" here to be "polarization", but i guess i'm also including "dysfunction due to polarization". if we really have the same level of "affective polarization" now as sweden or norway have had for a long time, why does it seem like their governments work way better? i think "because proportional systems result in centrist reform rather than pendulum swings" is pretty plausible.
but i could also make up a bunch of ad hoc forces that previously kept polarization in check that are now gone, like, the US used to have lots of powerful international enemies and now it doesn't. after all, one of the few things democrats and republicans can agree on now is that china is bad.
The Dixiecrat thing still seems like a reasonable hypothesis: the system we have always trends towards polarization, and there was a big weird thing happening that fought that trend for a few decades.
This exactly. The issue seems to me, and it's surreal that no one else mentioned this, the US only allows two parties to exist. Negative partisanship only works when they're are exactly two options. On the graph showing international polarization trends, consider that most other countries have more political parties -- I know that Germany and NZ with MMP certainly do, and the UK does as well.
(This doesn't explain any of the historical change in the US, so please take it as more prescriptive than descriptive).
because if you go with prop rep, you get too many parties, worse polarization, and extremists that have their own parties, out of control from the center. Two parties at least should tend to keep the extremists under control
That's only if you use proportional representation. Use range voting or approval voting, which eliminate spoilers, and you get multiple parties without it. Also, the most moderate candidate tends to win in those systems.
idk, should i really believe this? in the US, the republicans have obviously done a terrible job of keeping extremists under control. when i think of "countries that spun out of control because of proportional representation", where should i be thinking of if not all the stable european countries using it right now?
Several European countries now have 10-25% of their elected representatives from nationalist parties (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006). This is enough to produce significant influence when they enter into a 51% coalition government. Also, Brexit. From the other side, most of Europe was much quicker to adopt socialism during the Cold War.
I'm not sure how Brexit is relevant? It was passed by popular referendum in a country without proportional representation.
Part of the benefit of a multi-party system is that you aren't forced into a coalition on one side or the other of the spectrum. AfD may have 13% of the vote in Germany, but the center-right CDU forms a coalition with the center-left SPD instead. Similarly, the conservative government of Austria is currently in coalition with the Greens, keeping the nationalist FPO out of power.
I tried to check on a bunch of other countries listed in that link, and got sucked down a rabbit hole of trying to understand idiosyncrasies on other country's political spectrums. Suffice it to say, sometimes the center-right forms a coalition with the far-right, sometimes they don't.
This seems superior to me to what happened in the US, where a populist very few intuitional Republicans supported got the nomination and won, becoming the leader of a majority party. It's hard to imagine this happening if a Trump-populist party had to compete with / form a coalition with a christian democrat party.
The UK uses proportional representation. The vote may have been a referendum, but the voting system obviously affects the country's politics.
The problem with PR is that it is often the case that the two centrist parties together don't break 50%, causing all possible coalitions to include an extremist party on one side or the other. You can easily get dangerous results like 22% far right, 29% center right, 20% center left, 29% far left. Then the center right has to choose between far right and far left, and has the obvious disincentive to choose the far left which allows the far right to exercise outsized influence.
Whereas Trump was a brash, arrogant liar who was pretty objectionable as a human being but from a policy perspective did a lot of largely boring mainstream Republican things like enforce existing immigration laws and try to promote domestic industry. There was plenty of room for reasoned disagreement but despite the hyperbole it was hardly concentration camps and Jim Crow.
Moreover, the point isn't that the US status quo is ideal but rather that we should use range voting or approval voting instead of PR. I don't think Trump wins an election with range voting.
Duverger's law is false. It's a theoretical argument, but the conclusion is only true in the USA. Lots of countries have FPTP and all the rest have third parties (non-geographic). I don't know how they manage it.
I'm not American, but the poetical story I always told myself is that Americans are fighting themselves after they lost the things they fought for together. To me, it seems that over the past 50 years Americans cared about lots of cool things like spreading democracy and capitalism, and now they only care about dealing with local problems. And who causes all of the local problems? The other party.
And this isn't a chicken and egg thing. Everyone seems to say Americans care about local issues now because of Polarization. I think it is very clearly the opposite, Americans are polarized because they don't clearly perceive any external threats to themselves (which bdw, America looks like it has a ton of external threats it should be concerning itself with).
I think both parties are worried about what Russia and China are doing, but we're filtering that concern through partisanship: The other party are shills for a hostile foreign power!
There's been an interesting mitosis effect where the US and USSR were allies against Nazi Germany but then turned on each other during the Cold War. Dems and GOP were allies against the USSR but turned on each other after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This is my working hypothesis as well. The end of the Cold War removed the main constraint that was suppressing polarization. The specific manner in and rate at which it reemerged were not easy to predict, but I'd claim that its reemergence was predictable.
I am cautiously optimistic that, if China does not change in ways that make it a worthy successor to the US on the international stage, it will unite enough Americans against it.
I think you're missing a crucial point with the "Republicans moving further right vs Democrats moving further left" issue, which is the social versus economic split. I don't have the fancy data to support this, but if you look at social issues (such as gay marriage or race equality), I don't think many people would say that Democrats haven't moved further left. However, if you look at issues like reducing poverty, increasing labor laws, etc, you'll see a very different view. In the into the 1970s, both parties often supported increasing social security (Truman created Social Security), labor rights (Nixon introduced OSHA), nationalized healthcare (Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid), the minimum wage, and more. George H.W. Bush signed a tax hike while every Republican president since has been in favor of tax cuts. Right now, Democrats support continuing those changes while Republicans generally prefer to go back on those changes.
To clarify a bit, I think it's about the framing of an "issue." If the issue is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats generally agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no." If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no."
Republicans have stayed at the same place, while Democrats have stayed at the same velocity.
>I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People. Here he makes all of the impassioned and convincing arguments he avoided in his book
Regarding how Ezra has different styles in the book and elsewhere, he said in a podcast 'I only put things in the book that I think I could prove...this is my first book and I wanted it to be very grounded. So there are things that I think are true but cannot really prove it, so they did not go in the book'. It is at 19:40 in episode 'Your Questions Answered'. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-questions-answered/id1081584611?i=1000479525981
There is a lengthy, deeply grounded, and deadly serious argument that the Republican party has actually gone totally off the rails. It's a shame to see it mostly dodged here. But I point you to the events of January 6th as a good starting point, and you can work your way backwards. Or start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Even_Worse_Than_It_Looks
That's a terrible book. Attempts by both parties to increase their power in Congress are not unique to the GOP. It is, however, true that Republicans are more ambitious on solidifying their hold on power via gerrymandering.
If you understand how gerrymandering works, it's obvious that Democrats have a natural "packing" effect by having very high % of populations in cities, while Republicans are more spread out. Unless you gerrymander extensively to have city cores "spoke out" to the neighboring countryside, the 70+% Democrat cities are going to elect fewer representatives per total population.
Robert Putnam taught us that social capital (i.e. the network of relationships among people, both formal and informal) has been dropping in the United States for 75 years across all incomes, education levels, and demographics. This has led to decreases in social trust, cooperation norms, and a sense of shared identity. It is not hard to believe that this alienation of the American people from each other is leading to higher degrees of polarization. The specifics that Klein talks about certainly are part of the question, but it all sits in a much broader context.
I want to chime in on the idea of polarisation being some kind of lynchpin of problems, that if we fix everything would become a lot easier. I live in New Zealand, which is less polarised than the USA (you can see that in the graphs above). But despite this, our government (whether red or blue) has been strikingly unable to do anything to solve a number of the big problems the country faces. NZ has the worst housing costs in the developed world, one of the lowest productivities in the developed world and has so far done almost nothing to reduce our carbon emissions despite having a substantial proportion of our capital and people deployed in areas threatened by flooding and sea level rise. We're going in backwards in education levels, too. This seems inconsistent with the idea that if polarisation were reduced, the USA would find a way to solve its problems (but then again, maybe aside from the polarisation the USA otherwise has very good institutions? I'm not sure).
I'm surprised to hear that. NZ has a reputation in the US as a very well-governed country, though I can't remember how much of that comes from the coronavirus response.
People are often surprised about areas where New Zealand isn't doing well. For whatever reason, our reputation continues to punch above our weight. I'll absolutely grant that our coronavirus response was very good. Most politically inclined people I know here sort of agree that we've been very good at handling sudden emergencies, but relatively poor at dealing with long, chronic problems.
In some ways we have the opposite problem to the USA in that we have a large group of swing voters that genuinely do switch from one major party to the other election to election, and that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are. This has made it difficult to make the kind of changes that would reduce rent and housing costs, reduce carbon emissions etc.
New Zealand's COVID response succeeded through good luck far more than good management. Case in point, the latest outbreak in Australia is due to the fact that they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice. Had we had a higher population and been less isolated we would have been in the same boat as everywhere else.
Australia has had a very good pandemic by the standards of almost everywhere but NZ, and the latest quarantine-hotel outbreak currently consists of 5 people plus the family of 3 who seem to have been the source. So 'no better than Australia', even if true (which it doesn't seem to be; NZ showed more willingness to lock down hard and early, which clearly paid off) wouldn't be all that bad.
> they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice.
That quote is about inadequate testing of staff, not of quarantinees. I believe the latter are tested twice in most parts of Australia; the current debate is over whether to follow the lead of one state which recently added a test on day 16, i.e. two days after release.
> that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are.
I see a lot of people becoming more conservative due to the dysfunction of government. For example, a lot of Dutch people are in favor of green energy, but don't want wood burning plants that are very dirty and that don't achieve a reduction of greenhouse emissions in the medium term, even though the treaties and such say that we need to achieve a reduction fairly soon.
The government also claims that moving to electricity is 'green,' regardless of how that electricity is produced, which is obviously wrong.
The article actually claims the opposite. It claims that when most electricity comes from coal, like in Poland, EVs are more polluting. It argues that EVs are cleaner when a high enough percentage of the electricity comes from renewables.
However, the article makes a very common error.
It assumes that the emissions caused by EVs can be calculated by looking at the average carbon emission of creating electricity. However, you actually have to look at the emissions caused by the production of the additional electricity which is used by moving to EVs.
There is widespread agreement by experts/scientists that we cannot reasonably scale wind and solar beyond a certain point. In the absence of a electricity storage breakthrough (or such), we can probably only increase the percentage of no/low-emission electricity by building more nuclear plants, but the West, the trend seems to be to get rid of existing nuclear plants, rather than build new ones (if we can even still do that, with the current level of regulations).
So there is a pretty good chance that the extra electricity used by EVs, comes from coal plants. For example, right now in Germany, coal plant capacity is kept in reserve to match supply to demand. Every extra EV that goes on the road in Germany, will cause more electricity to be generated with coal plants.
Not something I've seen in NZ, mostly people here are becoming more radical due to worsening personal situations, but of course that could just be my bubble. I didn't notice it when I lived in NL either, but I wasn't very plugged into the politics there at all!
I don't understand the idea that New Zealand's COVID response is good. It looks catastrophic to me. The underlying logic appears to be "wait for a vaccine, vaccinate everyone, then we can open up again". But it was well publicised for all of 2020 that vaccination is a very risky strategy because nobody ever made a successful coronavirus vaccine. The problem is not that you can't do it but it mutates so quickly that vaccines are quickly rendered irrelevant. That now seems to be happening, with the UK - supposedly doing so well in this strategy - claiming that some new variant beats the current vaccine. So wrecking this strategy appears to have taken evolution all of, what, 8 weeks? Additionally it's still unclear if they're actually vaccines at all or more like therapies (i.e. you can still get sick and transmit, you just don't get sick as badly).
Assuming vaccines go the same way as they classically have done and can't stop the virus from spreading, New Zealand's strategy of sealing the border will eventually be recognised as delusional. It's left with no way out except to eventually re-open, which will let the virus in. Hopefully by that point therapeutics and drug based treatments are sufficiently far advanced that it won't be as big a deal as it otherwise would have been but there's no evidence Ardern is preparing people for that outcome.
Most overseas coverage of New Zealand is a form of romanticism. Obviously it depends on the metrics you choose, but there aren't really grounds for holding up New Zealand as a poster child for good governance. On the contrary, our unicameral parliament allows politicians to follow extremely poor process when it suits them. In the last term of parliament, one minor party in government was effectively granted a $3b pork barrel fund.
New Zealand has some structural advantages in this area over the US. In particular, local government has much less power:
(a) Local government does not have a general power of competence, i.e., it can only regulate on any given subject if the central government has explicitly granted it the power to do so.
(b) In particular, local government does not have the power of eminent domain.
(c) The police are run by the central government, not local government.
(d) Schools are run by the central government, not local government.
My gut feeling is that it also helps to not have a separate layer of state government, but I'm not sure that would work for a big nation.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that New Zealand is badly governed.
Enjoyed the post, minor nitpick, you refer to both Bill and Hilary Clinton as Clinton in the same paragraph, and it's a little confusing.
Thoughts.
I think liberal, conservative, and polarized are terms that are all used in unclear ways here. For example the graph linked to in the twitter post reads to me as Democrats have become more Democraty than Republicans have become Republicany. The issues in the graph, for the most part, don't have an accepted coherent philosophy unifying them, other than Republicans take one side of the issue, and Democrats take the other. Reading the graph this way fits with the Democratic narrative that most Americans agree with the Democratic position on most issues:
So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular. In this respect the Republican party is more extreme because it differs more from the median American position.
The other graphs also make me wonder. Does it make sense to measure historic liberal and conservative values of various parties, if the hot issues of the time were different, or the opposite positions on said issues were considered progressive? As an example I challenge you to consistently map US foreign policy to liberal or conservative over US history.
Along a similar set of lines I wonder what is being measured by the polarization over history graphs. Is it measuring difference in opinion or willingness to cooperate? Difference in opinion probably reduces the likely hood of cooperation, but it is not sufficient. Both parties may want to pass infrastructure reform, but are unwilling to make minor concessions lest their opponents get a policy win. Regardless of how polarization is measured, I think it's fair to say that we are not at a polarization high point considering we have not had any duels or canings on congress recently.
I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization since this is a common talking point in Vox among other places.
People point out gerrymandering as a cause of polarization because it negates the need for a representative to appeal to the median voter. In this respect you could consider the senate gerrymandered as well because Republicans hold a fundamental advantage in the senate map as well.
"In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists."
I don't really understand what this means. What does extreme mean? I think you have to define along the lines of the overton window, in which case I would say that Democrats and republicans are roughly symmetrical in how extreme they are, but Republicans have a larger portion of extremists. In other words an extremists is just someone who hasn't gone mainstream yet.
"Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump."
If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats. Even if you are talking about democrats, I don't see how the electoral college is the correct metric in the context of this conversation.
"If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats."
Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is. Medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases are very popular, while handing out drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants and affirmative action are not.
I should note that I don't know that I buy the democratic narrative. I haven't looked into it enough to decide, but I disagree with you that "Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is". Polling exists and is very useful for this kind of thing. Yes people can ask biased questions and it's hard for a layman to interpret what the results mean, but it's far better than elections for determining how popular a policy is. Elections carry so much more baggage such as the candidates who are running, and most voters probably don't even know all of the positions their candidates have.
> Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes. Democrat positions - or at least Biden compared to Trump - are more popular among voters.
Oh please. Trump hatred, a deranged of off-the-rails extremism if there ever was one, got Biden installed. He had no policy position other than Orange Man Bad and He's Killing Us!
Look at the presidential elections since 1990 then - Democrats won the popular vote in all of them except for 2004, and that was at the peak of Iraq and with an incumbent president.
Joe Biden won the electoral college 306 to 232. Trump won the electoral college by 304 to 227. Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes, a 4.5% differential. Trump lost the popular vote by around 3 million, a 2.2% differential. It seems to me that using the popular vote as a proxy for popularity isn't unwarranted.
The gerrymandering-polarization narrative never really made sense. The Republicans got to draw a lot of districts following the 2010 census, and supposedly their own gerrymandering made them extreme. But Republican gerrymandering means cramming Democrats into a few super-blue districts and spreading Republicans across numerous slightly-red districts. But you'd think slightly-red districts would elect moderate Republicans.
Congressmen aren't tailoring the districts so as to have a competitive election they just barely win, they want to have an competitive election they just barely win.
Certainly they build their red districts with a margin of safety to make sure they win even when elasticity goes against them. But still, concentrating the other party's voters and spreading out your own is fundamentally how gerrymandering works.
I don't know the details of real world districts, but consider a state where 60% of the population is a member of your party. If you drew every district to have 60% of the voters be members of your party, you will have gerrymandered the state to grant your party all the representatives with only 60% of the vote, without it ever being close.
"Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
Yes, except if we rewind to 1970, Clinton's positions (at least the economic ones) look moderate and Trump's... well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions, but the Republican Party would look insane and ultra-far-right. Both parties shifted to the right a lot in the 1975-2000 period, and the Democrats starting to swing back left is part of the more recent growth in polarization.
My belief remains that having political differences between parties is a good thing, though I'd distinguish between 'ideological diversity' and 'polarization', because the latter case implies having precisely two poles (/tribes), which *is* a problem but also may be decreasing a bit now (and in any case is the fault of the two-party system).
The economics goes back centuries, it's the view of trade that Adam Smith attacked and Ricardo demolished. Unfortunately, the false version (absolute advantage/favorable balance of payments) is easier to understand than the true version (comparative advantage), and makes a better fit to the political interests of many of those controlling trade policy.
> If you had some limited number of resources, and you wanted to improve (US) politics as much as possible so that the government made better decisions and better served its populace, what would you do?
Lawrence Lessig makes a compelling argument in Republic, Lost (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11814478-republic-lost) that the best way to improve US politics would be reversing Citizens United and getting money out of politics. Because both parties are in such intense competition, they spend all of their time fundraising instead of governing. If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
Voting system reform is far wiser. Implement score voting so the most popular candidate wins, rather than the candidate most popular among the plurality of the plurality. But I oppose democracy and instead support a wise government by superforecasters.
Was US politics doing just fine prior to Citizens United but suddenly got a lot worse after that? Because this polarization trend discussed above preceded that.
I was more making the point that if we could only solve one problem in politics, "money in politics" is more impactful than polarization, and might have a side-effect of decreasing polarization.
I'm saying that if Citizens United had a big impact, shouldn't we be able to see it by comparing what things were like before vs after? Some kind of trend-line test?
> If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
I agree on getting the money out of politics, but I doubt very much they'd stop trying to get voters to hate the other party. When real currency is out the window, votes are the only currency left so it will become a battle over different populist positions with all the same incentives.
Operating on the assumption that "populist" means "popular but useless or harmful", and "good policy" is "popular and helpful", I think that populist positions require advertising (aka money) that you are doing them and that they are working in order to get people to vote for you. Good policy should be self evident with a "are your circumstances better than they were four years ago?" test.
Policies that are unpopular and unhelpful (using public money to build yourself a private waterpark) or unpopular and helpful (force-feeding people vegetables) feel mostly unconnected to how much money political campaigns have to work with since the political incentives are to keep them quiet anyways.
The article about polarization data from 9 countries article doesn't seem to totally back up the idea that the internet/social media isn't to blame. Looking at their raw numbers, instead of their 2nd derivatives, Britain and Australia are roughly equal to the modern day US (which matched my understanding of their political climate), but are shown as having about an unchanging level of polarization over the past 20-30 years.
It could be that one conclusion is that the internet has nothing to do with polarization, but another potential one is that the internet raises polarization up to a certain cap, and other countries were already at that cap and have been even before the internet. Looking at the graphs, only 3 countries show a trend downwards from their current level of polarization, and they are all still (excluding Germany) currently at a level of polarization that roughly equals the US (45).
While this is a more complex explanation and thus goes against Occam's razer, it also seems really unlikely that the internet has nothing to do with polarization. After all, the Loss of geography section seems like it perfectly fits with the internet being to blame.
"That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness."
Republicans are less ideologically uniform in Congress. Probably less ideologically uniform among the general population, too. In both the Democratic and Republican parties, the primary opposition is from the right.
All evidence suggests the American party system (based on the electoral college) naturally tends toward polarization. America depolarized beginning in the 1920s largely because old debates were becoming less relevant, and the 1930s created the left-right ideological axis as the new primary difference between the parties, resulting in depolarization over the next forty years as the old pattern of polarization dissipated. In the 1970s and later, party constituencies became increasingly coherent to match the left-right ideological axis on which issues were debated. Even as late as 1976 you could see a presidential election that wasn't TOO different from that of 1876. No longer.
I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion. A big part of the changing dynamics of the 80s into the early 90s was the complete embrace of the Republican part by evangelicals, along with their re-entry into the political sphere after generations of trying to separate from society. Much of the socially cultural issues that caused deep divisions from 1980-2010 were in that area - abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, flag burning. The weird thing is that seemed to have a delayed effect up through the mid 2000's, when you people started abandoning organized religion, and the Democrats really started to be the party of the youth. This then naturally merged into the racial divisions that were exacerbated by right-wing opposition to Obama as a legitimate president.
I would have liked to see much more discussion in the book about the dimensions and correlations of religious/political polarization in the US. That could explain why we are so different from other WEIRD countries.
Evangelicals weren't especially anti-abortion early on. Catholics (who leaned Democrat at the time) were. They basically captured the intellectual heights of the conservative movement (how many Protestants are on SCOTUS?) and converted evangelicals to their cause.
You're right that evangelicals weren't that anti-abortion early, and until the 1980s they were still holding over a lot of anti-Catholic feeling. But the disappearance of Protestants from the SCOTUS didn't really get going until the late 1990s/2000s.
But the bigger issue stands, in that starting in the 1980s the parties developed a strong religious polarization. And the religious issues tended to drive some of the bitterest division. People weren't screaming about marginal federal income tax rates the way they were about abortion and gay rights. I think there is a part of this story about how certain issues that inspired the deepest division were religious, and that the religious polarization by party intensified that trend.
>> "I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion."
Yes, I also think this is a MAJOR part of the story.
I'd frame it a little differently, though: America used to be united by religion, which set a limit to how far its political divisions could go.
The cultural glue that gave Americans a sense of investment in a set of meta-level norms for resolving political disagreement was the civic religion Will Herberg in the 1950s called Catholic/Protestant/Jew. That religious mainstream has undergone a long, slow collapse, of which we're only now beginning to reap the fruit.
From some folks I've talked to, it seems like the leadership of many organized Christian denominations in the US seems to be much more Left than their followers. So it's possible that the leadership was pro-abortion, but it took a while for the signal from the congregants to get out.
It's also possible that the law-and-order impulse of people recoils against Roe v. Wade, which ultimately is a *terrible* legal opinion, even if I mostly agree with the results.
Many "Mainline" Protestant denominations have leadership that is much more to the left than their followers, but they're hollowing out, while Evangelicals (who have very conservative leadership) stay roughly the same. I don't have the best data on hand right now, but according to Pew in 2007 Mainline Protestants made up 18% of the US population while today they are only 14%, while over the same time period Evangelicals went from 26% to 25%. And in 1970 Mainline Protestants made up 30% of the population! It's been a long steady decline for Mainliner's while Evangelicals are holding out (or at least declining, much, much slower). So while the Mainline Protestant leadership is getting further to the Left, there are fewer of them overall year by year.
This is a good essay that gets to a good place and raises lots of good points, but I'm going to quibble with you on one point and then just point something out, but let's just understand I'm only quibbling on the point, not the overall piece.
OK? Cool.
Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
That's more an observation.
To quibble: I don't agree with you that the GOP is reacting to the craziness of the Dems. I agree the Dems are crazy! But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party.
That was quite crazy too. Not as crazy as now but it was crazy. And it sewed a lot of seeds for today's identity politics, particularly along the sexual faultlines.
In sum, each has brewed their own crazy and they both go way back. Each has also positioned themselves in contrast to the other, as well, though. Both things have happened. History is a mess. Anyway: Moderatism doesn't sell tickets.
And as an aside I've always had a hard time with moderatism on some issues. For example: I want to see a pretty hard ass approach to climate change. The time for moderation has passed. And even if it hasn't passed, if it turns out we go to far, we'll still come out with a nicer, cleaner, more healthy world on the other side of going hardass on it, so it's fine regardless. The utility value of going green is quite high to all even if the threat is overstated.
But I don't think it is.
This feels a little like a digression but I don't think it is. A mushy middle isn't really the answer. Restoring a consensus of nationhood and we all have more of a responsibility to that consensus than we do to political points seems more important.
To your point about an EA of politics: I've long thought crushing gerrymandering would be the best effective altruist solution here. If districts were more politically muddled and primaries were more of a contest we would see a different politics.
Gerrymandering is more important than the money. Usually people get mad when I say that but I suspect this crew won't.
>> "But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party."
Do you remember the "black helicopters"? And SNL's "Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol"? :-)
>>>Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
----
Out of curiousity, have you been to different regions of Germany and spoken to different types of people?
Half the country that is like 40+ years old, grew up in the Soviet Union, and the other half didn't. Some cities like Berlin have far-left ararchist movements that are blockading streets and burning cars when a squat is evicted, other cities are majority catholic and have huge beer festivals. The west and east had different immigrant populations that were arriving from ww2 on, like all the vietnamese in the east, and the turkish guest workers in the west.
I'm not sure why you would assume that farmers would get on perfect with city folks. Its my understanding that a lot of the far right party AFD, has a more rural base.
but yes, Germany is smaller than the US.
To be honest, I've been to about 15 states in the US (i'm Canadian with family there) and sure you're a diverse country, but but not strikingly more so somehow than other countries.
caveat: I'm just responding to your comment, I haven't read Ezra Klein's book or that article in a few months.
The thing that always strikes me about US political polarization is how clean of a rural/urban split it is, where urban areas all over are strongly Democratic and rural areas all over are strongly Republican. When did it start being this way? Do other countries see this same split?
I'm no historian, but wasn't there long migrations of black people, moving north, and out of rural areas into city centers. And then white people moving out of city centers because they didn't want to live near black people?
If that is true (and correct me if its wrong), then I guess its pretty easy to imagine that the white people that moved to suburbs and rural areas because they didn't want to mix with Blacks ended up in the Republican Party. And that conversely the city people were more progressive, also included immigrants from elsewhere and ended up in the Democrats.
But I'm curious about your take, how did the 2000 election drive a rural/urban split?
In Australia we have three parties -- to first approximation the Labor Party is for the city-dwelling poorer-than-median, the Liberal Party is for the city-dwelling richer-than-median, and the National Party is for rural areas. The Liberals and Nationals are in a permanent centre-right coalition.
As a city-dwelling rich(er-than-median) person I find it strange that I have no natural place in US politics. When I first moved to San Francisco I thought it obvious that rich city dwellers should support the right-wing party -- after all, they want to lower our taxes while the other party seems to spend their time talking about how evil we are. I never understood why my fellow rich city-dwelling friends didn't see things the same way.
"I'm not sure I fully understood Klein's explanation of exactly how this happened. After all, since identities are not 100% correlated (ie not all farmers are Protestant and not all city-dwellers are poor), you can't actually do this for the whole population at once. I think Klein would say that these correlations went from kind of random, to the ones that capture the biggest slice of the population."
Two things here:
1) People underestimate how very NOT diverse America was until recently. We were an 85%-90% white country from 1860-1960, and over 90% Christian, so those were not identities that you even could polarize around. There was some slicing and dicing of the various Christian sects (e.g. Catholics overwhelmingly supporting Democrats), but I think that's how this has shifted--the "big" identities have become much more polarized because they've become smaller.
2) Klein sort of misses something in this analysis, which is that polarization can be explained as much by the *erosion* of identity as by the *realignment* of identity. The question of the book is of course "Why are we polarized?" but as you do a good job explaining, the real question is more, "Why did we go from a system where you had conservatives and liberals supporting each party, to one in which conservatives overwhelmingly support Republicans and liberals overwhelmingly support Democrats?" But you could also pose the question as "What kept a bunch of conservative white people in the Democratic Party for so long?" The answer in the South was that the Democratic Party was completely tied up in white Southern identity. In the North it seems to be labor unions, or more broadly that they saw the Democrats as the "working man's party," that kept them in the party. I think the breakdown of the labor movement--and the class consciousness that came with it, not just the material benefits--kept a lot of conservatives in the Democratic Party.
As far as what polarized the parties, I see it as (in chronological order):
1) Civil Rights Act: As you said, this led to the decline of the Democratic Party in the South, essentially pushing conservative white Southerners closer to the GOP)
2) Reagan: He actively campaigned against moderate Republicans before becoming president and strongly pushed the idea that the Republicans should become a conservative party, basically making the conservative wing of the party ascendant
3) Iraq War
4) Obama: I don't think he tried to polarize the country, but he was basically the liberal dream candidate--black, son of an immigrant, intellectual, more dovish than Kerry, Gore, and Clinton--and the conservative nightmare. The 2010 election was basically the end of the conservative Democrat in Congress, and I don't think you can disentangle that from conservatives who had historically voted for Democrats being turned off by Obama.
I actually feel more confident about the Iraq part than the rest. The lead-up to Iraq was not very polarized, but the 2004 election seemed to polarize strongly so that if you were FOR the war, you were absolutely for Bush, and if you were against the war, you were for Kerry. Even though basically all of the pro-war Dems kept their prominent positions in the party, they all had to self-flagellate over their original support for it (and arguably, Iraq is why Obama beat Clinton in '08). That's very different from previous wars, which other than the Civil War seemed to not have a strong partisan division, even when they were unpopular. And that hard line also aligned with some regional polarization and seemed to beget a lot of the "Red State=Jesusland full of hicks trying to shove Bibles down your throat, Blue State=Latte sipping socialists."
It's a great question. I think that--to use my examples--basically by 2000 the realignment caused by the Civil Rights Act and Reagan had taken shape, and then Iraq just solidified it. If you didn't like Bush in 2000, you HATED him in 2004.
I don't know, it's true the country was 85-90% white by today's standards, but back then the different European ethnicities were quite distinct and there wasn't really a monolithic 'white' culture the way we see it today. Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white, and even the germanic/nordic communities throughout the midwest largely spoke their native languages and held onto their native customs. Yes they all treated each other as superior to black/brown populations, but to say they were an assimilated mass with little diversity between them would be wrong
You're right, and we did actually see partisan sorting along those ethnic lines that trumped ideology--you had strong support for Democrats among "ethnic" whites until Nixon and strong support for Republicans among WASPs in the Northeast. I just meant "white" and "Christian" weren't identities you could polarize around, so saying "white people are starting to drift to the Republican Party" would have just meant "America is shifting right" and not "America is polarizing."
"Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white"
Looked down on, perhaps, but "not really being white" certainly not. America had a legally enforced racial caste system, and European immigrants always classified as white under it.
Yea they never legally defined Italian/Irish as non-white, but I think my comment still stands that the prevailing opinion among Anglo/Germanic communities was that non-Anglo/Germanic Europeans weren't really 'white' like they were.
I wish there was an ungated version of the paper linked there available, because it does actually go into social (rather than merely legal) distinctions. They again find that European immigrants were lumped in with other whites, not African Americans or Native Americans.
There was a tiered hierarchy. Angle-Saxons at the top, then European immigrants (who themselves were divided based on their origin). Then they drew the line and declared those to be "white." Then there were African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and others.
The European immigrants still counted as "white," but they definitely weren't treated the same.
There's an important sense in which your 3, 4 and 5 are horribly missing the point.
For 4 and 5, Obama *spoke* like a dove but governed no less hawkishly than Bush while Trump *spoke* (kind of) like a hawk but governed more dovishly than any American president since Carter. Which gets to the meat of why 3 matters: Obama cultivated the persona of a political outsider at exactly the time when the Iraq war and the 2008 recession demonstrated incontrovertibly that the political insiders running our foreign and domestic policy were at best disastrously incompetent and at worst malevolent. When his neoliberalism turned out to be indistinguishable from Bush's neoconservatism in practice, just with rainbow flags in place of crosses, a lot of people in both parties started looking for the door.
Which is, to my mind, the essence of today's partisanship. If you reject the Washington Consensus which formed the mainstream of both parties pre-Trump (and which has been desperately trying to claw back control of the Republicans post-Trump) then your choices for elected officials are very limited. Without a genuine outsider to vote for, the best bet is just to gum up the gears of the Washington machine by threatening to primary any politician who tries to reach across the aisle to pass another part of their shared agenda. If a new war or a a new bailout or a new expansion of the surveillance state is worth it to their donors they'll take the risk, but forcing them to play defensively on the smaller issues means Democratic and Republican elected officials have that many fewer opportunities to defraud the American people.
I don't think you're wrong or I'm wrong here, I think we're describing different but simultaneous phenomena that pushed the country in the same direction. You are right that Obama was not (as he may have seemed at the time) a strong departure from the Washington consensus, so people who wanted that probably were turned off by him. What you write helps explain why we're seeing rising numbers of independents but not rising numbers of swing voters; there are a growing number of people who do see the two parties as indistinguishable and/or just bad actors, but who nevertheless have strong policy preferences one way or the other.
I think the synthesis for our ideas is this: Obama was not that different from previous iterations of Democrats, and people on the left saw him as basically a normal Democrat. This actually turned off some people, who had been hoping he would push against the grain more, and lead them to demand a more extreme version of liberalism a la Bernie Sanders. Many conservatives, on the other hand, perceived Obama as a radical, dangerous departure from the norm, possibly more because of who he was rather than the policies he pushed, though I'm sure they had their reasons. This led them to demand from the right for less cooperation and more ideological rigor. You could basically argue the same thing about Trump--Republican voters saw him as a businessman who deviated from Republican orthodoxy in speeches, but ultimately his big accomplishments were tax cuts, deregulation, and appointing conservative judges. If you asked Democrats, though, he was a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics, pushing them to cooperate less, and the cycle repeats.
Er, no, it had nothing to do with "who [Obama] was". It wasn't even what policies he pushed. It was what political tactics the Democrats used under him.
What both wiped out the "conservative" Democrats in 2010 and convinced the right that the Democrats had radically and dangerously departed from the historic norm was that in 2010 the "conservative" Democrats in Congress took the radical and unprecedented step of committing mass electoral suicide in order to push through a massively unpopular program on behalf of their party leadership. When even the people of the State of Massachusetts were opposed enough to Obamacare to elect a Republican in a special election to try to stop it, the Democrats went ahead and rammed it through.
You want "a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics", THAT was the moment.
At that point, the idea of there being such a thing as a "conservative" Democrat, or even one who would reflect and respond to his constituents' desires, died in the minds of America's right. They're now convinced that there's nobody to persuade or compromise with in the Democratic Party. And so any Republicans in office who act like there's any Democrats in office who can be persuaded or compromised with are either idiots or traitors.
And so that illustrates what they're really demanding of Republican politicians. The demand is not for ideological rigor; Trump went ahead and talked positively about the British NHS in a Republican Presidential debate, after all. What they demand is that the Republican politician agree that all that's possible with the Democrats is war-to-the-knife, and pledge to fight it.
RE international comparisons: which other developed countries have two-party systems? From a cursory Wikipedia, it seems like the answer is Malta and that's basically it.
Other contenders:
South Korea often only has two big parties, but which two seems to change every election.
Australia has two big groups, but one is the Coalition of two parties, and the senate is elected via PR and has 20% minority representation.
I am more familiar with the UK and don't think it counts, we had a coalition government pretty recently and the Scottish National Party are pretty big.
Many countries have a mostly dominant "natural governing party" and then a smaller opposition party. In Canada that was the Liberal Party, while in Japan it was the Liberal Democrats, and in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Arguably the American system is more analogous to various south American and African countries with strong presidential powers. Who tend to have the presidents party and the other one.
As a Canadian I feel like while we are multi party, we share some of the problem's with the US because we use the first past the post. Because there's basically just 1 party on the right and 2 big ones on the left, we basically have a constant spoiler effect on the left where the vote is split too much for either major left wing party to win. And so we end up sometimes with the Conservative (rightwing) party winning, even though 65% of the country voted for a left wing party.
I think of being a 2 party country and being a first-past the post country as almost one and the same problem. It greatly incentives voting against the one you hate rather than the one you want. And that's a huge barrier to entry for new parties and so should trend over time towards 2 consolidated parties.
Inequality began its explosive rise starting in the late 70s due to globalization, the loss of labor bargaining power, the rise of the managerial class, etc. As the producer of the world’s reserve currency, the US has a unique role in globalization which magnifies the effects (both good and bad). The massively divergent outcomes among members of society, plus what I would argue resembles stagnation at lower rungs, created fertile ground for a loss of social trust and a rise in angst. In the absence of deep, productive debates on the true underlying issues, we simply default to tribal partisanship and culture wars.
Economic inequality has been rising since around the late 60s. I agree globalization is a major factor (but it increased bargaining power for workers in many other countries), but automation has also been a major factor. I'm not sure what constitutes a productive debate on the underlying issues, but it seems to me that economic inequality is possibly the single most constantly talked about issue there is.
Sure, we talk about inequality but mostly in naïve, tribal ways that fail to address root causes, nevermind actual solutions. What i mostly hear is "tax the rich," "systemic racism," "throw more money at failing schools," etc etc. Regardless of what you think of such issues, they are not going to put a dent in inequality - which has been rising ever faster the more we "talk about it."
We need real discussions on trade policy, monetary policy, dramatic tax reform, supply-side revolutions in healthcare/education housing etc. Mostly what i observe is the use of emotional issues to avoid having the real discussions that are necessary - and which would probably prove financially costly for the elites.
Inequality and "economic inequality" aren’t problems. They are mathematical relationships. Inequality isn’t even remotely the same thing as "unfairness", which we can probably agree on as an actual problem.
I guess my point is that to the extent that unfairness is an issue, if we wish to address it we should start by labeling the issue correctly. Inequality of outcome is not necessarily an indication of unfairness, nor is greater economic inequality intrinsically worse than less inequality.
While I agree in theory, it may not mean much in practice. If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable? If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable? There are no clear answers and the way society finds the "answers" seems to be a very messy process, which i believe we are going through now.
I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair. We do a very poor job of this...the winners of the current configuration aren't "policed" much at all. I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative.
"If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable?"
Globalization doesn’t require a country to pursue it. Individual and corporate actions are sufficient to achieve global exchange absent country interference. And I really don’t understand what "leaving people behind" means. I decided to retire ten years ago. Was I left behind? Others chose not to move to booming markets (perhaps for good reasons), or chose not to make the transition to booming, higher paid professions. Were they left behind? Or is this just a euphemism for the fact that change creates winners and losers, pretty much by definition?
And I will add that wage inequality in a market is actually acting as the incentive to correct for the lack of transition (to the new job or area). The market is sending an incentive and a signal for people in declining areas and professions to adjust their behavior if possible.
"If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable?"
Not if we agree to play by those rules. If I agree to play by certain rules and we all follow them I would consider the game fair (and presumably desirable), even if the final score is extremely lopsided. I am not arguing against redistribution, I am suggesting that the system can be both fair and desirable even when it leads to inequality of outcome.
"I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair."
I agree we should police bad actors and ensure that the system is as fair as possible. But I do not believe it is logical to look at an unequal outcome and make an assumption that the system is unfair nor even that more equality would be better. Inequality of outcome and fairness are not necessarily correlated. Indeed I could argue that a market based system would be dysfunctional if every course of action led to the same results.
"I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative."
The equality pillar has nothing to do with equality of economic outcome. It refers to equality of process — it is about treating everyone fairly using the same rules.
I agree but I feel like that's a problem with pretty much every issue. With inequality, I think there are some 'inconvenient truths' that obstruct discourse, such as the fact that rising productivity inequality is probably at least one driving force behind it. Of course one can still argue for redistribution from rich to poor even if the gap largely reflects productivity difference, but I think many find it less palatable to demand recompense based on abstract moral valuation of equality than on the basis that one is being shortchanged by fatcats and is merely demanding the rest of one's rightful compensation.
Of course for some big inequality-related issues, like housing and education costs, Klein's point about the nationalization of politics is probably pretty relevant. They're local/state issues and thus can't command as much popular interest as national political issues.
Surprised I haven't heard anyone saying this - what about wealth and income inequality? Given the correspondence, seems as if an explanation would have more power if it related to them both. https://images.app.goo.gl/biMLpT78K9rK1QJr7
High levels of blatant inequality in the 1880s-1910s, pushes polarization until enough solutions get passed, things go down, people are happy, welfare state starts stagnating and retreating, inequality goes up, pushes polarization.
Why would wealth inequality push Polarization? People are unhappy, don't know why, blame the outgroup.
Alternatively, only way to suppress class consciousness is to give people some other identity to care about.
U.S society was fairly large and diverse in the 1920s, although African Americans were restricted from taking part in politics in the south (where most of them lived).
And that's also probably a contributing or correlated factor. No need to limit causality to one thing when there are probably a host of things that contribute
Alternative: most of the income inequality has been eaten up by other forms of compensation. Not just healthcare benefits, etc. Also regulatory benefits. With the introduction of OSHA, ADA, EEOC, etc., everybody is getting a large boost in non-monetary benefits through the regulatory apparatus rather than through the labor negotiation process.
If there's any discontinuity around that time, it'd be 9/11 and Iraq. I think 9/11 was the original cause, but it took a couple years to show up, because in the short term it was a unifying factor. It wasn't until Iraq happened, and started to go differently to how Bush suggested it would, that it exploded into polarization.
This is a guess, obviously, but it seems to fit well enough.
Maybe this is a consequence of coming of age in the 2000s, but I'm always going to associate political agreement and ability to get stuff done with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the creation of DHS, domestic spying and other civil liberty issues, etc., that came after 9/11. Democrats and Republicans agreed about a whole lot of that! Yes, I see that there are many problems with polarization. But you don't have to reach back very far to find examples where "inability to get stuff done" would have looked a lot better than the alternative.
Does the chart of polarization show the UK becoming less polarised? Because that does not match my impressions. I would say less until the mid 90s and then flat for a bit (maybe not quite - Blair was dominant so the Tories going down weird routes for a bit did not affect much) and then the left reaction against Blair started with Iraq/Bush which started moving bits of Labour apart just as the Tories went centre enough to have a chance to grab back power - the 2008 crash made this worse and then the Tories won and while socially liberal they were harsh cutters of government services, which made polarisation more urgent. The Lib dem implosion as part of the coalition destroyed the middle for a bit, then Brexit/Corbyn/Boris sharpened the cultural aspect until there was very strong polarisation.
So I would expect a U shape with the minimum late 90s early 00s
The UK chart shows ultra-high polarisation during the Thatcher years, calming down a bit during Major, reaching a minimum with Blair, and then increasing until we reach Thatcher levels again with Brexit. That matches my intuitions.
Which suggests that maybe polarisation levels are just strongly influenced by specific issues and personalities. What's really interesting is that the Iraq war was a polarising event in the US but a depolarising event in the UK, because in one country it was supported by a right-wing leader and in the other by a left-wing leader.
Perhaps the best thing for depolarising the US would be for Joe Biden to start a war.
I don't think anyone has mentioned Bush/Gore and 9/11? Those are two events that were huge in the popular consciousness that fit the timeline. Of course you can't draw a line in the sand, can you - just why was the 2000 Presidential race so evenly split - in my memory both Bush and Gore were pretty unremarkable candidates. All I know is that you still can find people bitter over the outcome, which naturally ought to contribute to a "win-at-all-costs" mentality. And then you had 9/11 and everything that followed. Attack on American soil! It was quite a shock to the system after a decade of relative peace and harmony. People were digging in on jingoistic patriotism versus the other side advocating a more measured response and saying, No the US is the true aggressor here. And throughout the Iraq War the justifications became more murky and Bush expanded his power in unpopular ways and you had things like the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Bush was so hated that a faux-documentary was made about his assassination and what would be the aftermath. I don't have a point to all this, perhaps it's too much of a just-so story. But I definitely see some of the origins of the current culture war in those times.
I think an interesting subject for further inquiry is why the Democrats have been more successful at fighting off insurgencies that Republicans.
My moderately informed opinion is that institutional Democrats have a lot more institutional support than institutional Republicans.
If someone primaries Mitch McConnell, they will get a lot of favorable coverage (in the primary campaign) even if that person's views were much more abhorrent. If AOC were to attempt to primary Chuck Schumer, it would be seen as a threat to the republic.
When Trump was launching his campaign, everyone thought it was hi-larious how he was taking down the Jeb Bushes and Marco Rubios of the world. I recall a lot of tweets about how Trump maybe really nuts, but what's really nuts is the numbers in Rubio's tax plan!
Meanwhile, the leasing institutionally conservative publication published an "against Trump" cover. But it didn't matter.
Bernie Sanders was always a threat. He was pressured to quite. People were really concerned about "Bernie-bros.", etc. Try talking about Jill Stein in certain quarters.
I think the Democrats are heading down that slope, though. They're doing what the Republicans did, resisting the direct challenges to the people in charge, but bending policy and appointments toward the insurgency to appease them. But eventually the old Democrats will be called some equivalent of DINO for holding on to something (anything) while the current is pulling them leftward.
I think may you have something here, but I want to quibble. AOC got into congress by primarying one of the prominent dem house leaders. I don't think she got much pushback for it, and if she did it didn't matter. The movement that put her in is dedicated to finding and pushing out dems that are too far to the right.
Also, in my state legislative district, the local Democratic party did not endorse their long-time centrist representative in the primary, when he was being challenged by two inexperienced activists on the left and the far left. It was also interesting to see a local news source completely avoid mention of the left challenger, in favor of the far left one. Like literally, their editorial recommendations didn't mention her name or acknowledge that she was in the race. (Fortunately they have a robust online comment section.)
I'm more than a little surprised that population density didn't come up once.
The simplest way to describe the difference between republican and democratic coalitions is population density. Democrats are predominantly an urban coalition, and republicans are more rural / suburban.
When you factor in that most economic growth has taken place in cities, and cities are always where almost all culture is produced, you see a pretty obvious pattern:
- cities are where almost all economic power is concentrated
- cities are where almost all cultural power is concentrated
- cities are dominated by democratic politics
He's got a point that AOC/Bernie have less influence inside party politics - but there are plenty of SJW extremists writing in the New York Times. Sure, QAnon is totally off the rails and there isn't anything like that on the left, but the closest left wing equivalents are tenured sociology professors.
Whenever I leave California to go visit my parents in Ohio, I feel like I understand the sense of despair and anger and frustration that people here feel, towards the place that took a lot of their kids, and responds by calling them racist, bigoted people for not going along with this increasingly radical agenda, which seems coupled to economic policies that are AWESOME if you leave your hometown and move to a big city and learn to do really insanely complicated things for a giant corporation, but otherwise are kinda meh.
It's been difficult for me to escape the conclusion that you can't possibly have a stable political coalition that covers "city dwellers" as more and more of the country movies into cities - unless those city dwellers are united against a common enemy. All around San Francisco in 2014, there was a big tech backlash, with people spraypainting '#DieTechieScum' on the sidewalk. It all went away around the time Michael Brown was killed. I watched how quickly all the big tech companies joined into BLM, and remembered thinking at the time "now we have an enemy that we can all feel good about hating."
If this hypothesis is true - that increasing urbanization drives political polarization - the solution would be... some kind of ... thing.. .which caused lots of people to start leaving big cities all at once. Maybe spreading tech wealth all over the country, and increasing the frequency of interaction between highly trained technological professionals and blue collar workers. Who knows what would cause such a thing?
Why not just have everyone move to cities? Seems easier to me - cities have economies of scale, whereas rural areas have... cows which do not require the rural population we currently have
That is in fact roughly what's happening, at what may be close the maximum rate consistent with aggregated individual choice as opposed to coercive state policy.
The present urban/rural political dynamic is what you see as a result.
I think you're wrong. America has instead gotten more suburban in the more recent decades. Restrictions on building in big cities pushes real estate prices up, and people out. There are many blue suburbs now, but it's not because a smaller portion of the country lives in rural areas (that has stayed steady at a low percentage of the population for a while).
I'm beginning to suspect that a great number of people here live in a bubble. So many people are fleeing San Francisco that rents have actually dropped by hundreds of dollars. Same in NY.
Reactions to covid are merely an accelerant. Conditions is San Francisco regarding homelessness, public sanitation, rising crime, and educational shortcomings are factors that won't go away anytime soon. And it looks like companies are finally waking up to the benefits of allowing folks to work at home. There's no going back.
Work from home is just going to accelerate urbanization. So many people that have jobs in suburban office parks would love to live in a city - and particularly people with jobs in a small city that would rather live in a big city.
All the data shows an increase up until last March, at which point the rents dropped drastically.[0] Just like they did in the rest of the country.[1] Perhaps it has multiple causes, but the data doesn't show it.
One theory of the cause of increased partisanship since the 70's that has been growing on me is transparency/sunshine laws. Apparently, pre 1970's congressional/comittee meetings and votes were all done closed door to the point where we don't even know how specific legislators voted on specific legislation. But beginning in the 1970's a wave of legislation calling for increased "accountability" opened up these proceedings to the general public. But, the theory goes, special interest groups, corporations, media interests etc are a LOT better at holding their representatives accountable than the average joe voter. Where previously they were still motivated to enact regulatory capture, but ultimately didn't know if it was working and couldn't easily organize against someone who defected, now they could. And the legislators now knew that they could.
And where previously they could give a good partisan speech but then go behind closed doors and compromise or acknowledge when someone from the other side made a good point, now there was no longer any backstage. The theatre element of politics is on and you can never be seen to not be treating the other side like they're the bad guys and we're the good guys.
Also with the transparency laws, the media gains power because they are the largest influencers of the only group that can possibly counter the special interest groups, the average voters. So the value of influencing the average voter goes up which, of course, increases competition for that influence. And the more the battle for that influence heats up the more you need to band together to win(media consolidation), the more you gain from demonizing the other side, and the more incentivized you are to do it.
The link I posted above has some really compelling research and arguments that link transparency laws to polarization, regulatory capture, government waste, pork, bill size inflation/obfuscation, wealth inequality, increased campaign spending, decreases in crossing the aisle voting, increases in "bang for your buck" for lobbying spending, wage stagnation/inequality and a whole host of other problems. It's a surprisingly robust theory.
It also offers an easy solution. Closed doors and secret ballots.
Excellent, I was going to mention this as well. TV didn't show up in the Senate until 1974 for example.
This also ties in with (and is accelerated later on) by the "revolt of the public" a la Matting Gurri in the post 2000-era, as the mediating media institutions have fallen away. Basically, I think at least part of the polarization is tied into the loss of faith in elites and institutional decline over the past 50-60 years, combined with a loss of narrative control.
Add in the decline in religiosity generally, one party grabbing most of the remaining religious voters over time after Roe v Wade (1973), some identity politics, and a few other things I'm sure I missed, and here we are.
I suspect we'd be better off if people spent less time thinking about vague ideals like "free speech", "democracy", "transparency", etc. etc. and more time just analyzing how a particular policy change would affect incentive structures.
Keeping people polarized seems to be the way political parties gain votes, all over the world. It is just a numbers game. In India, this means a politician running for election in a constituency being of the right caste/religion and promising just the right amount of favors to the right groups. Not too much, because that is a waste of resources.
The only time voters don't care about this is if the politician has an extraordinary personality. Then they vote for him or her even without being promised favors. So it is identity/personality.
It seems like the same thing happens in America these days. Is "Why we are polarized" really any more interesting than this?
I don't know enough about the U.S 50 years ago to consider multiple factors.
Is India less polarized than the U.S? Why? I can attempt to answer that.
The Congress party (left-leaning) ruled India for most of 70 years since independence in 1947. It had towering personalities who were seen as patriotic, upper class and all Indians loved that then.
Now Modi (of the right-wing BJP party) has a personality that appeals to all Hindu castes. He himself is from the lowest possible caste, and was dirt poor growing up. He has managed to unite all the Hindu castes (although maybe some upper castes are sometimes uncomfortable with his party's Hindu-leaning) under the umbrella of saving Hinduism from "outsiders". India was ruled by Muslims from outside for 800 years and the British from outside for 200 years - both of whom converted many Hindus. And the Congress party's ruling dynasty is conspicuously led by an outsider (Sonia Gandhi is from Italy).
Hindus are 82% of the population today. That might be why Christians and Muslims etc, who used to vote for different parties (from each other), now vote as a monolith for the non-BJP party, wherever they are. So it is an 82% - 18% polarization. Is that less polarized than the U.S's 50-50? Yes, I'd say so, in some ways.
Modi has divided the Muslim vote along gender lines by passing "pro-woman" laws that make many Muslim women happy (note that Muslims are allowed their own personal law for marriage, inheritance etc, different from the personal law for others in India). So, he has an advantage even in some majority-Muslim constituencies with the women favoring him.
The non-BJP i.e. the Congress party and the left parties have no clue how to defeat Modi anymore. There is no big national opposition party in India now, to oppose the BJP. So the various regional opposition parties keep getting together with EACH OTHER in different states (India has a multi-party system) and have thus taken over some important states even though the BJP did better than each of them there.
The opposition in India is now reduced to that strategy. It is very hard to justify to voters, because these parties are ideologically different from each other.
They also oppose anything the legislature passes (even if it passed unanimously, even if it was their party's idea originally, like the CAA law, the farm laws now). All they seem to do is protest constantly on the streets and appeal to identity politics (which Modi does not have to do overtly usually). Will this work for them? Who knows. They are out of ideas.
They try to divide Hindus along castes to achieve parity with Modi's party. And Modi's across-caste appeal makes that hard for them.
It all comes down to successful strategy in each constituency - knowing what the caste-mix is there and what favors are worth handing out to which group. It is hard to find politicians of the right caste with great personalities who will get votes regardless of identity.
It is a 50-50 polarization in a 2-party system versus an 82-18 in a multiparty system.
I might have over-simplified things though! And maybe I should not see America using the same abstractions as in India.
I think he's wrong that "one party called itself "Democrat", but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North". The primary axis of politics was still a right vs left one focusing on fiscal/economic issues, with the secondary/regional one that southerners differed from northerners on being a smaller axis. Klein's co-founder Matt Yglesias has a more realistic view of how important Dixiecrats were to things central to Democratic politics.
Yeah. Except instead of "more realistic", I'd say "less polarized", in the optical sense. I get the feeling that Klein is seeing things through a set of goggles that only admit one orientation of light. If it doesn't fit his narrative, it doesn't make it past the filter.
I feel like this talk of "polarization", and which party has gotten more "extreme", conflates a few things, and I think the talk of how extreme the two parties are on various popular issues obscures a few things.
This is a point I've made several times before -- the word "extremism" really conflates two different things. One of these things is, well, just object-level positions that are extreme, which is fine and in fact you tend to end up there if you try to be at all coherent. The other is "meta-level extremism" -- resorting to or endorsing violence, threats, etc., and which rather than "extremism" would be better called "illiberalism".
This discussion of polarization is similar -- is there a necessary connection between the parties moving further apart on object-level issues, and them becoming more illiberal in their attempts to get their way? I don't see that there is. It's what people expect, but the two are logically separate, as I see it.
But it's the illiberalism that's really dangerous, not the having of different positions. This is why I think looking at the positions of Democratic and Republican candidates and saying "well, the positions of the Republican candidates would have been fairly ordinary in the 1990s" is misleading. Sure, maybe if you restrict to object-level issues, but if you look at the meta-level issues, about how our democracy should function, not at all! I mean, we recently had the then-president encouraging the storming of the Capitol building, a bit hard to say that would have happened in the 1990s. I think when you look at the meta-level it's clear the Republican party has gone off the rails much more than the Democratic party. (And yes obviously there is a substantial illiberal wing there too, what with the SJers and all, but as mentioned above, they're not in control of the party, nor do they seem to rise to the same level.)
And you could say that well that wouldn't have happened in the 1990s because things were less polarized then, but my point is that these are two separate things; I think it's a mistake to automatically collapse together polarization and illiberalism. Even if they typically go together, that link should be made explicit rather than assumed.
I think the US is more polarised because it has a hard two party system, third parties exist but they have close to zero relevance on the national stage. Other countries like UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, don't – they have what you'd call a soft two party system, in which there are two major parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature, and sometimes the governing party has to rely on the support of a minor party to govern.
I personally think having a Presidential rather than Parliamentary system is part of what gives the US a hard two party system. The Democrats and Republicans have always been quite big tents with weak party discipline. Other English-speaking countries, the major political parties tend to be somewhat smaller tents with stronger party discipline, which I think promotes the major parties being narrower coalitions which leaves more space for third parties to exist. You need stronger discipline when the executive depends on a majority in the legislature to continue to govern. The independence which the executive has in the American model reduces the need for strong party discipline in the legislature branch.
First-past-the-post voting is another contributing factor, although it can't bear all the blame because Canada and the UK have it too. I think the parliamentary system dilutes the negative impact of first-past-the-post. Plus both Canada and the UK have far greater internal cultural diversity than the US does. Many people in Scotland and Wales view themselves as historically distinct nations, and they have aspirations for independence and parties which cater to that aspiration (SNP and Plaid Cymru). Northern Ireland politics still revolves around the conflict between the Unionist and Nationalist communities, which gives Northern Ireland its own completely distinct party system from the rest of the UK. In Canada, you have two distinct language communities (Anglophone and Francophone), and a significant minority of Quebecois still want independence. People say there is a big cultural difference between New York and Alabama, and no doubt there is, but it really pales in comparison to the internal cultural differences within Canada and the UK – despite their differences, people in New York and Alabama both view themselves as members of a common nation with a shared past and a shared future, whereas significant numbers of people in the UK and Canada don't.
The depolarization during the 1920s-1960s was quite unnatural in American history, while the current pattern is natural. The depolarization (and the subsequent repolarization) was caused by the parties adjusting to a switch in the axis that divided the parties.
Party leadership was much more influential and deliberately chose presidential and congressional candidates which were moderate. The introduction of primaries changed this gradually. Now partisanship is strong but parties are weak.
Very much agree that the "hard two-party system" is likely a huge factor in explaining the difference between US dynamics and other countries'. (And also your points regarding Canada and the UK being multinational states in a way that the contemporary US isn't really.)
The caveat is that it's not as if the two-party monopoly in the US invariably contributes to polarization in some fixed structural sense. For a very long time the conventional wisdom was roughly the opposite: that the US two-party system's major virtue was its tendency to tamp down extremism by requiring politicians to appeal to one or the other of two very-big-tent coalitions. (This, obviously, went hand-in-glove with a conventional wisdom about extremism being a bad thing.)
Perhaps the better thesis is that a hard two-party system tends to amplify secular trends toward *both* polarization and anti-polarization. To pick up on Scott's post about attractor states from a few days back, one might say the two-party system steepens the slope along which we roll toward either a polarized or an anti-polarized partisan equilibrium.
We currently have a weak party system with strong partisanship. The proverbial "smoke filled room" involved a strong party system, which wouldn't permit someone like Trump to barge in and take over.
This is a good point: it's the "two" part that's strong, not the "party" in an institutional sense. We have a two-bloc system that's persisted in spite of the dramatic weakening of institutional parties as they would've been understood c. 1970.
I don't think the two-party system is caused by presidentialism, because there are plenty of countries that have a similar constitutional system to the US (Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines), including presidentialism, but which are massively multi-party. This review didn't touch on one of the factors that make US politics really unique compared to any other democracy, whether First World or not, which is open primaries.
If you wanted to vote, or run for office, in the internal election in the Labour Party which picked Corbyn to be their leader, you needed to get a party membership, which costs money. Also the party leadership gets to kick you out if they want to. Same goes for the Liberal Party in Canada, or the Republicans in France, or Likud in Israel, or any other non-US party which holds "primaries" anywhere else in the world. (Also, the order of operations is going backwards: in the US primaries were first introduced in the 1900s and 1910s for very low-level positions which were totally safe for one party or the other. They were then gradually introduced for higher and higher offices and weren't used presidentially until the 1972 election. By contrast, Canada/France/the UK are introducing them for party leadership, but *not* for various lower positions! And you have to pay to vote. This is a very different system from ours, where any schmuck can vote -- even in "closed" primary states you just have to sign up a few months in advance, and not pay a penny -- and you can run even if you're explicitly not a party member, such as Sanders for the Democratic leadership. The leadership cannot expel or disqualify anybody.)
This means that it's almost always easier to run in some party primary if you want to be elected to office, rather than starting a new party. (Also, in both houses of our legislature you explicitly sit in "Republican" or "Democratic" caucuses, which assign you committee positions, even if you are a member of a third party, like Sanders or Joe Lieberman or Jim Buckley. Thus even if you start a regionally successful third-party somewhere one of the parties is likely to assimilate you, since as soon as you get any success you start having to pick whether you want to associate more with Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer.)
I don't think presidentialism as opposed to parliamentarism has very much to do with this. Even beyond our very antiquated 1787 Constitution, much of our small-c constitutional system also developed in the early 20th century when many of our peers were not democracies and so differs wildly from what was developed later.
"I don't think the two-party system is caused by presidentialism, because there are plenty of countries that have a similar constitutional system to the US (Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines), including presidentialism, but which are massively multi-party."
I think it's not merely presidentialism, but the electoral college which causes this two-party system.
Yes! Specifically that the electoral college can only choose a president by majority of the electors, not plurality. Plurality throws the vote into the house, which no one wants. This means voters dare not "throw away" their votes on parties that don't have a plausible chance of getting a majority. The entire federal duopoly flows from this one rule.
"Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop" also argues against the "vetocracy" and alludes to assymetrical issues in our political alignment, but with a more keen eye towards the Senate (which leads to dramatic changes in the power of your vote based on state population) as a key driver.
If the Internet as an explanation for increasing polarization is lacking because it raises the question "why only here?" and racial resentment is lacking because it raises the question "why now?", it seems like these issues might answer each other's questions? Is there another country which was primed for race-aligned polarization before the Internet that did not become more polarized?
My intuition is that the change in the media landscape (the Martin Gurri thesis) is a significant factor. Specifically, the change from a small set of gatekeeper voices limiting the overton to an infinite number of voices, reflecting the opinion of all people and creating "common knowledge". We went from a world where in 2008, Barack Obama couldn't publicly support gay marriage to a where where today, if a prominent person did not support gay marriage, they would be ex-communicated. I think it's important to think through the causal mechanism behind how this happened.
One possible theory as to why the changing media landscape did not increase polarization in the rest of the first world - is that the rest of the world follows the news/entertainment complex of the US rather than their own domestic one. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were watched all over the developed world; I suspect this polarized people 'against' American republicans without having a significant impact on how they view their own country.
Another plausible theory is that the changing media landscape only would have increased polarization if the country was ripe for an increase in polarization. Factors like Newt Gingrich and Gerrymandering could have sufficiently changed the situation to allow polarization to take off.
It's counterintuitive that the loss of the small set of gatekeeper voices has resulted in a narrowing of the Overton window instead of a broadening, but that's where we are.
In 2008 Barack Obama "couldn't" publically support gay marriage because he, a Presidential candidate, couldn't afford to lose the votes of the ten percent of most socially conservative Democrats if he still wanted to be President of the United States. But in 2021 I, a nobody, can't publically oppose gay marriage because I would lose my job and all my friends if I did so. The people who would condemn and defriend me for opposing gay marriage include an awful lot of people who would also opposed it as recently as 2008.
I am not sure if someone else mentioned this, but isn't the obvious response to your point on technology that the internet is itself not neutral? The experience of many Europeans of politics on the internet tends to be with specifically American politics, whereas Americans will not have the same experience.
Imagine if Americans browsed a Chinese internet with political discussions dominated by discussions about e.g. Xi Jinping's new anti-corruption campaign or whatever instead of about domestic political affairs.
That's actually a good point. Globalisation of communications means that people in other English-speaking countries now spend more time reading about and discussing US politics than politics in their own countries. US politics is big and flashy and distracting and everyone in the world apparently has a strong opinion on it; my own country's politics is a bunch of dull grey-haired men and red-haired women making boring decisions in a predictable manner, and I can't find anyone interesting to talk to about it anyway. US politics has sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Does Klein provide detailed evidence about the Dixiecrat/racist southern Democrat shift to the Republican Party after the GOP in Congress passed for the Civil Rights Act, or does he just repeat the myth and not provide any foundation?
" In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)"
and
"Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t." Is the model of the Southern Strategy theory that poorer southerners weren't racist?
The facts are that the least racist southern states turned Republican first, and the most racist states last. The opposite of what you'd expect if the switch was based on racism. It makes no sense that racists in the south would switch to the less racist party. Remember, the southern Republicans voted in favor of the civil rights act while southern Democrats voted against it. So the theory is that southern racists decided to.... join their ideological enemy in their state and start voting for them instead??? It's not a very coherent story.
Rather, the middle class increased. Small business owners increased. People moved into the south from northern and western Republican strongholds. That's what the data in the book shows how the south turned Republican.
Klein has a nice just-so story, but I'd bet he doesn't have the detailed voter-level data to back it up, because the myth of racists switching wholesale to the GOP post-civil rights act has already been disproven by Johnston and Shafer's work. Anyone still promoting it needs to address their data.
Republicans don't win 90%+ of the vote in Mississippi for no reason. That said, it was clear the South lost and the North won during the twentieth century, much as in the nineteenth. Today's Southerners are yesterday's Northerners, and today's Northerners are yesterday's radicals.
The order of change was wealthy+most extreme segregationists first (cf., 1952 election), hillbillies last (with a slight falloff by the wealthy post-1996).
You mean to say, the 57% to 41% the Republicans just got in Mississippi?
If your theory is correct, as southern states turned Republican, why would the least racist southern states have turned first?
How come in 1976, a dozen years after the Civil Rights Act, Carter won by winning the entire south? (https://www.270towin.com/1976_Election/) Was that because he was appealing to their racism?
Why would the "most extreme segregationists" change to the GOP in 1952 while the Republicans were the party of blacks in the south? Any data to back that up?
If you look at the county results, you can see quite a few rural MS and SC counties switching to Eisenhower: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/1952nationwidecountymapshadedbyvoteshare.svg No doubt this was caused by Strom Thurmond's endorsement of Eisenhower, a natural response to Truman's Democratic Party becoming pro-Black (thus Thurmond's insurgent campaign in 1948). Carter did well among hillbillies, but lost the White vote in four out of five Deep South states. Hillbillies are not to be confused with the most extreme segregationists, who had flipped by 1976. Recall that Mississippi voted more for Nixon than DC for McGovern.
It's not a myth. It's a plain fact that can be easily demonstrated in a variety of ways.
- Directly in actual people: The families here in the South who used to be Democrats are now Republicans. Literally the same people. Talk to them. See the voting habits of their communities over time.
- Via political science's favorite statistic: You can observe the changes in the DW-NOMINATE scores of the House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M193ZIOFk0k . During the Civil Rights movement era, the Democratic coalition splits into two distinct clusters. One cluster moves farther right then disappears as the GOP cluster grows.
The authors of the book looked at registration and voting records of actual people in the southern states and how they changed over time. The records prove that it's a myth. The vast majority of racist southern Democrats stayed Democrats until they died. The vast majority of Republicans came from out of state, or from younger and newly middle and upper class folks who weren't racists. That's what the voting records shows, as well as the pattern of how states switched from the D to the R column.
House voting scores are irrelevant. This isn't a myth about whether the south turned Republican, but whether the racist Democratic voters in the south switching to the GOP are the reason why it did. The facts show that they aren't.
But please, go ahead and attempt to refute the cited research in the book. So far, you haven't addressed any of it, not even the summary I gave. Have you even read it? Read the free preview, even?
I can't help but notice you wrote this: "The vast majority of racist southern Democrats stayed Democrats until they died." -- Until they died? 1964 wasn't that long ago. Millions of them are still quite alive. Some of them are serving in office right now here in Texas.
You say that House DW-NOMINATE scores, perhaps the most thoroughly-vetted and objective political science data available on the switch of Dixiecrats to the GOP, is irrelevant. I consider it thorough disproof of the claim you made that I objected to, which was that "the Dixiecrat/racist southern Democrat shift to the Republican Party after the GOP in Congress passed for the Civil Rights Act" is a myth.
Nevertheless, I do think the individual stories are important. For famous cases of individual powerful Dixiecrats who switched publicly to the GOP, here's an expertly compiled rundown: https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1013981449941331969
And for the particular book you cited, I'll initially note that it does not represent the consensus of the field but is only one piece of work within the field. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/ for what I'm thinking, if you haven't read it already.) It's true that I'm not going to buy the book and read it just for the sake of an online comment discussion. That would be silly and all out of proportion. But I did take the time to search for reviews.
This is the only independent professional review that's not behind a paywall: https://prospect.org/article/south-rose-d2/ . A key comment: "The data cited by Shafer and Johnston show that from the 1960s through the 1990s, in races for national office, Republicans ran best among the Southerners most resistant to government action to promote racial equity."
This academic review by Glenn Feldman, professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is accessible for free if you're willing to give JSTOR your information: https://doi.org/10.2307/27649547 . It uses very harsh language regarding the factual errors and omissions in the book. I can't evaluate how appropriate that is. But it also points out a couple things in Shafer & Johnston's methodology that stick out to me as weakening its conclusions. First, it says S&J defined their race measure as segregation exclusively (i.e. no other issues). That measure would be expected to show up more strongly after desegregation enforcement began. Second, it says S&J's analyses made no distinctions between local, regional, & national elections, so would underreport the change in national party allegiance.
And one Amazon reviewer who was impressively uninterested in getting political: "Their multivariant regression logit analyses show that the impact of economic class is equal to or greater than that of race and racial context."
Having done my due diligence: I consider the book refuted on account of its argument being about the causes, not the facts, of the party switch. The Dixiecrats shifted to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act. It's a fact, not a myth.
In your own statements, you've contradicted the myth as Klein tells/uses it. If the transition in the south from Democrat to GOP was made slowly over decades, rather than in the mid-late 1960s/early 70s, then it didn't happen in response to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (where Republicans voted for it more than Democrats, but that supposedly made it's opponents want to join the Republicans).
If your idea of "independent professional" is an LA Times reporter publishing for a site officially "devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective.", then we don't have a shared definition of the word "independent".
The authors of the book are a Canadian professor and a similarly left-wing professor at UW quoted favorably about things like inequality in the NYTs. They have no axe to grind in the debate, at least not in favor of Republicans. So I guess I'll continue to trust their professional research over your twitter anecdotes cherry-picking individuals (If you read above, notice I said "vast majority", not "all") and "independent" progressive policy perspectives.
If the south switched to the GOP because of racist voters switching, how come the least racist states switched first? If the primary cause was the 1964 Act, why did the switch take so long that Carter won with essentially all the southern states in '76?
I recall watching a C-SPAN lecture a few years ago about Eisenhower. In 1952, both the Democrats and the Republicans wanted Eisenhower to be their candidate. When the Republicans won that tug-of-war, the Dems enlisted Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson ran a half-hearted campaign because he, like apparently every single other American, thought Ike would make a great president. In 1956 Stevenson had gotten a lot grumpier about Republican policy, and ran a more forceful campaign, but of course still lost. I wonder vaguely if the nearness or distance of a devastating war with lots of middle-class and upper-middle-class loss of American life plays a role in our divisiveness.
Scott - you missed the part of the book that implicates social media and explains Klein’s change in attitudes.
I’d have to look it up (listened to the audiobook) but there’s a chapter that details media strategies at Vox where they deliberately try to “activate identities” and find that’s the easiest way to drive clicks. That could mean (examples form memory) benign things like 90s kids and left handed people, or any part of the intersectional collation.
The feedback loop here is- the more you profit off of activating identities, the more incentive you have to taller all of your behaviors to that paradigm—everything you do becomes part of your profit-driven identity activation until you forget how to see things any other way.
If you listen to the audio version of the book (like I did) you get to hear the giddiness in his tone change as he discusses the dashboard software Vox uses to monitor traffic on articles. It’s hard to hear it and not think of him and something of an addict.
My hunch is that gay rights are underrated in the polarization surge of the past two decades.
When I showed up at my elite US college in 2004, the student population definitely leaned Democratic, but there was a live split - I think 4 of the 7 guys in my freshman suite voted for Bush, as did a substantial minority of the other folks in my dorm. For the most part, though, those people were uncomfortable with the Republican party's position on gay rights; I recall a conversation between my roommate (an ambitious and extremely outspoken Republican) and one of our dorm neighbors, the daughter of a well-known Republican official, in which they talked about that as an issue where they disagreed with the party's position but hoped it would change soon. These were two extremely central members of the Republican coalition as it existed in 2004, but the social milieu of college students had moved fast enough that they were dissenting towards the nationwide minority of liberals on one of the central issues of that year's campaign.
The salience of gay rights and the Iraq war during the years I was in college was absolutely devastating to the Republican party's standing within that cohort. If that class was 60-40 for Kerry (I'm just guessing) it was probably 80-20 for Obama, and those two issues were doing almost all of the work. Shit, a few years after that an old friend of mine went to Harvard Business School; I asked him what the political breakdown of the class was and he said it was basically monolithic. At a business school! That would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier.
Think, then, what that meant for institutions that hire college educated workers; if their workforces were moderately Democratic-leaning in the 90s, all of a sudden in the 2010s they'd be massively Democratic-leaning without any real change in the hiring mix. Already liberal institutions, meanwhile, all of a sudden have an audience that's richer (for fundraising purposes) and more culturally similar to their own college educated workforces, and easier to talk to, and that facilitated a lot of them getting lazy about communicating outside their most natural idiom.
There's a whole Fox News centric story to tell on the other side of this, but I don't really understand it very well.
This. I voted for Bush the first time and at the time identified (weakly) as a Republican. I honestly don't remember how I voted in the midterms. But by 2004, there had been a referendum in my state putting an anti-gay marriage amendment in our constitution, and we'd gotten into Iraq. I became a democrat, and, at the time, a very angry one. I haven't voted for anyone with an (R) after their name since, and can't really imagine doing so anytime in the next generation or so.
If the big shift is 2000-2004, I think you can track it to those issues. I will, also, add one more thing. This was the era when the right was dominant in the culture. You had freedom fries, and boycotts of France, and if you're not with us you're against us. The right was winning all the fights and they were very smug about it, and contemptuous of us. I think that this played out in the other direction during the Obama years. When someone is both beating you and gloating about it, it really amps up and locks in that mutual hate you're talking about. My memory is that this really got going during the Iraq war.
I don't think this necessarily conflicts with the story I'm telling. Let me try to state it in a way that captures what you're seeing.
Anti gay marriage amendments were in fact broadly popular in 2004, which is why Rove et al wanted to put them on the ballot. They were, however, very unpopular with a specific demographic - college kids specifically, college educated people more broadly (but mostly college kids, age was big here) that was at that time fairly politically divided.
This resulted in a shift where "college educated" identity became aligned with partisan identity to a much stronger degree, and "fancy college educated" especially so. This shift in the polarization of a particular demographic had outsized impacts because those two demographics punch well above weight institutionally and culturally.
So, with that causal chain, gay marriage 2004 vote correlating more closely with Trump 2020 than Bush 2004 is exactly what you'd predict. Gay marriage drives a demographically small but powerful cohort from split into the D coalition -> mainstream institutions become more liberal, and liberal institutions become more narrowly focused on communicating in the idiom of the college educated -> non-college voters on the "no gay marriage in 2004" side are repelled by these shifts and move from split into the R coalition -> political identity is much more strongly linked to "college educated" cultural identity on both sides. Ike Skelton and Chris Shays out of the house, Katie Porter and Pete Stauber in, etc.
If the Iraq war may have driven college educated away from the republican party but apparently it didn't drive them from the Iraq war itself.
Not to be rude or anything, but more needs to be said to explain why a war weary republican electorate trying to purge it's more ardent interventionists from it's ranks is seen as a dangerous development. Why were the most bellicose members of Trumps cabinet always depicted as the Heroes by the press.
This talk of centrism seems to assumes that public policy is like a temperature gauge that has a default setting plus measurable degrees above and below it, rather than a rack of tools that different factions grab and utilize to inflict harm and/or bestow benefits. The people who use those tools often regret using them later on.
Always worth remembering that although "my side is just so much closer to being right than the other side, which is compromised of intellectual and moral barbarism" sounds very jejune *that doesn't mean it's not right*.
You're right that the US hasn't been able to accomplish much during a period of hyper-polarization, but this is more a symptom of the US's very poorly designed constitution. Americans are taught that their constitution reflects a special genius in its design, but actually it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus. As you note, through sheer fluke, consensus was possible for most of the first few hundred years (except for that civil war...) but now those good times are coming to an end. Hyper-polarization isn't going away, so if I were looking to save America I'd suggest learning to live with it by moving towards a unicameral legislative branch on a parliamentary model (no senate, no presidential veto, reduced supreme court oversight). At present the US might be going the way of the Polish parliament under the liberum veto: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Whose%20Voice%20Whose%20Choice_2.pdf
Unicameral parliamentarianism has two advantages:
1. Things can actually be done.
2. Voters know who to blame when things go wrong- the governing party.
It also has zero chance of happening right now. It's probably more likely than hyper-polarization going away in less than 30 years without a civil war or similar decisive event, though.
>Americans are taught that their constitution reflects a special genius in its design, but actually it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus.
Well if you still believe in a weak central government that will only act when given a strong mandate from its constituent states then that is a special genius. Things have certainly changed since then, but to call it poorly designed is missing the original point.
You say "it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus".
Is gridlock a bad thing? What is wrong with a govt that does the bare minimum - something that is likely in a system prone to gridlock? This is appealing to me as a libertarian. I think I believe govt generally does more harm than good anyway, and that its "doing" must
therefore be kept to a bare minimum. I'd like it to be only enforcing existing laws, but maybe be more intrusive in the time of pandemic - like mandating testing, contact tracing etc.
The problem with gridlock is that if it blocks the things you don't like then it also blocks the things you do like. Luckily for libertarians, they don't like most things governments do. However, for issues that they do want (like increasing testing and contact tracing), it also slows those issues down.
In addition, gridlock, or at least the systems that cause it, mean that compromises that no one likes are frequent. For one example, a lot of means-tested welfare systems have a cost involved in the means-testing[0], create disincentives[1], create bureaucratic issues for those who really need the welfare[2], and are really just a form of tax that applies at a different time[3], but means-tested welfare is the compromise between "no (or little) welfare" and "yes welfare."
[0]: the bureaucracy involved in running them is expensive
Gridlock doesn't mean the government will do less. Gridlock just means that what the government will do is decided spasmodically and is hard to change. The US government is huge and it's long term trend is growth, but it's hard to trim it or manage it in some overall rational way due to gridlock.
Can't help but think the simple solution here is to cut the Gordian knot & do a secession. As Scott has observed, the blue tribe is way less attached to America memes than the red tribe, so let red America stay as the United States & both coasts can split off. Florida can be it's own country, with Donald Trump as king! Then you can go back to Kansas having real contests between Kansas dems and Kansas repubs who actually represent their state - beating back Moloch with good fences.
Or not. That ship may have sailed, and with everything being so interconnected these days it might not be so easy to escape the sufficiently intense competition. Brexit hasn't seemed to spur a wave of localist English politics, the most major development recently (imo) has been the internationalist neoliberal Starmer purging his Labour party of leftists. Maybe going small just means placing yourself under the thumb of a hegemonic China.
I still think some kind of secession movement is likely in coming days. Red tribe anger is spiking & can only simmer for so long before it finds an effective outlet. The blue tribe meanwhile seems to be content to fight fire with oil in the form of a domestic war on terror. There's lots of speculation about a civil war brewing but I view this last year as instructive: despite everyone having guns & being incandescently furious, hardly any combat fatalities happened. My take is that the vast majority have too much to lose to throw away their lives on the barricades. Still mad as hell though, and in this case ignoring your enemy might just make them go away.
"Brexit hasn't seemed to spur a wave of localist English politics, the most major development recently (imo) has been the internationalist neoliberal Starmer purging his Labour party of leftists" You are forgetting about the political impact on Scotland and Northern Ireland. Brexit has put Scottish independence back on the front burner, and many see it as significantly increasing the likelihood of Irish reunification. (Independence is less popular in Wales, but support is growing there too – if Scotland and Northern Ireland successfully leave, Wales may well decide to follow.) Future historians may look back on Brexit as the event which finally destroyed the United Kingdom.
> Really the most interesting thing is the very end of the post, why is the US facing polarisation in a way that say Australia or Germany is not
> Yeah, that's the only thing in the review that actually made me think. One of my leading hypotheses was that social media has been driving US polarization, and this pretty much disproves that unless you add a ton of epicycles
> On the flipside, in that David Shor interview he linked a study looking at broadband rollout that did find it had significant effects boosting polarization. ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489?seq=1 ) Someone want to post this in Scott's substack comments btw?
I wouldn't say that's quite correct, Australia is facing about the same level of polarization as the US (both are at 45). Not sure what's up with Germany.
And i wouldn't say this disproves the internet -> polarization idea. After all, that is explicitly called out in the "Loss of geography" section. And social media is just a refinement of loss of geography.
"Australia is facing about the same level of polarization as the US (both are at 45)" You have to distinguish political polarisation as measured by some survey versus political polarisation as a lived experience. My personal experience of the two countries is that Australia has a lot less political polarisation than the US does, and I think most people who have experience of both countries would agree with me. If the numbers in some survey are saying otherwise, maybe that survey isn't measuring the right thing.
Speaking as an Australian who lived in the US for many years, the idea that Australia and the US have a similar level of political polarisation doesn't pass the sniff test. While the within-country trends make sense, whatever metric they're using doesn't seem sensibly calibrated between countries.
While people in Australia certainly tend to have a party preference, and maybe even a strong dislike for the politicians in the other party, I've rarely seen this extend to a dislike for the _supporters_ of the other party the way it does in the US. An Australian who says "I hate the Labor Party" is referring to the actual politicans, an American who says "I hate the Democrats" seems to be extending his disdain to the entire 50.01% of the country who support them over the Republicans.
Example 1: When I think of all the people I know in the US, I'm sure I can guess with almost 100% precision which way each of them would have voted at the last election. When I think of all the people I know in Australia, for most of them I have no clue. I know my parents' voting patterns (one for each party, they balance each other out) but couldn't reliably tell you those of my brother or my sister, or most of my friends.
Example 2: Things like political yard signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts or hats are virtually unknown in Australia. If someone has a yard sign for a particular candidate, it's probably the candidate.
I don't believe it's a coincidence that Australia is better run than the US either (witness, for instance, our orderly and successful response to the coronavirus).
To throw my 2c in: I agree with this generally but my sense is that there is a level of 'cultural contagion' from the US - i.e. more prominent conversations about the legitimacy of Australia Day, racism in sports etc are reflective of similar types of conversations happening in US media imo.
You could question how much momentum this effect has on its own in the Australian political climate - but it is definitely a thing that is happening and probably making Australian political culture a little more polarised over time. As a Victorian the extremely shrill nature of the politics and media coverage around the covid response didn't fill me with confidence that the political system here is some beacon of rationality.
Reading the reasons that Klein touches on, I do get the sense that Aus has perhaps some structurally depolarising features;
- Aus is a lot more ethnically homogenous than America is (whites still 75-80%), and no single minority group has any real weight as a political unit
- 40% of Australians live in 2 cities, and a very high urbanisation rate overall - less geographic separation?
- Aus has lower income inequality and a long run of positive economic growth, few major crises - less general political anger?
- Compulsory voting = less 'antipolitics' sentiment?
Compulsory voting is far more powerful than just that. It kills "get out the vote" stone dead. That means 100% of political campaigning by major parties is aimed at swing voters; anything that won't play to them, doesn't get aired (this tends to result in the parties attacking each other over scandals rather than substantive policy).
We also have the AEC preventing gerrymandering - without gerrymandering, fewer seats are safe (though there are definitely still quite a few) and that emphasises moderate candidates.
To respond to both: i was referring to the data from the survey given in this post. Apologies for not specifying, but you can check the graphs, and both the US and Australia, as of the current year, have the same level of polarization. But if it's the case that this survey is incorrect, as you suggest, than that does nullify the argument that social media has had nothing to do with polarization, since we no longer have data to back it up.
Well, speaking just from personal experience – social media is very popular in both US and Australia, yet just about everyone who has experiences of both countries agrees the US has a lot stronger political polarisation than Australia does. That seems to be evidence against the idea that social media alone can explain the difference. Of course it does have the problem of being based on anecdote rather than hard data, but I think it is an anecdote which the vast majority of people with familiarity with both countries would agree with.
Perhaps. My only experience, living in the US, is social media based reports on Australia, and from those it seems that the US and Australia are about equally polarized. But that's not good data at all, and like you say i'm not quite willing to trust anecdotes for a large scale trend like this. I mean, it's also quite possible social media made both Australia and the US dramatically more polarized, but the effect in Australia is lessened somehow.
The timing of congressional polarization seems more consistent with Roe v. Wade being a driving factor than the CRA, and also with the story conservatives tell about themselves (sincerely, I think). Moreover, during the 50 years after the CRA, white people consistently became less racist while black people got better off and more access to power. 'White identity politics' then became more pronounced during a period when black incomes were actually pretty stagnant compared to the previous half century, so I don't really buy racial resentment being a driving force.
As others have said, religion seems under-discussed as a factor. Maybe secularism finally hitting the US in a big way in recent decades has made conservatism increasingly desperate and pessimistic; other trends have had the same effect. The right these days seems to be driven by deep-seated pessimism and is constantly anticipating its own extinction, or at least that's my impression, and it seems at odds with Klein's.
re: "After Lincoln's death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship."
While Andrew Johnson was that bad, this implies that he was responsible for events but this was bitterly contested the whole time. (You might say the country was polarized.) Republicans in Congress kept Reconstruction going (overriding Johnson's vetos), and then Grant was elected. It really fell apart in Grant's second term and ended when he left office.
Also, this seems to imply that there was ever a time after the Civil War when the South was not a racist and violence-prone place? But the Reconstruction-era governments survived because the U.S. army was still occupying the South, and even so there was plenty of racist violence the whole time.
I recommend Ron Chernow's biography of Grant for a better view of this. (It's been a while so I might not have remembered it all correctly.)
The soft pedaling of the massive wave of racist violence in the South during reconstruction in this review is a disappointment from Scott. We know that he knows better.
I am not sure how you get that from the sentence above. Lincoln died within a month after the Civil War ended, so I'm not claiming there was some actual period of utopia. And I think it's fair to say Reconstruction had some successes early on, fading out after a few decades - for example, there were black representatives in Southern legislatures up until the 1880s or so.
The quote soft pedals how committed to racist militia violence the white South was right after the civil war. It was an active campaign that the North got tired of fighting but it required white people in the south to wake up in the morning, put on their Sunday clothes, and go lynching and burning. Which they did... for a decade.
Also, the phrasing around reconstruction as a "paradise of racial equality and universal love" makes it sound like unserious Kumbaya. It was a goal of having black people be equal citizens and participants in southern society.
I guess the soft pedaling is I feel that you made reconstruction sound more namby pamby fairytale then it was and then also omitted the active role of white southern paramilitaries in defeating it. Instead, it just sort of floats back to being a racist one party state... But no one is really responsible.
Also, the active and successful role of white paramilitary militia violence in the 1870's against what they perceived as unjust elected authority would probably have been informative to the current moment...
I think you might have mistaken a single sentence in a one-paragraph explanation of why the Democratic Party had a Dixiecrat wing, for an in-depth examination of all the problems of Reconstruction.
Risking a repeat of the accusation of reading too much into brevity, I think the phrasing of "Problems of Reconstruction" again makes it seem like "Reconstruction" was the problem... rather than the problem being the ongoing and ultimately successful paramilitary violence and organized terrorism to oppose reconstruction and the newly elected governments in the south.
That's why I feel this review stumbled with the phrasing. We have a sentence which rightfully blames Johnson for giving up on reconstruction, but we don't have one saying, "At the same time, conservatives in the south mounted an ultimately successful campaign of violence and attacks on elected officials culminating in the creation of a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship."
That's not a demand for super in depth commentary on the dixiecrats. I just wanted the review to put the onus for Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats where it should be, i.e. the paramilitary mobs who overthrew elected officials through the latter half of the 19th century.
I truly think that you need to take a step back, and reconsider how closely you're parsing people's phrasing. These aren't political platforms, or research papers, or even informational websites. This isn't a game where you can identify subtle deception by close examination of true-but-incomplete statements. These are blog posts and blog comments. At least in my case, please take my word that I had no such intent, and thus that you are reading something into my comment that was not there to begin with. And please then ask yourself whether this might be the case about Scott's post, as well.
Is the point that the USA is only now coming into the same levels of polarisation as other developed western nations, but is struggling to cope with it an argument that the governmental system (congressional rather than parliamentary) is no longer fit for purpose?
Are you familiar with the Will Wilkinsons thesis that the parties have been shifting along urban/rural party lines? This is an ongoing shift that has been further exasperated by globalization. These two ingredients alone, along with the downstream cultural implications, seem to me to explain the polarization change much more than any race narrative does.
One argument that I've found to be somewhat compelling is that as the federal government plays a larger role in local politics the conversation around national politics grows more polarized. That polarization isn't necessarily new, but that it would have been more focused on local issues in the past. The reason news and political discussion transitioned to national is not necessarily a technological one, but that as the federal government began to have a direct and tangible impact on everyone's daily life the only reasonable response is to care more about what it's up to. I'm not totally sure if this lines up with the polarization graphs, or even how you'd exactly measure the the level of impact the federal government has on daily life, though.
>This does not seem obvious to me. Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left.
When you say "Trump's positions," Are we talking "What Trump stated his positions were on the campaign trail" or "What Trump actually succeeded at implementing as President"? Because the latter might be described as mainstream, but the former definitely can't. Not unless "Ban all Muslims from entering the country," "Make Mexico pay for the construction of a border fence," and "the Democrats can't win an election without massive voter fraud" are mainstream Republican positions.
That last one in particular should carry a *lot* of weight, since you're approaching this from a "how to avoid civil war" perspective. "Candidate is looking into extralegal ways to retain power" is much more worrying in that regard than "Candidate holds extremely left-wing economic stances."
Interesting that World War 2 as a great antipolarization event isn't really mentioned either. Obviously the R or D doesn't seem some bad when you're fighting alongside them against Nazis...
And you'd expect the afterglow to match quite some time, especially in a time when all the "non-partisan" experts who won the war where widely trusted to order the economy, govern, etc... Between aging and the shine coming off in the Vietnam era, you would expect that to fade around the 1970-ish inflection point you note.
I also would hypothesise that as faith in the "Best and Brightest" continues slipping away, it's easier to assume those in charge are incompetent. Given human nature, this makes it a lot easier it to look at the other side and blame them for wrecking everything, as opposed to a grudging "they are on the other side but I still respect their competence, expertise, etc" which would work against polarization.
I wonder if there are any good "faith in elites" or "faith in experts and institutions" measures to check this against? Anyone know?
The graphs suggest that polarization started declining as early as WWI, and the period of maximally low polarization started around the Great Depression. I think you could make more of a case that the Cold War helped keep it low for a while.
Fair point. I tried to pull up that polarizedamerica.com study where the graphs come from to see study methodologies but the site doesn't appear to be up anymore?
Does anyone know what the measure of polarization was and how they quantified?
So hard to say more without looking into the exact methods, but some things that jump out using that method:
1)is congressional voting records really a good measure for what we mean by polarization?
2)if extrinsic events lead to a change in the type and number of votes, there will be a lot of noise in that data. Procedural changes, composition of a given Congress, elimination of earmarks, etc are a few things that would make me wonder if voting records is a good proxy, at least not without checking against other measures. For example, if everyone votes to rename a post office is that a "point" towards less polarization?
The nationalization was accelerated under Newt. From post war to early 90s, Republicans did great in national (presidential) elections, and poorly in local congressional elections. Newt's plan to win congress was to nationalize all politics, and institute the Hastert Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastert_Rule), which accelerated polarization.
The authors don't assume a two-party system; they "extract each respondent’s party identification, and exclude 'leaners' who only choose a party identification in response to a second survey prompt" and then look at the average difference in affect (normalized to a 0-100 scale) between someone's own party and all the other parties they reported feelings about. This is a better method than what I imagined and makes the graph more interesting!
For example, Canada's Conservatives (the right-wing party) had a schism right at the beginning of the trend (1987) and reformed in the middle of it (2000). I would have expected the reformation to increase polarization (since now right-wing people have no alternative parties) but the trend shows a decrease. Their appendix figure showing how many people declare a party affiliation doesn't jump up in 2000, either (which is what I'd expect to see if many pre-2000 right-wing voters were excluded as 'leaners' between parties). So the Reform-PC merger didn't really impact the polarization trend. Neat!
I am still not 100% clear on how they measured "party affiliation", but I now think it's something sensible. I was initially unsure how they could do this; in Canada, about 1/3 of people vote for neither the Liberals or Conservatives (leading, as others have noted above, to a "soft" two-party system) and very few people are officially registered party members. The paper reports the exact surveys they extract affliliation from, and the Canadian Election Study data is online (here's 2015 for example: https://search1.odesi.ca/#/details?uri=%2Fodesi%2FCES-E-2015.xml). I'm still not 100% percent sure which question they used for party affiliation, but my guess is that it's "Which party do you think you will vote for?", which seems pretty sensible to me.
Polarization wouldn't be as big of a problem if it didn't lead to unrepresentative governance and political paralysis. The big culprits here are stuff like partisan gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the Senate - all undemocratic institutions that work to limit partisan accountability at the ballot box for their failings in governance.
I do think that, but I believe it has value even if you don't believe so. The party that wins a majority should be able to pass legislation and carry out governance, be judged for that, and then be rejected if voters don't like them or what they passed.
I don't see any evidence that less democratically representative governments are more likely to be effective. The "democratically" part is key there, because even authoritarian governments have their constituencies they have to appease to maintain power (such as the military, key bureaucracies, etc).
Suppose that cities held mostly members of the majority demographic group and that rural areas held mostly members of minority demographic groups. Would you still favor popular rule in that case? Or would bias in the Senate, Electoral College, etc. be a plus in that case?
You can pretty easily look at countries with more proportional systems (e.g. Germany, Sweden, New Zealand) and see how their governance looks compared to the USA's. Obviously thats a selct sample. But you can look at things like the Human Development Index and see similar patterns
I want to second Brett here. The problems presented by polarization seem to stem nearly entirely from how bad our legislative system is at translating democratic will to governance (i.e., the senate/electoral college/supreme court make it practically random, and its full of vetos). If our system only "works" so long as the public is not polarized, then that's a bad system. Change it. The law, being an artificial construct, is a fixable problem. People's attitudes and ideologies cannot be reformed so easily.
And it's not even clear, as in our current Joe Manchin case, that political polarization even necessarily makes vetocarcy *worse*. As others have pointed out in these comments, if Manchin was more left-polarized the dems could get more done. The relationship between polarization and vetocracy is more complicated than it appears.
So count me in the "polarization is either neutral or benign enough such that it's not worth moving myself towards the center for de-polarization's sake, and it's the wrong focus of our efforts anyway" group.
This comes up in the book! Klein argues that the US' political system, including the parts you mentioned and also broadly the presidential democracy model, turns polarization into a much more intractable problem. From memory he says that the US is pretty much the only democracy that's done well with our model of governance, in particular one where the legislative and executive branches can be controlled by different parties at the same time. I believe his suggestion for why we've gotten away with that so far has been a) the parties not being well-sorted, as Scott talks about, and b) much of US history consisting of eras where one party dominates over the other.
Polarization still feels pretty squishy to me. The bias of declinism will mess with our instincts here.
But there's a whole book on it from a really smart guy, so playing along... I might go with internal migration patterns.
Urbanization took off in the last half of the century, it self-selects younger people with certain skills who, most importantly, are high on "openness to new experiences" measures, which anti-correlate with certain conservative positions. It clusters them in certain regions. They leave low population areas that swing faster in response to small demographic changes.
(OTOH... are internal migrants really less conservative? And what about Virginia as a case study? Is it any "less polarized" as a state since migrants turned it blue? Probably not. Some gaps and further research needed for this one...)
For a structural cause, poli sci friends of mine have talked a lot about the anti-pork thesis. Not sure the original source, but the claim is that increasing restrictions to prevent "pork" - handouts to congressional districts tacked on to other legislation - actually reduce the ability of parties to deal. It prevents you from peeling off a few moderates who could go home and claim, well, I voted with the other side, but brought home real benefits for constituents. Everybody hates pork in theory, but it actually a useful currency, it provided liquidity to the political system. Without it you just get gridlock and party line voting, because the tangible incentives to break have been cut down tremendously.
Or maybe we're just perceiving more "polarization" because of the pronounced gap between the median voter (50, no college degree), and the median social media user (20s, college)? So both overreact to the thing they can't control, the media / political environment? (I worry this comically understates the diversity of opinions in both politics and social media, so it's not really my favorite explanation.)
If you're still looking for answers, it might be worth contrasting Yglesias with "The Right Nation" from ca. 2000, from writers with different priors than Matt but also I think *trying* to be objective (and likewise failing in parts). The gaps between the two books might say more than either volume alone.
I think there's an important missing piece here, which of course has happened in part in the last year, has been the polarization inside the Republican party. I know two people who used to hang out and complain about the Democrats. Now they hang out and the talk about anything other than politics, since one of them is a big fan of Trump and the other is a Never-Trumper Republican. Liz Cheney, the No.3 House Republican and daughter of former VP Dick Cheney was censured by her state's Republican Party for voting against Trump. It's of course still very much in the air what will happen with the party, but if it doesn't change, then something is going to have to budge.
I mean, there's this big graph in the article labeled that way, but it seems to have no obvious relation to anything at all. Is this some sort of weird psychological test to see if anyone is paying attention or whether everyone is so polarized that they just immediately jump onto their favorite polarization-related hobby-horse?
Okay, so it takes the most conservative Democrat, and adds up the conservatism scores for all the Republicans who are less conservative. It also takes the least conservative Republican, and adds up all the conservatism scores for all the Democrats who are more conservative. It adds those together and divides by the total sum of conservatism scores across both parties -- seemingly a normalization step, but not a well-thought-out one: it could produce division by zero, since these scores go negative. Even aside from that, this is a horrible statistic, since it depends on outliers (the most extreme traitor-to-party on either side).
Even the foundation is shaky: "dim1" (there's also a "dim2") probably comes from principal components analysis, a tool of "exploratory statistics", meaning that even it is merely suggestive, not definitive. (That probably also applies to the other graphs presented in the same style, as being products of the same analysis.)
I feel inclined to make two notes, which aren't really related to each other:
1) The framing about Kansas Republicans and Kansas Democrats seems to miss that prior to a certain point, states tended to be really safe for one party or another -- there was an extremely stable system between the end of Reconstruction and the 1896 realignment, another really stable system (in which there was a Republican majority) until the New Deal, nearly uniform Democratic rule for about half a decade, and then another stable alignment from 1938-1952. When I read about Taft-Hartley and the rancor of the 1946/1948 elections, I don't see this taking place in a period of low polarization; looking at Senate and presidential races from this era, states tended to behave quite predictably (though the set of swing states was larger than it is now). Then Eisenhower comes in, banishes anti-New-Deal sentiment from the party, and you get a period of really intense depolarization -- by 1960 basically every state apart from the Deep South and northern New England is just 50/50 Nixon/Kennedy, like the nation -- and then polarization doesn't pick up again until the 1990s (defined as states preferring specific parties in a consistent way). The 1992 election -- well into your period of repolarization -- was the last one on record in which polling showed most Americans might've voted for more than one candidate (though this was because of Perot's presence), and Senate elections in the 1980s seemed to have patterns that verged on random, as the incumbents elected during the polarizing times of the 1940s had nearly all left by then. By 2004, there was a correlation again between the Senate races and the presidential one.
2) *very culture war content* Is the social justice movement really an identity-politics movement in the same way there are identity politics movements in countries with party list systems? In Israel, there is a party for Russian immigrants, parties for different kinds of Haredim, and so forth, which are strongly supported by those sectors, have negligible support outside of those sectors, and rather than having consistent positions just track public opinion from within those sectors. In the Netherlands, there is an identity politics party for Turkish immigrants (which gets votes almost entirely from Turkish immigrants) and another for hardcore Calvinists (which gets votes almost entirely from hardcore Calvinists).
Social justice doesn't seem to be like this; the minorities it claims to represent don't support referenda proposed by SJWs (like the affirmative action referendum in California), and often prefer candidates who are not very doctrinaire SJWs (like Biden). I'm not sure comparing it to more straightforward foreign identity politics movements is useful.
There were a few significant events that happened between 2000 and 2005...
1. The Republican president and congress decided to start 2 wars, neither of which went well. That mortally wounded the "both parties are the same" lie in a very public and ongoing way.
2. Fox News came into its own as a "conservative" news outlet. On the other hand, RW AM radio (eg Rush) had been a fixture since the eighties, and I don't know how much extra scope Fox provided.
3. The Supreme Court had a number of decisions (eg Bush v Gore) that pushed Democratic activists further away from the Republican party
4. This was the start of the Gay Marriage issue ramping up, which took ~10% of the population and made one of their defining personal attributes polarized.
>Why We're Polarized and the rest of Klein's oeuvre make a strong case that you would try to do something about polarization. Solve that, and a lot of the political pathologies of the past few decades disappear, and the country gets back on track.
But hold off on proposing solutions until you really understand the problem. It also possible that polarization is an effect of other things, and that treating those things would be better than trying to treat polarization directly.
>my own model here is that the social justice movement pioneered a much angrier, more radical, more in-your-face style of identity politics
I would suggest that these "identity politics" weren't very radical at all and that this is a misrepresentation of fairly standard debates. Can you find any evidence that they were "angry" or "in-your-face"?
How about the posters all around my neighborhood saying "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings"? (Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.) They're very well designed and have a relatively high production quality for something intended to be stabled to a telephone post. Ironically, to me the aesthetic seems most similar to actual Nazi posters from pre-WWII Germany.
Firstly, that doesn't seem very angry or "in-your-face" to me, unless the people who put up the posters were yelling at you or something? Posters and visual art are a fairly passive mode of expression.
>Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.
Secondly, I don't see how this reference is "pretty clear". It seems to me like you're inferring something that should not be inferred at all.
Also, can you show me a picture the posters for proof that this seems "similar" to the aesthetic of Nazi posters?
To the first point, there's a certain level of intimidation that comes from having poster like that up, and no one talking about them. Especially combined with seeing antifa running around in the street in masks (pre-covid, even) doing things, I don't know what, but the police were there blocking traffic, and yet it never made it into any of the local papers or blogs, I suspect because they're all left-leaning. These signs are literally calling for people's deaths. But no one dares to speak about them. I don't even want to be seen looking too closely at them.
To the second point, I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live here. Maybe try to imagine what a Mafia neighborhood is like? There are places you don't look closely at, people you get out of the way of and hope they never notice you, and a general sense that if you ever stand out of a crowd, you might get a "visit".
To the third point, that's just my personal aesthetic opinion, it doesn't really matter. And I unfortunately appear to have deleted the pictures I took, and as I said, I'm not too keen on taking more, but maybe I will. But I'll also need to be sure I don't leave any traceable metadata on the photos. If I do put up a link to them, will that cause any change in your opinion?
Overall, I'm very familiar with having people claim to be on " my side" that I don't really want there. That's all this has to be. Don't you accept the possibility that some people, who claim to be on "your side", may have gone too far? I'm not even asking you to disavow extremists on national television, the way Trump was asked in the debates. Just... that's a logical possibility, right?
>These signs are literally calling for people's deaths.
No they aren't. perhaps you should re-read the statement that you yourself quoted. And if this is your "personal aesthetic opinion" which "doesn't matter" then why did you write it? And I don't think that you should feel intimidated just because someone publicly displayed a piece of art that you find disagreeable.
Coming from someone who only just stumbled across this exchange, you're not appearing very charitable, though I acknowledge I may be misreading this entire exchange. I just wanted to let you know about my first impression, in case you care about how your arguments appear to people just reading the conversation.
From what I'm reading the statement you quoted may not be a good use of the word "literally", but the poster *is* making a statement that it's a good thing if certain people die. If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
(Mind, I have not seen these posters and thus also presumably don't live where Moon Moth does, so I don't have an opinion on whether this is the actual situation, but I think this is what one can glean from what Moon Moth wrote and I think it's fair to feel intimidated by such a situation.)
Yes, I may have mis-used the word "literally there." I'm not entirely sure what the right word would be. It's less veiled than saying, "That's a nice family you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to them." Maybe "implicitly" would have been a better word?
> If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
These are some extremely big "ifs" and I see no reason to assume they are true. Neither do I see any reason to make assumptions about what the artist meant to imply.
You feel differently if the poster said "Jew" instead of "Nazi"? How about "Commie" instead of Nazi?
Saying it's a good thing if certain people die is calling for their deaths, although not necessarily advocating murdering them. And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
>And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
I don't know what you mean by "shortage" of Nazis. If there's even one or two the point of the poster still makes sense. There's nothing wrong with niche art and there's no reason to feel threatened by it.
I don't think the second thing follows from the first. No I'm not ok with the poster referring to Jews. I'm ok but probably squicked out with it referring to Commies, and I'm pretty much fine with the Nazi version. I don't think there's a useful general rule here. I think each claim should be evaluated on its own merit.
In general, I think that the tool of generalizing a particular to a general, eg "Every time an outgroup member dies an angel get it's wings" is overused. The particulars are different, and we should be willing to exercise our judgement.
Yes, "literally" was the wrong choice of word. "Implicitly" might be better. The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths. Are you happier with that phrasing? What about the graffiti that says "save a life, kill a cop"? Would you consider that literally calling for people's deaths?
As for my personal aesthetic opinion, I mentioned it because I thought it was ironic and darkly funny. It's literally (correct usage there) the least important part of my comment.
As for intimidation, I used to feel more like you suggest. Then some things happened to me. Now I feel differently. *shrug* It's not safe to talk about in public, so I'll just say that this is one of those situations where it's much better to learn from the misfortunes of others.
>The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths.
Seems like it's simply saying that it's a good thing when a Nazi dies to me. I don't think it's calling for people to die.
If this entire debate revolves around things you "feel", posters that you never show a photo of, and events that you say you can't talk about in public - then I think that's not a very convincing case.
Basically, they pointed out that the elections from 1988-2020 bear a lot in common with the elections from 1876 to 1900, while the elections in between are quite different. 1876 to 1900 and 1988 to 2020 are two periods that are highly polarized, and have extremely close presidential elections (not one margin of 10 points or more), with the popular vote loser winning the electoral college twice each. 1904 to 1984 is a period that is not very polarized, and the majority of presidential elections have a margin of over 10 points (often with landslides for opposite parties not far apart).
I think that these periods can be refined a bit further if we think about the history of US party systems. It's traditional to say that we are now in the Sixth Party System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System, and links to the earlier ones). The first party system was 1796 to 1820 or so, Federalist vs Anti-Federalist. The second party system was 1828 to 1852 or so, Democrats vs Whigs. The third party system was 1860 to 1892 or so, with Reconstruction Republicans against Redeemer Democrats. The fourth party system was about 1896 to 1928, with Progressives in both parties, and a Populist third party. The fifth party system was about 1932 to 1968, with the New Deal system. The sixth party system was about 1972 to 2012, with the Republican Southern Strategy.
It seems that the third system and the sixth system were highly polarized, with very close elections, while the second, fourth, and fifth party systems were very anti-polarized - the two parties chose an obscure point of tariffs as their main differentiation, but otherwise existed only as meaningless electoral coalitions, that intentionally kept race issues out of Congress as long as they could.
Introducing national propositions on issues, like some states now have, and like Switzerland, might reduce polarization by, for example, letting people oppose abortion but vote for Democrats, or raise the minimum wage but vote for Republicans.
How does a discussion about the fall and rise of polarization over the court of the middle of the 20th century not mention the phrase, "New Deal Coalition", even once? It even shows up in your graphs: They all have spikes in the late 20's and they drop sharply in the late 70's. The coalition of ethnic whites(/organized labor/Catholics), liberals, blacks, and Southern whites created an electoral hegemony that, when it could stick together, was able to absolutely dominate the government from 1932 to 1976 (with fading but still present power until the 90's). This meant that the Republicans were thrust into an adapt or die situation, so they adapted by moderating towards acceptance of the New Deal vision of government (and, when they didn't, they died really hard, in 1964). There's a reason the Republicans did not control a unified Congress between 1956 and 1996 (and the short control in the 50's was super fluky and had to do with a super-popular Republican President's coat-tails in Eisenhower -- 1932 is really the correct year).
The New Deal Coalition collapsed for a lot of reasons. The cultural unification of the mass industrialization era declined over the course of the 1950's and 1960's, so by the 1970's it became possible for one party to be consistently tarred as the 'liberal' party. Nixon's 'moderate Republican' image was tied up much more with his stances on the New Deal government and much less with his cultural liberalism, because he pretty much had none. The Republicans could start biting into the ethnic white/Southern white portion of the Coalition which was becoming increasingly upset about the social and cultural change happening in the 1960's and 1970's -- yes, including the Civil Rights Act, busing, and other racial issues, but also including things like views about ostensible Democratic failures on the international stage (while anti-communism and foreign policy hawkishness was something both parties had strong wings in favor of in the post-war era, and Nixon was the one who pulled us out of Vietnam, the Democrats got associated with the anti-war movement in a lot of people's minds) and an increasingly libertine cultural approach (drugs, sex, and rock and roll). Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic President to be able to pull the New Deal Coalition together and he embodied these things so much to so many people that the Coalition collapsed around him in 1980.
There's a lot more to the story (the beginnings of the conservative movement go further back than the late 60's -- the rise of the religious right, too, which WAS a separate thing at first), but the broad picture is there: American politics was very underpolarized in the middle of the century because it had a hegemonic party. When the Conservative movement reached its apotheosis with Reagan, it actually failed to establish a similar hegemony, only barely managing to pull the culture towards themselves during the Clinton years (while Clinton triangulated well after the drubbing liberal Democrats had gotten in 1980, 1984, and 1988, he was not himself a conservative Democrat, although he sometimes played one on TV). What cultural pull the conservatives had managed to establish declined over the whole period and, I think, collapsed in the Bush years. They never managed to create the kind of cultural consensus created by the Great Depression, the war, and the New Deal and they never managed to create the electoral hegemony the Democrats had enjoyed in those years. So the country just kept slipping towards polarization.
Yuval Levin takes on this question in what at least seems to me from your description of Klein's work to be a better way in 'The Fractured Republic', focusing on the sense of cultural consensus and unity that was built up in the early 20th century and the way that it declined in the later 20th century. He doesn't dwell too hard on the details of the New Deal Coalition, either, but I think he does a better job of examining the underlying mechanics. Klein's focus on racism as the motive force of US history isn't insightful, it's just the standard party line for him and his now, cooked up so they can have a free hand to recreate American society in their image. The Dixiecrats and their motion through American politics were an important force, but they were one among many. Levin focuses more on the thesis that consensus, unity, and depolarization are not actually a natural thing, they were an aberration created by the relatively unique conditions of the early 20th century (mass industrialization, the rise of radio and television as highly centralized mediums, the mass impoverishment of the Great Depression and the mass mobilization of the Second World War, etc) and that the breakdown of this unity and consensus over the course of the later 20th century is a natural fragmentation of society. He, like Klein, doesn't necessarily think that polarization can or should be dealt with, but he does think we need to learn how to live and how to work with it. Build institutions that are capable of functioning in a social environment where polarization is common, such as in the late 19th century.
Post: I also have some quibbles about the timing of the Dixiecrat's inception and its role in depolarization. White Southerners were Democrats from the start, as soon as they started regaining the right to vote in the later 1860's and throughout what was left of Reconstruction. These 'Dixiecrats' survived through a century of drastically changing levels of polarization. Even the level of black suffrage changed mostly independently of polarization in this period: black suffrage in the South was substantially gone by 1900 but this is 20-30 years before any of your synthetic polarization indices show decreases. White supremacy had been re-established and became an article of political faith long before it became a stabilizing force in national politics.
Overall, I'm dis-satisfied with the level of actual historical discussion in this discussion of history. Polarization is a complex phenomenon, it takes actually digging into the details to understand it. A few synthetic indices aren't really going to tell you much on their own.
Plenty of democracies are equally polarised, but (i) elections are fair and seen as such, since they are run by an independent election committee, and (ii) the winner can govern, since the prime minister is elected by parliament, so "winning" means winning both the legislature and the executive. The U.S. has (i) a throughly corruptible electoral process, and (ii) a byzantine governing system, which makes it likely that one party controls the executive and the other controls at least half the legislature. As long as politics was local, this peculiar system worked OK. Politicians who brought home the bacon could do whatever they wanted in Washington, and voters didn't know or care. But now, voters are better informed, so that U.S. politics has become nationally polarised - just as it has always been in smaller countries. But unlike these other countries, the U.S. system isn't built for these conditions.
My analysis is based on posts and articles by Matthew Yglesias and David Shor, as well as personal familiarity with the democratic system in several other countries (Israel, the UK, and Australia - the UK is about as polarised as the US, and Israel probably more so).
> "Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
I recently realized that many people wouldn't frame the issue this way. I was listening to, of all things, a Malcolm Gladwell podcast about civil rights lawyers in the 1950's, in which he offhandedly summarizes some of their early experiences as "they were losing". *Losing?* I thought. That didn't seem right; they were building support, raising awareness, and getting better results with each successive case. In hindsight they were already well on their way to near-total victory. Then I realized that Gladwell and I had different mental baselines. My baseline was a near-zero rate of change; anything above that baseline was a civil rights "victory" because it shifted the long-term status quo. Gladwell's baseline was a near-infinite rate of change; anything below that was a civil rights "defeat" because it allowed injustice to persist for that much longer.
The "who's changed more" analysis of political polarization depends on a similar discrepancy. In the absence of more sophisticated statistics (e.g. measuring skew in the distribution of political positions), claims about which side "has become more extreme" should be taken as claims about what the correct rate of change is. And such claims can't be separated from object-level political positions.
So for whatever it's worth, I'm not very convinced by this argument against Klein's framing. I disagree substantially with Klein both on how fast political consensus ought to change (slower!) and on whether its change since the 90's has been for the better (no!). Even so, I think it's clear that the correct rate of political change for societies like ours isn't zero, or even very close to zero (say, <5% of the rate that the median Democrat's position has changed). If nothing else, technological changes necessitate some political changes; also the status quo leaves, shall we say, plenty of room for improvement.
Exactly this. It seems to me an unhelpful framing to say "Republicans are closer to where they were 25 years ago, so Democrats are polarizing." It leaves out the existence of objective reality entirely.
Sure; Trump still holds the 1995 Republican position that "the Kyoto Protocol is too strong a measure to adopt to combat climate change". In the meantime, 25 years of climate science has occurred. If the Republicans have not updated their position at all to account for that, and Democrats have, we have to say Democrats are being polarizing?
In 1995, healthcare was 12 percent of GDP. Now it's 18. Republicans want the healthcare system to stay substantially the same. Democrats have suggested changing it. They're driving polarization?
You are taking it for granted that the 25 years have strengthened the argument for doing something drastic about climate change. What I remember is one person after another telling us that if we didn't do something drastic in the next ten years, the game was lost. I don't remember any of them saying, ten years later, "It's too late now — might as well live it up until the world ends."
Some time back I tried the experiment of going through the first few IPCC reports to see what rate of warming someone who read them would expect. For the first report, the actual rate thereafter was below the bottom of the predicted range. For the second report the projected rate of warming was a little high. For the third the actual rate was again below the bottom of the projected range.
If people were modifying their beliefs to accord with objective reality, what would have happened?
To take an older case ... . Back in the 1960's the equivalent of the current climate campaign was the campaign against population growth. People made a lot or predictions, with the extreme end of the respectable range being Ehrlich's claim in _The Population Bomb_ that there would be unstoppable mass famines in the 1970's, with hundreds of millions of people dying. What happened was the precise opposite — populations continued to increase in poor countries, per capita calorie consumption went up, not down, extreme poverty rates went sharply down. I haven't noticed many people responding with "we were wrong, population isn't a problem after all." Instead, like other failed end of the world cults, the believers just push the predictions a little farther ahead.
My favorite case of leftish disinterest in objective reality is a minor one, the widely believed claim by Ron Suskind that a Bush aide identified the other side as the "reality based Community." The aide was never identified, no evidence was ever offered that the statement had been made, but lots of people who found the description flattering took it for granted that the story was true.
I don't think there's an issue isn't with the framing. Once you assume that it is 'natural' for the frame of reference to move left (or right) at a certain pace I think you end up with a circular argument. I think it would be more straightforward to simply argue that polarization is not, in fact, a problem, that the left moving further to the left (which is, by the neutral definition of the word, polarizing) is simply justified. And of course that's what most people (including Klein) more or less believe: polarization isn't really the major issue; that people still disagree with them (or the extent to which they disagree with them) is the issue. But polarization has negative connotations, so instead people redefine it rather than questioning whether it (or their side's half of it, at least) is bad.
My own view is that local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life vs national-politics-as-entertainment is the crux of this problem, not polarization. Politics has become a spectacle, where what's at stake is less about policy outcomes and more about symbolic gestures and abstract point-scoring in a reality TV game show. That's why both sides are less willing to compromise -- unlike policy outcomes, symbolic victories are zero-sum. Also, if the fight is about abstractions neither side can ever really win, so the same fights continue indefinitely.
This gets obscured because activists will often organize around policy issues, but often these are just totems in the symbolic fight. How effective has the Woke Left been at actually improving the lives of marginalized people? How effective has Trumpism been at restraining the Woke Left? If the people in either camp really cared about effectiveness, wouldn't they consider changing tactics? I see no signs of it; I see both sides doubling down on symbolic gestures, as if it's an end in itself, as if that's what politics is really all about.
Yes, of course empty symbolism has always been a part of politics. I'm saying it's come to occupy a much larger mind share in the last few decades, and I think this is 100% driven by changing media technologies & the incentives they create: Decontextualizing everything; forcing complex issues into simple, flattering narratives; pushing emotional buttons, etc. etc.
If this is happening at the same time as rising polarization it can look like polarization is driving the dysfunction & gridlock, but I think that's a red herring. The problem isn't that people disagree -- democratic republics are designed to handle that -- the problem is that activists on both sides have lost sight of instrumental goals & grown disconnected from reality.
It is very late and I should not be awake, but I have ADHD and a crazy idea. Please excuse me for a moment as I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist and don't want to stay up even later tracking down sources.
I live in Texas. I grew up here even though I wasn't born here. I am also a Democrat. Yes we exist. The reason I'm a Democrat is also what I believe to be the source of why we got so polarized: Cracked.com.
Hear me out: there was a time that I was rooting for Rand Paul to win an election (can't remember what he was running for but I wanted him to win). This was around the time the Tea Party was picking up steam. I was fresh out of high school, I had burned a bunch of bridges, and was staying with relatives because my dad had kicked me out as soon as I graduated. I had nothing better to do than surf the internet all day everyday for about 6 months straight. I was about as republican as an uninformed Texas-dwelling high school graduate could get. But that all changed when (the fire nation attacked) I found Cracked.com.
At the time, Cracked was at its popularity peak. Millions of clicks on every article. The ones I want to draw particular attention to here though are the regular "true life experience" articles they ran. These were listicles "written" by people actually living through different extreme/unlikely/ horrific experiences: the guy who survived over a year in AlQueda custody, the lady who escaped from a cult, working prostitutes and other sex workers, homeless people, I think they got that guy who cut off his own arm that inspired the movie 127 hours, people who survived natural disasters and military insurrections, members of "weird" religions, people who worked behind the scenes on everything from television shows to politicians to sewage waste treatment plants etc.
Around the same time I was getting exposed to these people with heart wrenching tales of survival and oppression, Cracked's most popular writers were pulling further and further left. David Wong and John Cheese are the main writers I'm thinking of here: Wong was more abstractly political, but Cheese was the real converter.
Read his articles and you'll find stories of growing up in squalor with unhinged people, with a subtle, almost subliminal implication that these horrific people are only like this because they've been born, raised, and inculcated with the values and virtues necessary to survive while living in such a poor (in more ways than one) environment.
All of these taken together paint a picture that is violently against the conservative rhetoric of "individual responsibility", "disregulation", and "American exceptionalism".
Remember, Cracked at this time had readers in the millions everyday, and they were leaning more and more left as time went on. The only reason I don't still go to the site anymore is that they fired a bunch of really good writers which lead to two of my favorite video series getting canceled (After Hours and Some News if you're curious). They were able to get a young Texas republican to change parties in less than a year. Imagine what they did to people who were already on the fence.
Even though I don't still go there though the damage had been done: unless the Democrats do something to totally ruin the progress we've made, I'm a member for life.
Spider Jerusalem once said "Journalism is a gun with a single bullet, but if you aim it just right, you can blow a kneecap off the world". My (conspiracy) theory is that Cracked was in just the right place, at just the right time, to provide exposure therapy on a massive scale to the younger population
Sorry accidently posted without finishing my thought.
So yeah anyway, Cracked made young people want to balk against "the man", which started a chain reaction leading to the eventual polarization of America. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Good night
Why Ireland is not as polarized as the US? Our elections use single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies. The argument that you have to vote for the Xs if you don't want the Ys to win doesn't work here - you can vote for the Zs, the Qs, the Ns... and finally, okay, last option on the ballot goes to the Xs, since they are at least better than the Ys.
The UK has a first-past-the-post system, where there are multiple parties but only two realistic options in most constituencies, and any government will be lead by either the Conservatives or the Labour party, and it is increasingly polarised.
I note the graph above says the UK is becoming _less_ polarised, but the source article says the researchers tried to limit results to the top two parties. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the vote, and were in government, ten years ago, but have lost half their vote since then. The Scottish nationalists have gone from 10% of the Scottish vote to dominating elections completely. And the Brexit referendum has been _extremely_ polarising. So, I would have some questions about the research.
I think you cannot talk about polarisation in different countries without looking at voting systems, for that radically changes incentives.
Here in Germany, we do not have the Winner Takes All system of the US, so the incentives for political parties are totally different. If you have more than two parties representing an non-miniscule part of the population and are not in the situation whetre one party has enough votes to govern alone, demonization of the Others will not work, because you cannot really demonize someone and then form a coalition with them.
This is what happend in Germany, in my impression: We were pretty clearly polarized in the 70s and 80s, with the CDU representing the more affluent, more conservative, more christian, more nativist parts and the SPD representing the poorer, more liberal, more foreigner-friendly parts. The FDP were the enocomically liberals and made a coalition with one of them, contributing the 8-10 % needed to top the 50%. Between 61 and 98, the FDP was part of every government, and the other part was either SPD or CDU.
But then, times changed. The Greens entered the picture in the 80s, Die Linke in the 90s. Votes spilt between 5 parties meant smaller chunks for the big parties, and a need for more diverse coalitions. We had SPD/Green coalitions from 98 to 05, than a coalition of SPD and CDU, the big old enemies.
Why? Because if the CDU had stayed as conservative as it was in the Kohl years, it would have trouble to start a coalition with either SPD, Greens, Die Linke, and their own numbers have been decreasing since 83, when the Greens entered the picture. Merkel moved the party towards the middle, while Gerhard Schröder did the same with the SPD, so much so that it is hard for most to tell their politics apart.
But it is not a uniform trend. The rise of the radical ADF in the 2010s had the CSU (something like part of the CDU, it's complicated) try to move back to the old days of ultra-conservativism, only to then do a 180 and try to be like the Greens now. It's hard to predict a trend now.
That a radical party like the AFD could get 10+ % is a total novum for us, so the radicalization of the internet may well be a real factor driving parts of the electorate towards polarisation. It just isn't the only one.
Genereally, my impression is that the modern times offer more diverse identities, which in a voting system other than Winner Takes All will lead to the creation of more parties. These force the parties to be open to coalitions, which tends to move them towards the mainstream. At least, that is what I thing happened in Germany. In Israel for example, the story is a totally different one, from what I can tell.
The consequence of a coalition system is that polarizing against a party has to be compensated for by getting closer to other parties. If the CDU rejects governance with the AFD, then they have fewer alternatives to governing with the Greens, so they cannot afford to be very polarized with them, compared to when they can threaten to 'trade in' the Greens for the AFD.
I see a trend where there is an increasing polarization between parties that are globalist or populist, which pushes traditionally opposes parties together. For example, in The Netherlands, classical liberals have become much more similar to leftists, with the leader of biggest classical liberal party adopting woke language (like structural racism).
However, the polarization between globalists vs populists is far stronger than the old polarization was between left and right, who were willing to govern with each other.
The graph about polarization in sweden feels like it ends right when it would have gotten interesting. In 2010, the sweden democrats (SD, conservative nationalists) got into parliament, and stayed there. Throughout basically their entire stay they have been met with exclusions (invite every party into the discussion, except SD; open to cooperation with every party, except SD and anyone open to cooperating with them), protests and various accusations and scandals about being nazis. And just last months I've seen news indicating them getting called pigs, misogynists, etc by prominent politicians.
Perhaps other countries aren't decreasing their polarization *now*, it's just we're a decade or two behind the US in terms of the rise of polarization?
Facebook was for sure a thing even in 2010, but I don't recall twitter being mainstream at that point.
The Netherlands had a big populist revolt against the elites starting in 2002. Flanders was much earlier, with a Flemish populist party gaining a lot of votes in 1988, which quickly resulted in the other parties collectively agreeing not to govern with this party.
Scott is there not a certain tension between on the one hand the fact that you vote 'almost straight Democrat' by your own account, and your strong record of opposition to anyone else ever claiming that the Dems are better than the Repubs. Like, if the Dems are really no better why vote for them?
I don't think I've ever said the Republicans are no worse than the Democrats.
I often complain about Democrats exaggerating how bad Republicans are, but that's to be expected - any group will exaggerate the badness of their enemies. If people frequently underestimated how bad Republicans were I would be annoyed at that too, but that's not the sort of error propaganda departments tend to make during a total war.
In fairness, I didn't say you had said it, just that my impression was you tended to come down hard on anyone saying they are better. Perhaps that's wrong.
That graph for polarization in Britain as a function of year is the clearest sine curve I've ever seen and it hurts my heart to see a straight line fitted to it.
That graph of polarization in Britain as a function of year is the clearest sine curve I've ever seen and it hurts my heart that they fitted a straight line to it.
Excellent post that I would not have known I needed to read until I read it. Thank you.
”A Republican writing a similar book might argue that although the Republicans have the advantage of being able to say "We have beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z", the Democrats have the advantage of being able to say "People with beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z are the enemy". And Klein has already shown that negative partisanship is more powerful than positive partisanship! Having a clearly defined set of people to be against can be more unifying than being anyone in particular yourself.“
Nicely summarizes this current political climate. Hate fighting hate? 🤔
American polarization is not exactly the same as regular polarization as America is not ideologically polarized but socially so. The average establishment Dem and the average establishment Republican don't have very much ideological divergence especially when compared to the rest of the Western world where the overton window is considerably larger. American polarization really rests on historical animosity and America's obsession with relatively superficial things like identity politics.
If you think polarization is a bad thing, which seems implied, then, surely, the only thing you can possibly do to reduce it, is to take a step towards the other pole.
There are huge numbers of single-issue voters who won't vote for a pro-choice (or pro-life for the other side) candidate. Back before RvW, the parties were less polarized on abortion but it's almost at the point where it's impossible to get chosen as a candidate for the Democrats if you are pro-life (and vice versa).
For large swathes of social conservatives, the only reason to vote for a Republican president is because they will nominate another conservative SCOTUS justice who will overturn Roe v Wade.
If your frame for evaluating a candidate is always "do they support abortion rights?" (I am moderating my language here) then all other considerations become rounding error. Other cultural issues (guns, prayer in school, SSM, trans rights) come along for the ride but abortion is the ur-issue that started to drive the parties apart.
It's worth considering this in the light of the constitution's guidance that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Many people on right see the abortion issue as not just a moral issue but as an attack on the Constitution.
If the power to regulate abortion were reserved to the states then the people of Kansas could make different judgments than the people of Hawaii and the politicians of Kansas (and Hawaii) could be held to account for those decisions. As it stands, the nationalization of this decision by RvW gives cover to politicians in Kansas as they make ever more extreme rules that they never have to account for locally because they know they will be struck down by SCOTUS.
I predict that, if RvW is ever overturned, the urgent need to vote for Republican presidents will be taken away and some of the polarization will fade.
There are two reasons I can think of that the Tea Party has been more successful than the AOC wing: money and votes.
My mental model (which may be wrong) of the Tea Party is that they tend to be older and thus tend to vote more and tend to have more disposable income. My model of the AOC wing is that they are younger and thus less likely to vote and less likely to have disposable income.
Politicians want votes to get re-elected. And politicians want campaign contributions because they have expenses to run a campaign, and you can use the rest creatively for your own amusement.
"(W)here nobody could tell you the difference between the two major parties (or, rather, they would wax rhapsodic about the parties' differing positions on a 1920s treaty, and then when you interrupted and said "no, I mean today", they would say "oh, no difference"). This was baffling to me. I would ask Irish people how they chose which party to vote for, and it would usually be something along the lines of "ah, we're a Fianna Fail family, always have been, always will be, someone from Fine Gael killed my great-grandpa during the war. Never bothered to look at either side's position on the issues, but still hope to get around to it one day."
Well, yes 😀 Though both parties which were centre-right (Fine Gael being slightly more to the right, see the Blueshirts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts , our homegrown version of the Blackshirts and Brownshirts and Fianna Fáil having some Old IRA connections being slightly more economically left) moved even more to the centre to compete for the (growing) middle-class vote, where Labour joined them (and left the traditional working-class vote to be scooped up by Sinn Féin) and both went more for the 'business friendly, light-touch regulation' economically while moving socially more liberal.
Before that, the major differences were the economic/class ones - Fine Gael being seen as the party of the "strong farmer" and the incipient professional classes, aspiring to more respectability. Fianna Fáil being slightly more the worker's party, not as left-wing or urban working-class as Labour but the party of, say, the farm labourer as distinct from the farmer (my grandmother, who worshipped Dev, said "he made the farmers pay their workers a decent wage" and my grandfather, being a farm labourer, she always voted straight FF, reared her kids to do likewise, and at least my mother raised us to do the same).
In the 1941 poem by Donagh MacDonagh below, the "teacher, solicitor and bank clerk" would be the archetypal Fine Gael party members and voters:
Dublin made me and no little town
Donagh MacDonagh
Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements
The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats
Devouring the fair-day between them
A public-house to half a hundred men
And the teacher, the solicitor and the bank-clerk
In the hotel bar drinking for ten.
Dublin made me, not the secret poteen still
The raw and hungry hills of the West
The lean road flung over profitless bog
Where only a snipe could nest
Where the sea takes its tithe of every boat.
Bawneen and currach have no allegiance of mine,
Nor the cute self-deceiving talkers of the South
Who look to the East for a sign.
The soft and dreary midlands with their tame canals
Wallow between sea and sea, remote from adventure
And Northward a far and fortified province
Crouches under the lash of arid censure.
I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land
The evil that grows from it and the good,
But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city
> Fine Gael being slightly more to the right, see the Blueshirts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts, our homegrown version of the Blackshirts and Brownshirts
I think Klein misses something very important, and to conservatives, very obvious about "vetocracy." It ties in so well with his overall point that I can only assume he misses it because at heart he's a Democrat who cares as much about the Democrats winning (getting their, and his, preferred policy) as he does making polarization better.
If the Democrats (or Republicans) want to pass a bad law, and do not want to pass a different law that is a good law, then the Republicans (or Democrats) are better off making sure nothing at all passes instead of what their opponents want. Mitch McConnell is a sometimes hero of the Republicans because he has been able to sit on the Senate and stop the Democrats from putting any of their stupid (to the Republicans) policies into place. For instance, look at the $15 minimum wage discussion now. Democrats are saying $15. Republicans are against $15. If the Democrats asked for ~$9, I bet the Republicans would vote that in, and quickly. But they're not asking for $9 ("good law," compromise), they're asking for $15 ("bad law," no compromise). The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that $15 is too high. And recall, Republicans are more often from rural areas where $15 is a LOT higher than it is in a big city. A few years ago San Francisco's equivalent of $17/hour was Alabama's $11. A $15 minimum wouldn't affect SF very much, but would destroy Alabama's economy. If the Democrats decide to push forward with $15 instead of a compromise, what possible reason would there be for Republicans to pass the law? They should refuse to pass the $15 minimum wage, and defeat it in any way possible.
This isn't purely a Republicans Refuse To Pass Good Laws issue, as there are times Republicans want to pass a law and it's defeated by the Democrats. That said, it is much more likely that Republicans want to keep things as is, rather than changing. It's probably part of the core reason we call them conservatives. That shouldn't be surprising. Democrats more often want to change things, try new things, etc., than Republicans.
I'm not sure this is true - I know we have to say "Republicans are conservative and conservative means no change", but Republicans want lots of things. Lower taxes, more school choice, more tariffs, border walls, immigration enforcement, rollback of various regulations.
It sounds like maybe you're saying something like that a compromise would often look like "Republicans accept Change X in exchange for Democrats agreeing not to try to push Change Y for some number of years", and the Democrats aren't cohesive enough to credibly promise that. I agree that's an interesting dynamic, though I'm not sure how much it matters in real life.
It's hard to speak of an entire segment of society in huge general terms, but I believe that conservatives tend to genuinely prefer less change overall.
I've long had a theory that conservatives like to take a situation/scenario/system and push for improvements within that system. They tend to maximize efficiency and power within a certain environment. They tend to create rigid rules, designed to solve iterative problems within a system. These are genuine changes (new laws to go back to the original discussion), but their focus is intersystem improvement, rather than systemic changes.
The other side (progressives) more often pursues entirely new systems, attempting to break the molds of the current society and find new ways of operating. They want to solve systemic wrongs, and are willing to abandon existing systems in order to try new approaches.
As an example, we can look at the minimum wage discussion. A $9 minimum wage is an incremental change, that would have fairly minimal effects on society. Also, conservatives seem fine leaving the $7.25 in place anyway.
A $15 minimum wage is big enough to be a systemic change, fundamentally altering segments of society. This is often explained as intentional - that there is a desire to alter society through a much higher minimum wage.
Obviously these two approaches are in tension, and we see plenty of evidence of that tension. On the other hand, working together can produce an overall better society. The progressives identify systemic problems and agitate for big change. The conservatives evaluate the effects on the existing system and try to incorporate and adapt the new thinking - or reject it as incompatible.
Progressives end up steering the ship most of the time, while the conservatives act as a kind of gatekeeper or correction device for weeding out bad ideas. In a society where the conservatives are too powerful, the country stagnates and becomes too rigid - society fails to adapt as conditions change around it. In a society where progressives are too powerful, there is often chaos and constantly shifting ideas - society breaks down as core institutions are broken up and conditions don't stay the same long enough to develop new ones.
We may be looking at a short term situation where "the Democrats aren't cohesive enough to credibly promise that" - which is a problem for long term stability. If the Democrats cannot advance acceptable compromises, the Republicans feel the need to push back more than normal. This leads to a downward spiral of relationships and a breakdown of the process.
As a democrat, I feel like one of the big sources of polarization is gun freedom/control. At least it's used as a wedge issue and my impression is that there is a sizeable chunk of the populace that will always vote for the person most in favor of a broad view of the second amendment. Even though I support basic gun control for the same reason I support drivers licenses, I'd really encourage my party to just drop the issue entirely. For two reasons:
1) Though gun violence is problematic, it's exaggerated and any gun control that had the slightest chance of passing would have minimal impact on such a thing. We've made 0 progress in my lifetime, maybe it's time to give up?
2) Can't we trade this for support in another realm? I would gladly take single-payer healthcare in exchange for completely dropping gun control as an issue. Single-payer healthcare is actually fairly popular so this isn't totally an implausible trade if we thought dropping gun control nets a 5pp gain in the polls.
Yet I feel like my party will continue aggressively supporting gun control precisely because it's the opposite of the other party. If someone were looking to deescalate political polarization, gun control would be where I'd start. I'd also be curious if anyone with more contact with pro-gun rights people could comment on how likely any would be to change their voting if gun rights weren't an partisan issue.
I feel similarly about immigration. I see immigration as a net good, but aside from refugees, I don't see that we have a moral imperative to accept any specific percentage of would-be immigrants. I'm a bit baffled that it's become a central issue for Democrats; it seems like something that should be relatively easy to compromise on. The shift may be purely a matter of negative partisanship, though, just as you suggest about gun control.
With immigration, a lot of the wedge issues are immigrants already in the US, and refugees at the boarder.
For those already in the US, kicking them out is seem as pretty shitty, plus it's a very salient issue for many since a lot of the immigrants who would be kicked out are personal friends.
For refugees at the border, it's debatably a moral imperative, plus the controversy is often about the ways they are treated, especially during the Trump administration.
I live in a very pro-gun area and own guns myself.
If Democrats could drop any cultural attacks planks (including gun control), I think it would help ease concerns a lot among average Republicans. I don't know too many single issue gun voters, that they would suddenly think about voting Democrat, but it would help with other compromise positions.
They gave up about 10-20 years ago, but have decided in the past few years it would be fun to roll that Sisyphean boulder back up the hill to die on while mixing their metaphors.
Is gun control more like this than anything else? Lots of people will always vote for the person who's most pro-life/pro-choice, most pro-police/pro-BLM, etc.
1) Gun control is relatively non-central to Democratic positions and is mostly taken as an anti-Republican position, compared to other issues like BLM or expanded healthcare.
2) Democrats are unlikely to make non-symbolic progress on this front (and barely make any symbolic-only progress) and it's practically impossible for gun rights to get more loose than they currently are, so there's not much risk from letting it up.
3) Republicans appear to effectively use pro gun-rights as a rallying cry and fund raiser. Democrats have had little success in rallying a pro-gun-control movement with the same vigor, we'd find something else to sneer at Republicans about if that left the public eye.
So I think removing it as a partisan issue has an asymmetric effect where Democrats win more than they lose strategically and suffer no practical losses legislatively.
Compared to pro-life/choice, Democrats have a clear need to keep fighting the fight lest they have material losses. And pro-choice is a more effective get-out-the-vote and such than pro-gun control is (in my uninformed view), relative to the republican side of the equation. I would also guess that gun-rights voters would be low-propensity voters if they didn't have the issue in a way that pro-life voters would not.
First is the effects of a series of crises - the Great Depression and WWII, followed by the Cold War. This produced a generation where it was the norm for partisanship to be subsumed by more pressing concerns. I don't think it's a coincidence that the growth in partisanship among the public really took off in the 1990's when the Silent and greatest generation were dying out coinciding with the end of the Cold War. I think younger people (I'm 52) like Klein don't fully understand how the Cold War and the ideological battle against Communism generally influenced American politics more generally by forcing a consensus that bled over into other areas and was led by two generations of people that thought in those terms.
The second factor is the growth in power and authority (perceived and real) of the federal government as compared to state and local government. When issues become nationalized and are adjudicated at the federal level, then that raises the stakes. This also applies to the courts. A good example of this is Roe v. Wade which unintentionally created the binary division over abortion we see today and prevented the healthier kinds of political debates on the topic seen in other countries. Even Justice Ginsberg, in her earlier years, had reservations about Roe:
"Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed, reflected most recently in the Supreme Court’s splintered decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."
And abortion has been one of the major catalysts for ideological sorting today.
>And the Dem presidential nomination went to Joe Biden, a moderate who wouldn't look out of place running for president in 1988 (in fact...).
1988-edition Joe Biden wouldn't recognize 2021-edition Joe Biden, and not just due to some extra wrinkles and less hair. 2021-Biden would not even approach being a 1988-moderate.
Your cheap joke devalues your analysis and glosses over the differences that mark 33 years of changes in the party as reflected by that blank canvas of a politician.
This should not be taken as saying people can't "evolve their views," either; just that doing so requires actual change, and if he has actually changed your joke is moot.
No story about American polarization can really be started without discussing the urban / rural divide. People like Klein always think that big ideas shape history, but they don't. Trends and forces do, and most trends and forces come down to expressions of human behavior and their access to technology. Our least politically polarized time was shortly after the founding, when a town had to literally meet in a church or a barn and hash out their politics, most political decisions didn't extend beyond the decision makers, and most meetings were done in groups under Dunbar's number. The counter argument to this usually starts with federal/anti-federal stuff, but that was the vast minority of political decisions being made. Most where on the town/county level and never made it into the history books because it just was an agreement to use 4 rails on fences instead of 3 because Goodman Yoder's cow kept getting into Mrs. Hancock's flowers.
Now, we extract above-average academic achievers from their home communities (while making academics more reliant on social capital), place them in an environment with a ~4 year churn of the population, move them to be in charge of lots of stuff they don't have skin in the game on, and wonder why we don't have the cultural institutions that keep bad things from happening.
In the mean time, we concentrate the academic underachievers (aka low human capitol) out in the hinterlands (rural or urban) and wonder why depression, crime, and drug use is rampant and why social institutions like churches and mutual-aid groups like unions fail.
Does anyone here know anyone from high school who a smart go getter that turned down college to chose to start a small blue collar business in their rural or ghetto home town and contribute to the human capitol of the community?
I think this is missing a structural explanation: we're polarized because the American system is structurally set up to favor two parties and no more. This is an accidental by-product of the constitutional requirement that the president be the majority choice of the electoral college (if no one wins a majority, the vote is thrown to the house of representatives, which no one wants). This gives ordinary voters strong incentives to choose one of only the two most prominent choices. Parties can therefore only define themselves on one principal axis, and other possible axes are after thoughts, and only two parties can at any given time emerge as a source of plausible nominees for president. Third parties are doomed to irrelevance for presidential elections.
Now, this need not determine which parties seat members of congress, and indeed sometimes third parties do win some seats, but the gravitational pull of the big contest for president drags the rest of the federal contests into alignment with this same two-party system, creating effective federal duopoly.
At the state and local level it's possible to move somewhat further away from this two-party trap, which is why you see many more parties fielding plausible candidates for local positions. But the whole system is still tugged towards duopoly as what seems like an unintended consequence of the electoral majority requirement in the constitution.
Now, the two parties square off and define themselves in opposition to each other. There are no third parties to join in coalitions to help elect candidates, so the kinds of compromise that coalitions can build are impossible. This need not cause polarization, but it seems very likely to be a factor intensifying it.
I should add this mattered a lot less when the president mattered less, but with the rise of the "imperial presidency", this dynamic has become more and more important.
So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
If a policy choice is binary, and the voters are clustered nearly evenly at yes/no, then one party should court one group, and the other party should court the other group by saying "yes" and "no", respectively. They will presumably hope that that view grows in public support, and eventually dominates, and their policy position will be seen retrospectively as the correct binary choice.
We can model this numerically: one party says 0 and the other says 1. They are as far apart as possible. If a policy has a range of possible positions, going from 0 to 1, and the voters are evenly spread out, then staking out the barely distinguishable positions around the middle [.5 - epsilon, .5 + epsilon] should be in a sense optimal, as you suggest.
If a policy has two primary ends to it -- you lean more towards yes or more towards no -- but possible smearing of positions towards the middle -- build up, phase out, spend a modest amount toward it, or cut spending a modest amount -- then the two parties should get pulled both towards these extremes by their fundamental posture and then maybe back toward the middle by their practical decision; maybe they would end up at 1/3 and 2/3.
You might think a candidate could always win by staking out the middle position, but if the issue is one that will eventually face a verdict of history (this war was wrong, say) the party will never distinguish itself by choosing correctly, and runs the risk of looking worse than another party that heads for the center but makes a few wise choices closer to the extreme on positions that are carefully chosen and turn out to be "right".
Take any issue you like and you can probably see how even a binary choice allows for this smearing between making a choice of position and a practical extent of support for it. Pro-war / anti-war? How pro-war are you? How anti-war are you? No wars, ever? Cut the federal budge / raise spending? By how much? How fast?
So I would describe this as the tension between making a decision about which side of an issue you fundamentally are on, in the hopes of getting it right by the verdict of history, which pulls you al the way toward one extreme end, and making a pragmatic determination as to how far to go in practical terms, which probably pulls you back toward the middle, maybe landing at 1/3 and 2/3.
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Let me answer by taking the example of Iraq: I am in my early 50s so I have a somewhat longer view of US wars than Iraq. When I was a child the Vietnam war was a recent memory, and indeed it was still being wound down in my early school years.
I would describe the period from the mid 1970s through early 1980s -- roughly a decade -- as one in which the new consensus view was that the US had allowed itself to be drawn into wars too often during the prior 25 years. The war machine had taken us all for a ride. The consensus position was probably not strongly distinguishable for Democrats and Republicans.
Then Reagan staked out a new position, easily distinguishable from the consensus, by fairly extraordinary covert involvement in wars in Latin America, and big actions like the mining of the harbors in Nicaragua and the invasion of Grenada. This of course generated intense opposition.
Then Bush the elder presided during the first gulf war.
It is my sense that Reagan and Bush as republican presidents little by little broke a post-Vietnam war consensus against the US using its military might openly in wars that were clearly not acts of national self-defense against imminent threat. The position that it was ok for the US to do so became, for a time, a republican-owned position. You can still see this polarization in the January 1991 congressional resolution to support the first gulf war.
However, many democrats defected to the republican side, either by being convinced of the rightness or the issue or because they believed the public wanted the war.
The pattern repeated with the AUMF for the invasion of Iraq:
Republicans in both the house and senate took a position of close to 1 for the war, whereas in the house democrats took a position close to 0.4, and in the Senate they took a position close to 0.6 (just from the tally of Democratic members' votes on the AUMF).
Democrats were dragged "up" closer to the Republican position on the issue, and ended up on net being close to the middle. Republicans were overwhelmingly for the war, so of course the vote passed.
I think it's reasonable to believe that Democrats moved toward the Republican position out of the belief by about half of them that the war would come to be seen as the "right" thing. If the war had been won decisively and easily and American's had been greeted as liberators as promised, and the Democrats had stayed at a default position of 0, they would have looked like foolish pacifists to the general public. By moving, as a party, to the middle, they staked out safer ground.
The judgment of history I'm referring to is this kind of near-term result, so perhaps that's not the right term for it. I'm talking about what the voters will think a few years down the line. I do think parties expect to be judged by these kinds of decisions.
I left out a point, namely that the Republicans in this case gambled on an extreme, because going to war is a binary decision, but you could frame the issues facing the country in the 1980s and on for 20 years as "should the US aggressively use its military might to topple or resist foreign powers that look or sound somewhat threatening toward the US, without being an undeniable imminent threat?"
In that view a 1 would be "very often" and a 0 would be "almost never". The brief consensus in the late 1970s looked a lot more like 0 than 1.
Reagan dragged us way closer to 1 but not all the way there (consider all the wars we didn't fight). The Democrats were split and on net were somewhere closer to 0 without being all the way there.
Both of these in my view represent something like hedged bets that the best answer was closer to 1 or 0 without being willing to go all the way there.
I think the reason for not staking out the extreme position and for not going to the exact middle is to have clearly distinguishable positions in opposition while also gambling that one side or the other will eventually be proven right in the eyes of the public. When it looks like one side might lose such a contest, you act expect that side to move toward the other one, and if this continues eventually you get consensus, and the issue ceases to be a point of distinction between the parties.
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
Thank you, I appreciate your questions. They have helped me clarify my own thinking; I may have meandered a bit, but I think I can now state this a bit more clearly:
Some issues are perennial. On these kinds of issues, public opinion might be like a pendulum swing, or it might be fairly stable. In either case, we might expect the parties not to stake out extreme positions, and in fact these issues might not be seen as partisan issues at all. But such issues are barely issues. Neither party can make much political advantage out of those kinds of things.
Other controversies have a beginning, middle and end. Think of large conflicts in American history: should slavery be abolished? Should the USA try to gain territory from coast to coast? Should full civil rights be granted to all adults, regardless of race and gender?
These kinds of controversies do eventually reach some kind of resolution. Moreover, there is often some kind of medium-term public judgment that one side was right and the other wrong. Until that point, in the middle phase of such a controversy, public opinion may swing all over the place.
At the start of such a controversy, there might be a fragile equilibrium with neither party taking a strong position, defaulting to tacitly supporting the status quo. This is the kind of situation I described in the late 1970s with regard to military adventurism.
In that kind of situation, I expect that often, either because one party sees a chance to take a stand for what they believe will later be judged the right or winning side of the controversy, or because circumstances force a decision, one or the other party will stake out a position far from the center, which they hope will eventually win. If the other party then joins them at this position, the controversy instantly ends: there is a new consensus at this new position.
But if the other party picks the other side of the fight, their desire to be proven correct will drive them not to the middle, in some attempt to be the voice of moderation with the greatest appeal to all voters, but to be the counterweight, hoping that the other side of the issue will be judged correct once events unfold.
New controversies yield new occasions for such polarization constantly. These controversies eventually end with one side or the other winning: slavery is abolished, the US did indeed conquer and incorporate territory all the way to the west coast, universal adult suffrage was passed, prohibition was ended as a disaster, etc. But new issues take the place of old ones.
What we don't see is one issue after another where both parties take barely distinguishable positions from each other, almost never sharply disagreeing. Or to the extent that happens, it's a complete non-event, because there's no need to talk about it, campaign on it, etc.
I think the driver for this is the desire to choose a side on a controversy that partisans believe can and should win.
Increasing globalization in the 1970s and the rise of the internet/IT in the late 1990s and early 2000s have slowed income growth among people without some level of post-high school education. I think a more useful dichotomy is between people who are doing well relative to the median vs people who aren't. This also seems to correlate better in time. Your review makes it seem like Klein focuses a lot on racial dichotomy (white vs not white), and while I think this is a factor, I don't think it's the primary one.
The colors of the links on substack are lighter than the standard link color. For me, that causes them to blend into the background and makes reading harder. Any chance we could get the color to be a bit darker/more saturated? (There are some web accessibility standards which provide a good guide on which colors should be used on a white background)
Regarding the reason why the coalitional makeup of the Democrats would make them more structurally resistant to ideological polarization than the Republicans - I haven't read the book, but I have listened to Ezra Klein talk about this on podcasts, and the point he made there made a lot of sense to me. It goes basically as follows -
The Democratic party cannot become as ideologically polarized as the Republican party, because the racial coalition aspect also translates into having a lot of conservatives. There are a very large number of black, hispanic, and other non-white voters who are conservatives by inclination, but stick to the Democratic party because they (rightly or wrongly) see the Republicans as the Racism Party.
If you're a black conservative, your choice is between the Democrats, who may be more left-wing than you like, and the Republicans, who are basically still seen as the party of the Dixiecrats. Again, whether or not the reader agrees with this idea, it is clearly one accepted by the great majority of black voters in the US. And we see similar patterns across many other groups who make up the Democratic coalition.
But this means that as a result, the Democratic voter base is not merely more racially diverse, but also ideologically more diverse. You need to make enough room in the party not to completely drive out voters like this, and thus the reason the Democratic party has remained more centrist overall than the Republican party, which doesn't have any equivalent group of liberal voters who are "forced" into the party.
Could there be a tradeoff between polarization and corruption?
In Paraguay when you ask someone how they choose which person to vote for they often answer that they'll vote for so-and-so because they promised some inane, selfish, short-term material benefit.
People here vote for the person who promises them a public sector job (a position that will open up after the candidate wins and fires all the supporters of the other party), or the one that will help them cut the line to get free healthcare for their parents in the overloaded public healthcare system, or even just the one who throws the best parties.
This has many disadvantages that the United States doesn't have and cannot afford to have. For example it leads to a public sector that is full of lazy incompetent bootlickers. But it does have an advantage: when the population is poor and concrete material conditions are at stake in every election, there is little room for abstract ideological considerations.
Some concrete examples of what I mean:
1) I know some pro-choice feminists who voted for a literal Catholic priest for president, just because his concrete proposal to spend more money on hospitals in rural areas was more important for most women than an abstract agreement on the moral question of abortion.
2) Said Catholic priest won an election by allying himself with free market liberals and literal communists. Nobody here thought this was weird at all. After all, the point of elections is to win and appoint your supporters to well-paid positions, not to advance some meaningless ideological agenda.
3) I know someone who has, in different elections, voted for a corrupt fascist party, a corrupt technocratic neoliberal party, a social democrat party, a Trump-style populist party and a corrupt agrarian socialist party. I know this because they voted for the same party every time, and that party changes ideology depending on who is their most charismatic member at the time.
I tends towards these explanations that aren't mine, but I feel are heavily under-discussed:
1. Two party system: not like the UK with 2 big parties, but really the US seems unique in only having 2 real options for leadership and president. This may have worked temporarily, but it seems obvious to me that human nature will turn this situation in two warring sides each considering the other to be the ultimate enemy. Most other democracies have smaller parties with enough power to keep the big ones from going too extreme.
2. End of the cold war: the out group used to be a scary foreign country that threatened to overtake and destroy America. Such an external threat simply doesn't exist anymore. It seems natural to me that everyone needs an outgroup and now that wars between superpowers is a thing of the past, people will find their outgroup in local politics.
Really eager to hear criticism of these explanations!
Good points. I'd also add specific wedge issues to your list. A number of them all seem to play into the shifting US secular-religious landscape: the role of women in society and how it relates to the protestant family unit (workplace, abortion), gay rights, diversity, and most recently, trans rights.
When you say "most other democracies", do you primarily mean the continental European countries, most of which were substantially constitutionally recomposed in the aftermath of the second world war?
The difficulty here is that you are trying to compare the constitutional stability of systems, when the US constitution is 230 years old and has survived a civil war and two world wars mostly intact, the UK constitution has been staggering on for so long that nobody can really put a start date on it, but many point to the original insurrection against King John that led to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. The UK has also survived many cycles of violence, civil war and social upheaval without being recomposed. These are then being compared to a bunch of constitutions that have only existed since the last major violent event finished in 1945. The French are famously onto their fifth republic since 1789, the same year that the US constitution was ratified.
The test of a constitution is really whether it survives a period of polarization like the present and regains stability or whether it collapses into civil war or revolution. Having a "good weather" constitution may feel great when the sun is shining, but in the long run, a country's success will depend more on whether it can get through the storms without sinking. Many country-level constitutions in Europe are substantially untested in this regard, and the EU level is a horrific mess of contradictions that seems pretty unsustainable.
A British-style parliament (like the US and most of the Commonwealth and former British Empire) typical leads to a two-party system. Continental Europe typically has multi-party systems with rainbow coalitions in charge. Several of these are currently experiencing pretty serious instability themselves. France, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Poland are all seeing the rise of some pretty extreme characters in their politics. More than 10% of seats in Germany's Bundestag are taken by a party, which (if you believe the German liberal press) are basically neo-fascists.
I'll reserve judgment on which system is better until I see which survive the next 20 years or so.
The very notion of representative democracy and a free country relies on a system that is widely trusted to be structurally fair. Things like the peaceful transfer of power rely on extremely large majorities believing that it is better to be a loser under a fair system, than to be a winner in an unfair system, where you have only won because you successfully deposed the other side in a coup. In the US at the moment:
* Nobody believes that the US system is structurally fair
* Nobody apparently seems to believe that a structurally fair system is even possible
* Nobody is even trying to construct or promote a system on the basis of its structural fairness
In the absence of faith in the system, what you end up with is everybody voting and acting for personal gain. This includes trying to reconstruct the system in ways that favor you. This manifests as the kind of extremely political polarization that we're currently living through.
It was not always thus: the American Dream was the shining vision of the systemic economic fairness of the United States. MLK's vision of a colorblind society was a vision of a structurally fair social system.
The notion that this is about the Republicans swinging right while the Democrats stay where they are is frankly laughable. If anything, the Republican leadership clings hopelessly to the notion that the American system is structurally sound, even as the economic unfairness of globalization has totally discredited that notion with their voting base, hence Trump. The Democrats meanwhile have turned social and legal unfairness into their calling cards, spent four years discrediting the 2016 election result and whipped up a mob who want to burn the whole thing down and replace it with ... what, exactly? This is not particularly clear, but my guess would be some kind of system where "fairness" is given out as political patronage. This is normally the case when a system is substantially designed by angry left-wing protest groups who want it to favor minority interests. It is hard to find historical examples where this has been attempted without significant downside!
I can't really see any of this getting better any time soon. Redesigning political systems is like trying to change the wings of an airplane while it is flying. Doing it in the current environment is like trying to change the wings while flying through a storm.
I have to question your thesis that "nobody believes that the US system is structurally fair" - at least as compared with alternating coups. From where I sit, the radicals on both sides believe the system is just about that unfair, and tilted in favor of their opponents. But no one else agrees; Joe and Jane Random aren't rioting, let alone plotting or participating in an insurrection.
At a guess, most reflective Americans believe that the system isn't perfectly fair - but much much better than any system that comes from the barrel of a gun. And the non-reflective repeat whatever slogans their leaders produce, in much the way they cheer for their local sports team, and to little more effect. Or they are sick and tired of the never ending cycle of supposed end-of-the-world crises, and discount the hyperbolic rhetoric semi-instinctively, in the same way they discount other sales tactics. (The human mind is well optimized for social skills, especially those involving attempted cheating.) Or both.
Some may want the system changed in various ways - e.g. replacing the electoral college with direct voting for president. But that's in the line of making a more or less OK thing better. (Except for those mostly young radicals who want perfection - nothing else will do - and believe it's attainable.)
Meanwhile, the pundit class declares doom and gloom - because that generates more clicks, more publicity, and thus greater earnings for them. Believing what they say - especially the level of emergency they declare - is strictly optional - but OTOH, humans are also great at finding reasons to honestly believe whatever it benefits them to claim.
"While pork-barrel spending, in many cases, can undoubtedly undermine voter confidence in government by making them associate government with corruption, its role as a possible curative for hyperpolarization seems to make it a net positive practice for preserving American democracy.
Since many scholars argue that the number one goal of all politicians is to win re-election, removing incentives that assist that goal would consequently reduce the chances of politicians being willing to compromise.
Therefore, when pork-barrel/earmark spending, a type of spending designed specifically for incumbents to boast of their legislative achievements on behalf of their constituents, is removed, politicians must turn to other methods to win and maintain the favor of their constituents to protect them from both primary and general election challenges.
Since politicians can no longer appeal to their constituents’ material interests, they are driven to appeal to their social and ideological interests."
"Ezra Klein is great." This opening salvo felt like a thesis. I was hoping in the course of reading to adjust my opinion of Ezra upwards. But instead I feel most deflated... Ezra Klein's "Why we can't Build Anymore" a quick article of his outperforms his full length book. The concluding sentence felt like praise, but was it?
My folk understanding of this was that it was an outgrowth of the McGovern-Fraser commission making party nominations much more small-d democratic. This lead to candidates more directly chosen by primary voters, leading to greater ideological sorting of politicians, leading to greater ideological sorting of voters, leading to more extreme candidates winning primaries, etc. This seems to dovetail with stuff like Cory Gardner losing his reelection campaign by 10 points after completely failing to hew to the center: he was terrified that doing so would get him primaried. The timing doesn't seem like a perfect fit for this story, but it's not terrible, and because this story is one about a snowballing feedback effect it has the virtue (vice, really) of not committing to a tightly constrained timeline.
An interesting question in polarization: how many times does the average punter play a game of Three Card Monte before deciding that the game is rigged against them and checking out.
Similarly, how many times can a person be on the losing side of an election before deciding that democracy is rigged against them and becoming an insurrectionist/revolutionary?
It is entirely possible that any form of stable centrism is invariably unstable, since it typically leads to a stable group being excluded from decision making and therefore steady attrition in democratic participation. Once you get to the point where you have a similar number of people who have lost faith in the system as are voting for the winner, you're almost invariably going to have something happening like the Capitol insurrection.
Maybe a lack of political swings with most candidates looking basically the same should be a major red flag of a system about to go off the rails.
The trouble with this story is that neither party has had control of the government for a long stretch of time at once - nobody has consistently been on the losing side of the elections. The people at the Capitol Insurrection were just coming off of 4 years of their preferred president in office. So apparently the answer to "how many times can you be on the losing side of an election before becoming a revolutionary?" is "once is all it takes."
It doesn't work as a story about polarization between the parties. It might work as a story about people who don't feel represented by either/any party, if those people become something other than a small and mostly denigrated minority.
But it needs something added about the scale of the losses. The various levels of government in the US give me a lot of things. It doesn't do any of them perfectly, but I'm better off with peace, relative safety, relative security of property, enforceable contracts, etc. etc.. I'd much rather be here than in Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc.
This is true even though it pretty consistently does things I dislike, which I can't find any viable party interested in preventing it from doing.
It was still true when the consensus of all parties was that my sexual preferences and gender identity were pathological. It's still true even though some citizens believe my religion prevents me from having any ethics or morals whatsoever.
It stops being true somewhere between when my sexuality, gender and/or religion significantly impair my chances of earning a decent living, and when the state targets me for violence or incarceration because of them.
Whether I then emigrate, radicalize, or join in a rebellion then depends on what I think of my/our chances, and what I have to lose. The same presumably also applies to participants in the Capitol Insurrection.
It looks to my like part of the polarization in US politics is due to the "radicalization" option. People who don't want business as usual try to push the party nearest to their preference to actively support that preference.
> they don't seem to become much more polarized until 2000-something
The chart showing the the snapshots of public's ideological distribution in 1994, 2004, and 2015 leaves out such an interesting chunk of time. There's an animated version on this page, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/ . Watching that, I see a significant shift right among Republicans from 2004-2012 (while Democrats basically stay put), and then both both parties shooting apart from 2012 forward.
I wonder what was happening in each of those periods?
My observation, and Scott hints at it, is that this short essay from the NYT identifies the most important cause of polarization https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?_r=0 The reason seems pretty obvious: the current national obsession with identify politics within US large corporations and cultural institutions naturally forces people to follow one of their most basic instincts, which is to take sides with their side.
> Along with the nationalization of politics came a nationalization of news. In the old days, you either read the city paper or watched your one local news channel. Since these papers/channels had both Democratic and Republican readers, they would try pretty hard to avoid offending either group, and had some incentive towards objective journalism.
As far as I can tell, in many other countries, most of the media have always been national, with much of it having various partisan alignments. The American situation where, for a long time, the mainstream media at least tried to be neutral, was somewhat unusual.
This could explain that other countries have long been as polarized as the US is now: their media have always been national and partisan, like the US media are now. I'm not claiming that this is actually the explanation: I have no idea if it is, or if the political polarization charts are even meaningful (especially when compared between different countries).
Always felt that a lot of polarization could be traced back to efforts to get more people involved in politics. Back when I was growing up, a sizeable proportion of the population were ambivalent. A constant refrain (which I was dubious about) was "how do we get more people involved in politics?".
Of course the way you do this is simple. You make it entertaining, and you make it angry. This approach has been so successful that it's hard to read about sport without mostly consuming politics. You could argue that the politics is now secondary, as America's politics serves as the globe's entertainment.
Regarding vetocracy and infrastructure: "American litigiousness developed specifically in the 1970s – it’s exactly how what the authors of the paper call citizen voice is enforced. In contrast, on this side of the Channel, and to some extent even generally on this side of the Pond, laws are enforced by regulators, tripartite labor-business-government meetings, ombudsmen, or street protests. French riotousness is legendary, but its ability to systematically change infrastructure is limited, since rioting imposes a real cost on the activist, namely the risk of arrest and backlash; in contrast, it is impossible to retaliate against people who launch frivolous lawsuits."
I'm confused about the claim that low levels of polarization are abnormal. Here's a toy model which explains my confusion. Let's say we have a two-party system which differs only on one dimension (e.g. liberal-conservative). Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that.
This doesn't seem to be the case with Republicans and Democrats. So where does the model go wrong? Well, one way it can break down is if the electorate is polarized and people too far from the center become disaffected and stop voting for "their" parties. My sense was that something like this happened in the 1960s through 1970s - voters were polarized on civil rights before the parties tackled the issue, and 60s counterculture was another (related) source of grassroots divisions. (I got this picture mostly from Bill Schneider's "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable." Schneider also claims that it's the fact that the US is a particularly religious country that has caused polarization to keep increasing past the 60s - the conservative backlash to the 60s counterculture has been much stronger.)
I don't really see how party polarization could ever happen *before* mass polarization. I mean, if we tweak the toy model to reflect the fact that parties aren't one-dimensional, there's another route for polarization: party platforms might move to extremes on issues that most people don't care about either way, and some of the base cares about a lot. Then the public will take its cue from the party and polarize as a result. Something like this probably happened on some issues (gay rights maybe?), but given that the US parties have been getting increasingly unidimensional [https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm "a single dimension accounts for about 93 percent of roll call voting choices in the 114th House and Senate "], this just doesn't seem to be most of the story.
So I guess given the lack of data on mass polarization before the 90s, I would expect that normal people *were* issue-polarized before 2000... though maybe not as affectively polarized?
Does my reasoning check out? I'd love to see holes poked in the toy model.
A major problem with your toy model is that getting people to actually vote is at least as important as converting them to your party. We don't have clientelism to convince people that voting is worth their time, so fear is often used instead. That requires sufficient separation from the other party.
That makes sense, except my understanding is that turnout doesn't actually affect outcomes in presidential elections very much. See e.g. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1246805891493629953 But maybe congressional elections are the right place to look instead.
Whether or not outcomes are effected is a completely different question to whether turnout increased. If there is increased mutual hatred and increased mutual turnout, then the impact on turnout can be substantial, but the impact on the outcome low to none, because both parties draw more voters.
Oh, I see, by "getting people to actually vote is at least as important as converting them to your party" you meant that the parties are engaged in a turnout arms race, and leaving the arms race would result in the other party winning. Got it, thanks.
One big factor this ignores is that while it might be rational for the party *as a whole* to move towards the middle, individual candidates are selected by a smaller electorate of party members, not the general population. Which means that for any individual candidate its rational to appeal to their own base, and in particular the elements most likely to vote in primaries, who tend to be more extreme. You see that in particular right now with moderate GOP congressmembers worried about primary challenges supported by trump
This also concurrs with it being mostly a US phenomenon. It seems that party establishments in most other countries have a lot more power to make their candidates toe a centerist line.
Curent polarization is no mystery. Starting in 2000 Democrats explicitly embraced the strategy set out in "The Emerging Democratic Majority," which was basically to exploit immigration to create a dominant non-white majority.
Then, starting around 2012 (as documented by Jonathan Haight), American Universities basically lost their minds and starting pumping the "woke" ideology that everything that ails society is "whiteness" and "white privilege" and the invisible force of "systemic racism."
Because the MSM is downstream from the university monoculture, they became lockstep propaganda outfits dedicated to propagating the new religion. The essence of wokism is not debate or compromise but morally demonizing your opponents as immoral "racists," "Misogynists," "homophobes," etc. The more you do this, the more morally superior you are to your fellow un-woke Americans, whom you should look down on and despise. The NYT, CNN, NPR, are now dumpster fires of hate directed at Trump voters, Republicans and White people generally.
In short, politics has been transformed from concrete debates about policy -- taxes, spending, healthcare -- to a never ending moral outrage. It is this aspect of moral condemnation that makes the subjects "resentful." For what it's worth, the Democrats initiated this, Republicans and Trumpists are just reacting.
Oh yeah, and Klein is one of the bad people at the front leading this process with the execrable Vox. So it's no surprise that he can't get it. He's a victim of his own propaganda. He can't see anything but virtuous leftists and their bigoted opposition.
In other words, Klein can't diagnose the problem because he is the problem.
Democrats and Republicans weren't exactly the same in the early 20th century. Traditionally Democrats were the party of unions, and labor rights whereas Republicans were the party of business interests. That has been fairly constant, however, as of 2016 Republicans seem to be making inroads with union workers, even as they continue to oppose and dismantle labor laws.
My comment is re: republicans representing "modal" American. I believe that is entirely wrong, as the Trump coalition brought together arm-in-arm Orthodox Jews with Holocaust fans, hispanics with people who thought they are rapists, women with incels, asian immigrants with those who hate immigrants, etc, etc. It's almost beautiful, kinda. The glue that held them all together was a mutual sense of "hey man, on the maga train whatever you want to believe, we won't judge". So whether it's QAnon, falun gong, religious devotion, anti religious devotion, hoping to finish the Holocaust and eliminate the zionists, hoping to empower the zionists, refugees from totalitarian states wanting to make a totalitarian state because it's anti totalitarian (the kind they don't like)... None of this matters, it's just a big tent of broadly anti-liberal individuals and groups.
A final point: the craziest thing on the 2020 campaign was this: Trump ads in Spanish with people waving Mexican and cuban flags. And broadly winning them.
It makes sense for US and Canada to be more affected by trends towards national media, since these are much bigger countries. I'm not sure when Sweden started having national television, but I'm guessing it happened at the same time we got television.
I feel like I've spent most of my adult life surrounded by people claiming we're experiencing increasing polarization and not believing it. I guess that's in part because I tend to take a very long view of history and we live in a country that has historically experienced tremendous internal violence, whereas my own lifetime has been steadily increasing internal peace, marked largely by the decrease in crime since the 90s. That has nothing to do with political polarization, but I remember going to school in a place where we weren't allowed to wear red or blue because kids were getting shot in the streets by whoever was wearing the other color, and whatever hysteria comes from the fact that every now and again kids in the suburbs shoot up their schools, the actual danger of being a person in America is so historically low that whining about government gridlock just makes me sigh. If we can't get optimal tax or housing policy and healthcare costs too much, I guess that sucks, but it's a heck of a lot better than my memories of the news every single night talking about some little girl getting shot in gang crossfire trying to buy ice cream from the ice cream man. That seems like cognitive bias on first glance, but actual statistics bear out that life has gotten much better in the past 30 years by any reasonable measure and that is even more the case globally. Much of Africa and South Asia was very nearly an unlivable hellhole in the lifetimes of people still alive and that is largely not the case any more.
But I've probably been convinced at this point. Even your own comment section has a good 5% or so of people who seem like they wouldn't be out of place on any of the boards I frequent for sports fans, insisting that the other team is everything wrong with the sport, seemingly forgetting that free agency is a thing and the guys they love today they hated just a few years ago. Things have gone tribal, in spite of the fact that I don't buy that Americans really have distinct enough social groups to warrant calling them tribes. I've lived in seven states, born in California, currently in Texas, lived in rural Kentucky and absolute bum fuck Appalachia in North Carolina, and I just don't see it. Talk to people for five minutes and they're the same damn people. But when all they know of each other is the news and the Internet, they seem so easily convinced they're on opposite sides of a grandiose struggle for the soul of the future that will determine whether our great nation stands or falls. That hasn't been true since 1870.
The reasons seem obvious as just-so stories. The news, politicians, addiction-based ad tech companies posing as public squares all have tremendous incentive to incite outrage. But why now and why here more than comparable countries? Do we simply interact with each other less? Is it car culture and unwalkable suburbs? We just aren't physically near enough to actually talk to people as might be more encouraged by the basic literal structure of European cities? Weaker national identities thanks to not having nationality inherently tied in with ethnicity and religion as in many European countries? No near-peer external existential threat after the fall of the Soviet Union forcing us to look internally for the enemy? Or is it really just regression to the mean after a near century of cooperation created by the historical accidents of Dixiecrats and the New Deal Coalition that are now gone? Is comparing the entire United States to any single European country just a flawed comparison? What does the comparison look like if we consider polarization between different parts of Europe? England doesn't seem thrilled with the continent. Germany doesn't seem to be getting along swimmingly with Greece. Russia just invaded Ukraine a few years ago. Is polarization specifically along political party lines really different or are we just turning to the only distinction we can plausibly conceive of with people who can make enough of a local impact for us to care?
I think there's a potential reason why the internet and social media might have played a larger role in polarizing the US, and it's that the US is just more important than, say, Germany. US politics has become a sort of global focal point for political debate. Nobody cares which German party you support, but if you, even as a non American, support the Republicans you can be ostracized by your peers, kicked from discord servers, cancelled on Twitter, etc.
I'm not sure which direction the causality flows, but I'm pretty confident that the internet has been uniquely accelerating of polarization in the US.
I used Germany as an example, but I don't think the specifics of Germany's politics are relevant. I think I could have picked literally any other country with the possible exception of China and most people would see their politics as less important than the US.
And I could have made the same speculation about any other country. I'm thinking Germans find Republicans unacceptable, worse than any German party, because German parties have to make themselves acceptable to Germans and the Republicans do not.
But the same argument applies to Democrats, does it not? Why would Germans not find both unacceptable?
I think people just see the US as extra important - especially in the online sphere where nearly all major companies are located in the US or China, so rather than fighting political battles in the own countries where even large differences between parties are seemingly less important, they fight US political battles because they seem more important. The media spectacle around US elections could also be somewhat at fault - US elections are much more visible globally than my own Canadian elections.
It could apply to Democrats. But the Democrats happen to be within Germany's Overton Window, even though they don't need to be.
Rereading your comment, I realize I misunderstood it at first. I thought you were saying that *Germans* will ostracise you for supporting Republicans, but don't care which German party you support.
Ah yes, I should have been clearer. I think Germans might in fact ostracize you for which German party you support, but *everyone* might ostracize you over which US party you support.
Even as a Canadian, which has moderately high polarization, US politics just seem much more important, and that's felt true since I became politically conscious ~12 years ago
No mention of 1972 Roe v Wade??? Semi-socialist sympathizing Christians which were long time family Democrats, but believe abortion is wrong - such folk have been essentially exiled from the Dems. And now make up a huge part of the Reps, along with their desires for more (good!) gov't against the older smaller gov't Reps.
Dem control of colleges has also created an elite that is NOT allowed to denigrate others, but it's OK, even encouraged, to denigrate and demonize Republicans.
And Democrats have always loved to Hate the evil ones - so they falsely claim Reps are evil, whenever there is mere policy disagreement.
Racism is now the focus because accusations, including false accusations, can be so damaging to any career; and Dems have little problem in lying about Reps (look at Dan Rather's lies about Bush).
Reps being hated by Dems, especially elitist Dems acting "superior", cause a hate-based reaction.
The "Political Correctness" that has been gaining strength is now more like PC-nazis.
Reps also love to hate - commies or mostly other external enemies.
It's in response to internal Dem hate that is increasing Rep counter-hate.
Often because the Dems claim that Reps hating Muslim terrorists is "racist", and therefore it's OK for Dems to hate Reps - so Reps hate such Dems because they don't agree it racist to hate Islamofascists, and Dem support for such terrorists is anti-American, and Reps love America and hate those Americans who don't.
As late as 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in favor of legal abortion access. I think it's much more likely that the modern focus abortion as a single-issue trump card among social conservatives is an effect of polarization, not a cause.
That is, first other movements (especially the fight against desegregation) unified social conservatives within the Republican Party over the course of the 1970s & 1980s, and only after social conservatives were overwhelmingly in one party but had lost the battle on their original issue, abortion was turned into the next battleground. There hadn't been enough agreement among social conservatives to unify on that issue until polarization created that unity.
Viewing it as a Canadian, I’d say it went something like this. Bush v Gore was widely perceived then and since as being a partisan decision. 9/11 was kind of mixed, but featured lots of infringements of civil rights and things like that. Then there was the Iraq War, which featured lots of “with us or against us” rhetoric, then turned out to have been based on misinformation.
Getting all flustered about Bush was, IMO, legitimate. But then nobody calmed the hell down, in part because it'd been eight years of normalizing people being angry and extreme about these things. And it's just kept building from there.
"He refers to data 'showing Congressional Republicans have moved further left than Democrats have moved right', which I think is a typo (isn't the usual argument that Republicans have moved further right than Democrats have moved left?)"
I listened to the audiobook not long ago, and I believe there this section says "showing Congressional Democrats have moved further left than Republicans have moved right," acknowledging a point you make later in your post. It's a bit challenging to verify that in an audiobook--can anyone else corroborate?
Long time lurker, almost never commentator here. I"m surprised you were confused by why polarization started to get worse among the general public in the US around 2005-ish. The answer is social media.
.... and that's why I don't comment. Looking through comments now lots of people have said the same thing but in a much clearer and intelligent way than me. :)
My working theory for what changed around 2000-2004 in US politics is that, prior to that time, we did not identify things as "red states" or "blue states":
> In the days following the 2000 election, whose outcome was unclear for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular use in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election.
This identification gave rise to a bunch of effects, including feeling like a member of the outgroup if you were "blue" aligned in a "red" state and vice versa (where previously those identities may not have mattered as much in day-to-day life) and also color-coded maps of the US that lent themselves to mistaking land area for political representation (which also activated identities of aggrievement or assailment, depending).
There is an interesting question here about Ireland, because it has a much more polarised politics now. The conventional mainstream media story is "sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and the Global Financial Crisis". I think this misses at least one other big factor (peace in Northern Ireland that has enabled Sinn Féin to legitimise themselves).
The two traditional parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) have both declined in numbers and eventually got forced into forming a coalition with each other - while Sinn Féin now operates as a somewhat left-wing opposition party to the merged neoliberal government.
This poses an alternative way that American politics could have polarised, which is the rise of a third party that would have pushed two neoliberal parties together.
But, well, honestly, I would say that Klein is answering the wrong question. The right question is: given that the US is polarised, how do you design a political system that doesn't completely fall apart. The unique thing about the USA is that it's a political system that enforces a strong form of Duverger's Law (ie pushes to two parties very hard) and also requires cross-party working for effective governance. Other countries are either two-party (Australia, UK) but have a political system that puts one party in power and means they never need votes from the other, or require cross-party co-operation in building a coalition, but are multi-party, and therefore the co-operating parties are still not all parties (Ireland where there's a FF/FG government and an SF opposition, Germany, Netherlands, etc).
[Note that Sinn Féin originates from taking a third position on the 1920s treaty, but that position was so unpopular (it was "restart the war with Britain") that they essentially ceased to exist until 1969 when they were revived by, uh, restarting the war with Brtain (in Northern Ireland) - this means that they are not associated with the treaty/civil war by most Irish people, unlike FF and FG]
I think it's likely that American polarization has structural roots. The U.S. is an unusual country in its combination of first past the post voting and strong presidentialism. Most of the world's most successful democracies (going by ratings from Freedom House or from the EIU Democracy Index) have proportional representation and parliamentary systems. In those systems, the head of state is usually a monarch or an indirectly elected figurehead president, and the head of government (prime minister) is also elected by the parliament. The upper chamber, if it exists, is also usually elected indirectly, and usually is much less powerful than the lower chamber. All this indirect election may seem less democratic superficially, but it arguably has much more democratic outcomes.
In the U.S., very little can be accomplished legislatively unless one party holds the presidency, the House, and 60% of the Senate seats OR there is significant bipartisan cooperation. Once enough polarization has happened that bipartisan cooperation is unworkable, the incentive structure encourages hyper-partisanship, because the only viable path to achieving any political goal in such a system is total domination.
Many structural reforms of varying levels of viability would alter the incentive structure, and would probably make polarization decrease: abolishing the filibuster in the Senate (more parliamentarism), any form of proportional representation in the House such as Lee Drutman's plan to emulate the Irish system that Ezra Klein mentions in the book (less FPTP), reducing the power of the president and/or of the Senate (more parliamentarism), alternative voting systems like approval voting or range voting or ranked choice voting (less FPTP), or alternative executive structures such as delegating some executive powers to the House or replacing the Presidency with a Swiss-style executive council (more parliamentarism).
Why is Canada not polarized? I think it has to do with its level of parliamentarism. Canada has FPTP voting, but, like the Finns in their proportional democracy, Canadians vote only for their district's parliamentary representative rather than directly electing the Most Powerful Person in the Land Who Represents the Soul of the Nation. That's less polarizing. After they vote, a governing majority or coalition forms, which has the power to legislate and get things done instead of just screaming at each other all the time. That's also less polarizing. Seemingly as a result, Canada's main political parties are moderate, political discourse is more about ideas than in the U.S., and voters are less sorted ideologically. Some voters who identity as liberals vote for the Conservative party and some voters who identify as conservatives vote for the Green party. See this paper, which shows this in surprising charts:
I think reducing polarization via structural reforms is an important cause area for rationalists and effective altruists to focus on. Polarization, or at least its U.S. manifestation, is extremely wasteful of resources (think of the hundreds of millions spent on Senate campaigns this year). It makes political discourse become about demographics and geography and whether people like you feel like they're winning or losing, instead of being about policy and ideas and how to actually make the world a better place. It makes it really hard to get anything done even if it's really important (like stopping climate change). And – I can't back this up with data – but it seems like it's got to be damaging to public health by causing everyone to feel constantly anxious (which, in turn, distracts people from thinking about things that really matter – things like Kelsey Piper's latest Vox article on the history of smallpox eradication and its implications for today). Oh yeah, and it might destroy liberal democracy, leading to autocratic government (which is what usually happened when Latin American countries tried to copy the U.S. system).
As to why polarization is happening so much NOW, I don't know the answer, but I suspect it might have something to do with rising income inequality. See this article (which also discusses some of Peter Turchin's ideas):
It feels important to say that whatever the case was for the Republican party being different from the Democratic party before the 2020 election, the case now is overwhelming.
Heaps of top Republicans parroted Trump's baseless lies about election fraud. Trump and his faithful encouraged and organized a mob to interrupt the election's certification. Perhaps most concerning to me, 147 members of congress voted not to certify the election results. It's hard to keep track of all the other attempts to obstruct the electoral process along the way, but suffice it to say this wasn't nearly the half of it.
This is all a million miles from the Bernie or AOC contingents, and it's not the least bit fringe: just about the entire Republican party is involved, including almost every one of its biggest names. Let's not let this one go unremembered. Whatever the republican party was in the recent past, a faction of anti-democratic opportunists have since taken the reins, and their influence looks to have fully metastasized.
(In case this sounds like the sort of thing only a leftist partisan could believe, here's a conservative-born publication with hundreds of articles making the same point: https://thebulwark.com/)
So, you recognize that "polarization" can be based on past conflicts or death. You know we had a Civil War in the US over slavery. You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, having supported FDR for an unprecedented four terms as President when he ran on repealing Prohibition, expanding the role of government in helping people, and allying with Communists if need be to protect American ideals. Yet you badmouth the idea that they're just racist or following race-based tribalism.
Plainly, the Fox News Channel, which is a propaganda organization created by Roger Ailes when he left "America's Talking", deliberately made race-based tribalism respectable again. Everyone on the Left who had elderly relatives not on the hard Left reports them going far-right when the cancer known as Fox News got up and running. My late grandfather told me we should put gays in concentration camps, and that was one of the milder changes people have reported.
I also recall your own graph showing that support for immigrants was growing, among Democrats and Republicans, before the pestilent rot called the FNC began. At that point support tanked among Democrats, and stagnated for Republicans. Then, when Democrats realized the FNC narrative was a pile of poisonous lies, support went up to where it might have been naturally. Republicans stayed in the gutter.
I see people still pushing falsehoods about how this happened, so let's be very clear. Roger Ailes was an operative in the Nixon administration who proposed they create GOP TV, in order to counter the media's bias against treasonous criminals. Later, he ran the network that became MSNBC. It was called America's Talking, and it had a talk show hosted by Roger Ailes, as well as a segment purporting to showcase failures of government. That wasn't enough propaganda for Ailes, which is why he left to realize his long-standing dream of founding GOP TV. None of this is secret.
You also rather oddly say that nothing was happening re:race from 2000-2005. Ignoring the whole Iraq War, and everything on Fox News, you also either fail to grasp why Michael Bloomberg had zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination for President, or you choose to ignore the way he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFivw-dB4gA&ab_channel=TheDailyShowwithTrevorNoah">outright lied</a> about facts he later confessed to, on the record.
"You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act"
They did not; it was decades later. I remember, as a child in Georgia in the 1980s, that the South was still solidly Democratic. (I was from a left-leaning household, and was proud of my region for supporting the correct party. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the Dixiecrats were different.)
Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. Bill Clinton was from Arkansas. Al Gore was from Tennessee.
Funny you should mention Al Gore, as he was the first Democratic candidate for President to run after the Fox News Channel really got started. Did you read the rest of my comment?
I think it's unfair to not mention the (IMO accurate) view that the senate is biased in terms of political representation in the context of the DC and PR statehood arguments. The democratic party picked Biden over Bernie et al in part because it needs to win more than 50% of the vote to win elections. The Republican party has become a lot Trumpier over the past 4 years due to not suffering a penalty for nominating a candidate that lost by 2 million votes. (I know I'm equivocation between the EC and senate here but I think similar arguments hold). I think "reduce electoral bias in favor of Republicans" is a highly plausible antipolarization mechanism and you don't give it a fair reading here.
If I'm following the logic, wouldn't DC or PR statehood reduce polarization on the Republican side, but increase it on the Democrat side? Are you confident that the result is reduced polarization on net?
Probably not. I understand why it would be counterintuitive, but I think it gets at the reality that a lot of people support Democrats as a party is because of the GOP's tendency toward "f off if you would been out of place in a 50s television show" policies, not because they're actually liberal. DC and Puerto Rico are, of course, majority non-white and support Democrats for basically that reason, but minorities tend to not actually be leftists. Black voters are why Biden is president right now rather than Bernie Sanders.
Maybe not, though. California became more or less permanently Democrat after Prop 187 alienated Mexican-American voters in the 90s, but it's just been the white San Francisco crazy types that ended up taking control of the party and not really doing all that much for the working poor or minorities. It's unfortunate that the GOP pushes so many people to the other side just by being dicks and doesn't force the other side to actually implement any worthwhile policies.
The primitive brain Is wired to place more importance on avoiding poisonous berries... primitive people shared danger knowledge in order to survive... The nightly news taps into this primitive fear response.. captivating audiences = ratings = add revenue. Political parties tap into fear and hate captivating, polarizing = growing your base.... the attention economy exploits the primitive brain...whaddyagonnadooo?!
Mostly agree, but I would point out that any kind of propaganda will capitalize on fear of the enemy. Think communist, fascist, American anti-communist propaganda. This begs the question, are current mainstream media fear narratives motivated by a race for ratings or just plain ideological reasons... I one favour the latter.
Game theory + US system (game rules) = the more power DC gains, the more polarized we become.
The US political system requires "MOVE!" Choose one of 50 sovereign flavors. Americans are the genetic elite of moving. This is the game the founders invented. States compete in a political free market for common currency and labor.
The only hack to the supremacy of the US system people who hate their homeplace so much, they do not MOVE! someplace else, they move to DC and make all states the same, and try to manage the polarization.
Ezra knows this theory and refuses to confront it directly.
The 1965 Civil Rights thesis feeds Klein thesis that the evil Southerners are evil. But my counter arguments would be to look at the 1965 immigration act.
There was also a delay to immigration that can be objectively measured. There is a handy video on YouTube tracking the source of immigrants to the US. By 1975 the Mexican bar explodes and shrinks the Italian bar to less than 25 percent of the screen by 1980 and keeps climbing.
A few important events seem to be ignored. First, the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas the Cold War used to animate politics before that, now other issues are allowed to come to the fore and determine political discourse. This I think ties into a previous event that was happening behind the scenes: the reorientation of Western leftists from classical Marxism(or the softer democratic socialism in the West) to a more socially minded ideology(cultural Marxism; race, sex, critical theory, Frankfurt School). With the threat of the Soviet Union gone, this new ideology proceeded to wholly envelop the left.
As a non-American, my main concern is that trends arise in the US because of factors within the nation itself, but because it's the world's most powerful and influential country it then goes on to export its problems to countries that wouldn't have them otherwise. (This is mostly the fault of the countries themselves - they look up to America just as much now as they did in the days before bashing it became cool.)
The most toxic, outgroup-demonising, hatred-fomenting examples of American polarisation may be the result of a long buildup of historical processes, driftwood downstream of any number of paradigm shifts that happened decades ago. But when all that hyperaggressive language gets plucked out of that context and dumped into the middle of other national conversations that haven't had all that buildup, it does untold damage. Countries are being divided along all kinds of weird lines now, and I saw the consequences of that playing out in real time during my last years in college (2014-6). Everything in the discourse became worse almost overnight.
You walk into a restaurant... it’s an all you can eat buffet ... the catch is that the buffet consists of fruity pebbles, Pork rinds, cocaine, snake tits, and hot sauce.... this is what the media buffet has to offer us.... try to have a healthy state of mind after consuming this....
"One explanation for why Trump did so well among Republicans, despite his apparent forsaking of many Republican sacred cows on the campaign trail, was that he credibly promised to accomplish the one thing most Republicans want from their political leaders - not being a Democrat."
Kind of ironic considering that he used to be a registered Democrat in the past.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because the better the electoral calculus is for the Democrats, the more the Republicans will have to change their strategy, and maybe their new strategy won't involve them being evil racists, and then the Democrats won't have to be so justly and correctly polarized against them (am I being unfair? check page 257 and see for yourself).
Come on, Scott. Yes. Yes, this is obviously an unfair mischaracterization. Let me reference Bryan Caplan's excellent piece on how he self-polices his work: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/how_i_self-poli.html . Specifically, see his Rule #6 and try to imagine saying what you wrote to Klein directly. "Rule #6: If someone says you mischaracterized their work, you almost certainly did. Experts are often wrong, but at minimum they know what they meant."
From Klein's book, the central point on page 257 comes after a discussion of how "There's a broad range of ways to make voting easier ... The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls", and reads:
"It's possible that a more democratic America would be a more Democratic America, but it's also possible that a Republican Party that had to compete for more kinds of voters would reform itself to win that competition. As I noted before, the most popular governors in the country are moderate Republicans leading blue states, so there's no reason to believe the party lacks popular appeal when its incentives are aligned."
You should fix the unfair mischaracterization in your review.
Surely the rapid and radical change in America's demographics and the accompanying emphasis on diversity over unity is the primary cause of the polarization.
I agree with Scott that political polarisation is one of the biggest problems we have, and I am very happy to see him address it.
I too wonder a lot about the causes for polarisation, and for me social media is one of the biggest contenders.
If social media indeed played a big role, it would probably be good to know this and try to affect it.
Alas, Scott seems to be impressed by the graphs showing that polarisation decreased in some countries, for me most notably in Germany, although they too have social media.
So my two cents is:
Germany having become less polarised seems very, very unlikely to me.
If it is indeed true, then there has to be a very interesting difference in perceived and actual polarisation.
Or it is just eastern germany that is polarised.
But I am just sceptical of the overall claim. My perception is that there is a stark, growing polarisation, very similar to that in the US. (although not as pronounced yet)
I actually suspect that we inherit US american ideology to a significant degree.
In the U.K. I was struck by the experience of polarisation over Brexit. I have plenty of friends and colleagues who vote Labour or Conservative, and when 2016 came around, I realised I didn’t have a single friend who voted for Brexit. The divide better matched the natural divisions in the country and the argument felt much tenser than party politics. Since the parties were not perfectly partisan aligned on the issue (ie some Labour brexiteers and some Tory remainers ) there was a kind of vector pressure to move towards perfect alignment as a natural state for the big parties.
But then it ended. First, everybody god bored of it. Brexit is quite a meaty set of policy discussions, and the external negotiation is very tiring to watch. There’s a lot of arcane details and subjects nobody wants to touch, like Ireland. Both parties have their own reason for wanting to move on from talking about it. Second, coronavirus. Now the right wing party in power is uncomfortable with, but nonetheless taking, measures which reduce personal freedom and increase government spending. And polarisation is lower, at least on policy.
Forgive me if someone else posted this already, but I think that what this analysis misses is that the migration of Southern Dixiecrats into the Republican party didn't just happen overnight when Nixon won the 1968 election, but rather was a process that completed in the early 2000s. I grew up in Georgia and I remember my Governor from 1991-1999 was the conservative Democrat, Zell Miller, who went on to serve a term as a Democratic Senator from 1998-2004. One (barely) living former Democratic president is Jimmy Carter, a Georgia Democrat.
This extends throughout the South. In Tennessee, both senators were Democrats until 1994. Keep in mind Al Gore was a TN Senator. His replacement lost the special election in 94, when the other TN Senate seat also flipped red. In Alabama, there was a Democratic Senator until 94. Richard Shelby (who is by the way still serving as a Republican senator from Alabama today) was first elected as a Democrat in 86, and switched party affiliations in 94. Mississippi was a bit earlier, where their Senate seats flipped Republican in 88. Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, which isn't the South but is cultural similar and is now solidly Republican. I could go through every Southern state but it's clear that the process of Dixiecrat conversion to Republicans was a process that mostly finished in the mid-90s, with some holdouts to the early 2000s.
So I think the timeline actually lines up quite nicely in favor of the "Dixiecrats becoming Republicans led to current US polarization" argument. For a long time, even while the South was getting redder, there was still a political and cultural holdout in favor of the Democratic Party. This prevented the Democratic Party from being able to abandon conservativism entirely. In fact, until Obama the Democratic Party's driving impulse was to embrace conservatism in order to prevent the loss of the Dixiecrats. The two Democratic Presidents before Obama were a former Georgia Governor and a former Arkansas Governor (and plenty has been said about Clinton's triangulation). (Plus the Democratic President before Carter was LBJ, a former Senator from Texas, so this trend extends back even further.)
This also prevented Republicans from consolidating the White Christian evangelical vote, because Democrats in the South were still competing for (and winning) these voters. It wasn't until the sorting completed in the 90s-00s that the true mass sort/polarization could take place. The Democratic Party became free to abandon conservatism. It was the first time since maybe ever that the Democratic Party was competitive nationally without any semblance of Dixiecrat or conservative Democrat influence. The Republican Party was free to consolidate the conservative (and White evangelical) vote for the first time without having to compete with (historically better aligned) Democrats for those same voters.
TLDR: I think that the shift of Dixiecrats into Republicans perfectly matches and precedes the populace's polarization trends that Scott shows in this review.
The last paragraph is why I have become much more politically active since I retired. I’ve always been a donor to charities, but no amount of donations will fix the problems that require collection cross nation action.
This seems to be missing one thing which is asking how strongly are people attached to their views and how strongly they despise of the competing ones, rather than focusing solely on what those views are and how many people hold them. If we defined polarization along these lines, I'm sure it grew bigger in all of those other countries as well in recent years.
This seems to be missing one thing which is asking how strongly are people attached to their views and how strongly they despise of the competing ones, rather than focusing solely on what those views are and how many people hold them. If we defined polarization along these lines, I'm sure it grew bigger in all of those other countries as well in recent years.
I think there is an underestimation of how US dominated the Media/Technology political discourse is overseas vs it's impact on polarizing US politics internally. Overseas my news and social media feeds are still heavily US centric. Locally we are seeing a slow emulation of US style political races in recent years, as if everyone here has been watching how ridiculous US politics can be and thought it'd be great to reproduce, but direct polarizing of local politics has been slower since people aren't even talking that much about local races in the first place.
I have seen an increase in local Identity based movements though. Considering the amount of cultural exporting the US has done historically it may just be that other English speaking countries need time to catch up?
Everything Klein writes is true, but there is another level we have to go to to understand our divisions. Truism: Change happens. It never stops happening. it happens in all area of society. We all know this, but somehow we don't make it part of the equation that helps us understand who we are and why we do what we do.
Our divide is so simple. One side embraces change. Likes our growing diversity. Likes our changing attitudes about global warming, women's rights, gay rights, occupations.
The other side wants to stop all of it in its tracks. Trump's people see their way of life slipping away. They see everything they define themselves by under threat. Their religion, their places in the social hierarchy are being undermined by a gaggle of people of color. Their occupations are threatened by technology. Their relations with women are changing. The father, the husband, are losing their places as top dogs in the family and society.
This is nothing new. Whenever big change happens, big resistance fights back. Some passively, some violently. Eventually the more dogged resisters die out and the less dogged make an accommodation with change.
The silver lining in all the dark Trumpian clouds is that the size of the resistance is directly proportional to the change we see happening all around us. If we look at the situation through that lens we can focus on and appreciate all the good things that are changing in all the areas touched on above.
It is called the human drama, folks. Enjoy it like you would enjoy any movie or play or novel. In the end, the good guys always win, but there is plenty of angst in the process for those who won't see it that way. Enough preaching. thanks for the Opportunity.
I think the reason for the polarization is nationalization of every issue. When every issue is decided locally, then national races aren’t as important. When every issue is nationalized, then you have some loony democrat who thinks milk comes from the store making local policy in Kansas, and some Alabama gun-toting racist who has never even met a Jew, making policy for New York City. Nobody is happy, and hating and fearing the other party matters more.
I have always felt that the end of the Cold War was a momentous factor in the polarization of the two parties. People seem to need an enemy and without a common enemy to bind us (The Soviet Union) that need must be filled elsewhere. To me the post 1989 graphs seem to bear that out.
Two quick points. First, media polarization is driving a great deal of the broader polarization. Media generally has been left-leaning, but in the 70s, conservatives (rightly or wrongly; I don't really know enough to have an opinion here) felt like they were being driven out, so they formed their own world. The problem is that their world was _solely about being conservative_. Over the decades, this trend naturally became more extreme, because right-wing media were selling feelings and politics, while the mainstream media were selling primarily fact-based news seasoned, to varying degrees, with opinion.
If anyone is interested, I'd highly recommend _Network Propaganda_ (https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001/oso-9780190923624). You can get the PDF from OUP for free at that link, although I'd strongly recommend the paperback given how many charts there are (it's also a well-printed book, with think paper, vivid colors, etc.---worth the cost). It's very wonky but still manages to be an easy read; it's incredibly well-researched and balanced. Also, just in case: don't read the New Yorker review of it; I've never read a more misleading review; it's absolute garbage. The authors openly and repeatedly disclaim the entire thesis of that review, viz. that Republican voters like being lied to. That is the opposite of the authors' view, so skip that journalistic turd (which is a shame, because I generally respect New Yorker and am not sure what happened there).
Second, drawing equivalence between, let's call it "Sanderism" on the left and the Tea Party is very misleading. The Tea Partiers lavishly costumed themselves in the language of traditional libertarian conservatism, and many mainline Republicans believed it. This is _really important_ to understand what happened. We look back on the Tea Party now and see a lot of racists and cranks. At the time, much of the mainstream media did as well. Elite Republicans and conservative intellectuals did NOT see those elements; they saw citizens motivated by concerns about liberty and self-determination who were being suffocated by an oppressive bureaucratic state.
Elite Republicans looked at the Tea Party and saw a less articulate, less sophisticated, but in some ways more authentic version of the conservative/libertarian views they themselves espoused. Their reasoning was no less effective for being highly motivated. Republicans were delighted to hitch themselves to the Tea Party, being willfully blind to what it really was. By the time it became clear that the libertarian stuff was very much a disposable derivative of the true core---white identity politics---the movement had grown too big to jettison.
Sanderism is different. The guy is a literal Communist and has been his entire adult life. He lived on a commune. He honeymooned in the USSR in 1988, well after the Walter Durantys of the world had been exposed, and the world knew that tens of millions of people had been shot and starved by that murderous regime. He was spewing hagiographies of Maduro in 2019 for heaven's sake! Sanderism, AOC-ism, etc. never had much camouflage to it; it started as Communism and ended as Communism. Democrats never found themselves in the position of having belatedly to learn how insane their new constituency was, because there was never any attempt to hide it. As a consequence, they didn't fan the flames, and they didn't deliberately elevate Socialist politicians.
This is an excellent and thought provoking article, as usual. The one thing I wanted to respond to is this:
"And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because the better the electoral calculus is for the Democrats, the more the Republicans will have to change their strategy, and maybe their new strategy won't involve them being evil racists, and then the Democrats won't have to be so justly and correctly polarized against them (am I being unfair? check page 257 and see for yourself)."
This would have been a good time to surface Klein's prioritization of "pro-democracy" policies. The problem is *not* that Republicans are evil racists. The problem is that the overall electoral maps are tilted towards Republicans, which means that their median policy positions are significantly to the right of the population. The well worn example trotted out to support this is that the 2000 and 2016 elections went to Republicans despite them losing the popular vote. You can also see it in the recent Senate vote to acquit President Trump, in which only 57% of Senators voted to convict, but those Senators truly represented 75% of the population.
Today's GOP is a minority party, representing a minority of voters and yet they routinely find themselves in the political majority. *This* is the problem. In order for Republican politicians to win their primaries, they must appeal to a more right-leaning median voter than Democrats, whose coalitions are less ideologically compressed. It is the Senate that distorts the national political conversation more than anything else, in that the Senate is the least democratically-aligned (meaning majority rules) institution at the national level.
Good analysis, I'll have to think on it a bit. My off the cuff reaction to the 2000-2005 time frame for increased polarization is 9/11, the subsequent illegitimate Iraq war, and the rise of Atheism. All of these influences led to harsh criticisms of Islam, which led to considerable discussion and accusations of Islamaphobia (from my recollection), and this maybe seeded the fertile ground for polarization along further racial issues, ie. if fighting Islamaphobia played well in elections or in media, Democrats would double down, as would Republicans for being anti-Islam.
I think it needs to be mentioned that First Past the Post voting rewards partisanship / polarization. This voting requires that a political party needs 50.1% of the votes to win.
A party that can turn its supporters into partisans, will then carry more word of mouth advertising power into each election cycle. Each partisan will be more convincing. Each partisan will not weigh the choice of candidates, but will vote down ballot by party line. Non-partisans will split their ticket.
Therefore, if Party A is filled with non-partisans that agree 70% of the time, and split their ticket accordingly compared to Party B that is filled with die hard partisans that always vote for their party, I expect the statistical advantage for down ballot wins, for winning enough of the swing voters, and voter motivation is going to favor Party B.
I'd be very curious to know what study the graphs about international polarisation are from. Most countries in the first world don't have a two party system and I wonder how that is affecting whatever measure was used. It also seems to me that it the path to polarisation might be quicker when there is only one enemy to point at.
It's easy and convenient (particularly for liberals) to link changes in partisanship with a backlash to the Civil Rights Act. But this linkage completely ignores how the South compared to the rest of the US before WWII, both economically and politically. Basically the South was an relatively poor agrarian society pre WWII that voted 90%+ Democrat in state and national elections. Republicans didn't bother to even run candidates for many elections. Other regions of the country were more industrialized and had a more even partisan split.
Post WWII, the South's economy began to catch up and the South's partisan split began to resemble the rest of the country. This is evident in Senate and House races in the 50's, well before the Civil Rights Act. There is no doubt that backlash to Civil Rights played a part in the partisan re-alignment, but IMO economic trends played a much larger role.
The last paragraph of the review talks about how the most effective altruism of politics might be addressing polarization. I've independently come to the same conclusion and would like to recommend four nonprofits that I think are good for this. Most of these are political reforms aimed at electing candidates that better represent a districts values but I secretly hope that if the political center had more power then thought and rhetoric might follow.
Open Primaries advocates that everyone be allowed to vote in primary elections, not just Democrats and Republicans on the general theory that these elections are super important so it would be nice to enfranchise folks and on the more specific theory that it will make the candidates less extreme. They also sometimes talk about nonpartisan primaries where you could conceivably nominate a moderate candidate that neither major party's base particularly liked.
The Center for Election Science advocates for approval voting where you get to vote for as many candidates as you want instead of just one. This way if you're mostly motivated by hating the bad party then you can vote for the good party and also the moderate and again we could conceivably elect a moderate that nobody really hated.
FairVote advocates for ranked choice voting and multi member districts. RCV is almost as good as approval voting and multi member districts are super interesting. In a 10 member district if 10% of the population is libertarian then you get to send 1 libertarian candidate to congress. Of course you're not going to have a majority but a seat at the table is pretty good and if neither major party ends up with a majority then minor parties are really going to get to have an impact on policy.
Finally Braver Angels simply tries to get people from opposite parties to talk with and try to understand each other. Seems like this pretty directly makes people have less animosity towards the other side.
"This does not seem obvious to me. Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
But you yourself have acknowledged that Hillary's policy positions are more rational than Trump's, and furthermore, that Hillary has comparatively modest expectations for what her policies can achieve while Trump is far more of a utopian. So if Democrats have been able to move towards relatively rational policy positions despite them violating what was once party doctrine, whereas Republicans have kept doubling down on the same bad ideas they've been pushing for decades and insisting if they just stick with what hasn't worked in the past it will somehow bring about utopia, doesn't that mean Ezra is correct that partisan polarization is worse on the Republican side?
You say you don't know why we became more polarized in the early 2000's. Plenty of research studies point to the rise of Fox News as that cause. When cities got Fox News, those cities became more polarized.
Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
The above comment uses different time units, year vs quarter. So the difference is 3.3 times, not 13.
Where do you get 13? Are you comparing the annual figure for the U.S. to the quarterly figure for Europe? The ratio is 3 1/3:1
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
???
40/12 = 3 1/3 not 10
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/world-internet-usage-index-philippines-10-hours-a-day
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
The irony !
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I've heard there's revisionism on Robber's Cave recently (as with Stanford Prison). A shame since I have cited that example many times. https://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peace-and-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php
Interesting! Thank you for the link.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
I don't have a source, but I've heard it mentioned that the big two in the US basically excluded anyone else from the presidential debates.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
It's interesting to note how France until recently had a system with 2 very dominant parties... then in 2017 both basically collapsed !
I'm willing to bet that some people blamed it too on social media...
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
In other words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog#/media/File:Internet_dog.jpg
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
but that's not true, it was open to everyone in the world by 2006
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
I’m not sure that your premise is true. Do Norwegians use social media as much as Americans?
A more interesting comparison would be amount of time spent on Facebook and changing attitudes regarding politics.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
Unpack this as "geography losing its function as a barrier to interaction and preventer of conflict".
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
I want to say there is an asymmetric warfare going on where one side treats it as something serious, and the other side as entertainment.
But I'm not *really* sure I can say that the first side isn't full of entertainment-seekers, too.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
This is so true.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Depends what you mean with 'recently'.
https://dawum.de/#Umfrageverlauf
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
Aren't wokism and QAnon both internet ideologies?
Wokism is much older than the Internet. It's a university ideology pushed in departments whose purpose is activism and not knowledge building.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
Few countries are as large as the US. Many EU countries are practically city-states by comparison. https://medium.com/migration-issues/who-is-the-city-statey-ist-of-them-all-fccd76f8e683
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
Agreed, but this says we should redraw the state boundaries and still have things done by states.
States might not be the ideal level, cities or counties might be better. But doing everything at the federal level is insane.
"Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not."
U.S. is actually very polarized along state lines: https://againstjebelallawz.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/averagedeviation.png
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
Say we assume the following:
* Dunbar's number is 150
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNELNSvPzI
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
I don't think black Americans under Jim Crow felt very included in the American dream.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment ctrl+f "No Irish need apply"
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
I think people overestimate the effect that adding guaranteed-Democrat Senate seats would be. "Tentin Quarantino" on Twitter (https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1276634862548647936) said in June:
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
David Shor (https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1277781856721743880) replied:
> I lot of the thinking here is driven by the inability to think through the derivative of the (50+x)/(100+x) function
The "always win" framing was mine, not Klein's. I'll edit the post.
Ah, I wasn't criticizing either way. I just think people ought to be more aware of this!
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.
not sure why you were so dismissive of this point, the reason to add PR and DC is not partisan, it's that those are citizens who deserve representation like everyone else
That may be your reason. And it is a good one. But: If PR was solidly republican, and DC was solidly democrat, do you think we would be hearing about statehood for both of them? Or would the blue-tribe news talk about one and not the other?
There are many things in the world that we should do because there are good arguments for them. The news selects a subset that are good for "their side" and talks about those things. The red tribe is right to be suspicious.
PR last governor was Republican, so I don't think the partisan politics are as clear as you do, but I really don't care if it helps the blue team or red team. Unless you have a good reason those citizens don't deserve representation in congress, it should be done and it should be done tomorrow.
These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful - "would the police have been so kind to these coup-rioters if they had been brown?" and "would Democrats believe in expanding the vote even to conservatives?" are equally unhelpful, except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
> These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful ...
> except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
I find them to be helpful in the following way: They clarify what part of a person's position is a universal standard they truly believe in, and which part is a convenient club to hit someone they dislike for other reasons.
Example: A person says "riots are never acceptable". They apply this rule to riots for the political party that they dislike, and not their own. This tells you something important: Their true belief is that riots are okay when the cause is "just", for however they define "just".
That's true and something I was considering adding in another comment. It feels gross to ignore the basic, obvious object level good that is representative democracy and treat this issue like it's just partisan. Yes, the Democrats have the moral luck that they benefit from the good-for-general-democracy-reasons position, but that doesn't make the position itself any less virtuous.
(misuse of the term "moral luck", but I think the intent is clear)
You have to consider the context in which it was raised. The point was that it should be done so that Dems could conquer, not that there are these poor people suffering in D.C. without substantive national political representation
I notice that retrocession — giving Maryland the land back that was carved out for D.C., minus a non-residential federal district with the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, etc. — is never weighed against statehood.
We already did retrocession back Virgina, it’s why the bottom-left border of D.C. is Potomac-shaped. The city used to be a quadrangle.
Retrocession would be a compromise that would probably meet immediate agreement from Republicans, since it would keep the current balance in the Senate while granting maybe one solid Dem seat in the House.
But Democratic advocacy for D.C. statehood is not about representation, so the Democrats won’t entertain retrocession.
I'm definitely open to ideas like that about DC, although I've heard good arguments against this. I actually had a longer comment written about DC being a more complicated case than PR, but I lost interest halfway through writing it. I don't think you're right about Republicans immediately accepting it though, it doesn't seem like straightforward compromises like that are actually possible in Congress right now.
nor do I think this decision should rest on a compromise between current political interest. politics change. The decision should be about the best thing for the citizens of DC, but I wouldn't rule out that being some form of retrocession
Is it not also an important goal for American democracy to have the representatives of the people be the winners of the popular vote?
Currently Republicans are over-represented in the Senate, so they're getting more power than they have earned in votes. The state lines seem like a pretty arbitrary thing to me, and it seems very bizarre to give extra power to some random rural regions just because of the peculiar history of the country.
It seems quite obviously unfair that your vote is simply worth less if you reside in a city.
Sure what's good for the citizens of DC is important, but this issue could also be a good tool to correct this republican overrepresentation which arguably is a bigger issue.
I'm a liberal, and I'm in favor of retrocession. As I understand it, the sticking point is that Maryland doesn't want it because they don't want to take on D.C.'s problems. (But Baltimore is worse than Washington).
Out of curiousity, are there other tools or suggestions to fix the power imbalance in the senate.
I guess what i'm wondering is, if retrocession wouldn't miss out on an opportunity to correct the Senate imbalance which is actually more important for everyone (including the residents of DC).
I'm not american, by the way but I think as a person living in the world, because of the US's power, it feels like I'm basically being governed by Republican senators from some rural state. Like for example: I feel like the whole world is doing way too little about climate change because certain republican senators like the oil industry.
None of the peoples or governments of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want this. Forcing them to merge against their will as a "compromise" rests on the assumption that this is a partisan exercise and that what the actual people in question want doesn't matter.
Do the people living in DC actually care that they don't have substantive national political representation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Washington,_D.C._statehood_referendum
86% of them do
They made it their license plate and have repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted for it multiple times.
But there's lots of ways to give them representation without making them states, e.g. with two Senators.
PR could just be added to, e.g. Florida. DC could be given back to the neighboring states.
It's suspicious that 'they deserve representation' is somehow always followed by 'they should be made new states'. It's hard not to think that the arguments were form backwards, i.e. to justify a hidden 'bottom line' that was decided first.
A key test for "is this a good way to give people representation?" is "do the people on the receiving end of this want this to happen?"
None of the governments or populations of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want their governments to merge or to share representation.
Your second example, merging Puerto Rico into Florida, is actually likely an even better outcome for Democrats than making PR a new state - but it's still a bad idea because neither Florida nor Puerto Rico want that.
If "do the people who are seeking representation think this is a good solution" doesn't factor into your analysis, you're missing the point of representative democracy.
Why assume that the point of representative democracy is representing people? As far as I'm concerned, the point is ensuring that bums get thrown out with reasonable frequency and civil war is averted because everyone expects to get their turn before too long. Some fairly substantial amount of representation is instrumentally necessary, but I'm not in favour of optimising for representation as an end goal.
Come on – that's just not something that should be weighted very highly. Unless you're also open to succession – in which case, sure, that's nice, but is even (much) less likely to happen than statehood.
Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
This is how we've admitted every state up to this point. It's the basic idea on which the idea of states being united was originally built. It's literally in the name of the country.
> Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
Yes, that's literally how the process of admitting a state works. The representatives voted on by the people of those states vote on the question.
> And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
No one wants that. I don't understand how this point about how in a democracy what people want matters keeps eluding you.
> Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
Adding states that want to be states is good. It would probably be a good idea to set a minimum population requirement, but otherwise, assuming there aren't extraneous complications (e.g. Kurdistan wanting to join as a state would involve probably too many complications to be viable), entities that want to be states should be considered for statehood.
Merging Puerto Rico into Florida does seem ridiculous on its face, but I think something under-considered in the retrocession argument is how self-serving Maryland and the richer (and therefore more vocal) DC residents are. Maryland doesn't want to take on the poor Black people in DC, despite being a very rich state, and progressives in both DC and Maryland a looking at the Senate.
In any case, there will be something distasteful about a city-state for a large number of people. Puerto Rico has more people than Iowa, even after losing tons of people post-Maria, so that makes so level of sense to the average person. DC (besides being synecdoche for the federal government and therefore completely associated with it in people's minds) just recently passed Vermont in population, and, because it's the most Democratic-voting place in the country by a large margin, seems like a power grab.
I also think "what the people want" when it comes to local people deciding something that has national significance is unimportant. We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way. DC statehood isn't a local issue; it's a federal one
DC has higher per-capita and median income than literally any other state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
"something distasteful"...are you making predictions about polls or trying to argue on the merits? Because on the merits "DC shouldn't have statehood because it consists largely of Black Democrats" is an embarrassingly bad argument with nothing of substance to refute. I don't even know how to respond to an argument of the form "you can't let *those sorts of people* have a state".
> We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way.
This is the same war in which West Virginia just decided it wanted to be a state and the rest of the country agreed. Yes, the way to admit states is via the democratic process of voting on it in Congress. As a straightforward ethical matter, the preferences of the people in the proposed states should weigh on those deliberations. I honestly don't understand how multiple people seem really confused about this. "The process of adding states requires the endorsement of the current representational system" is obviously true and has nothing to do with the fact that the people in that process should consider the basic principles of democracy and representation in making their decision.
DC maybe. I'll grant you it's at least more complicated. Adding PR to Florida makes no sense. You can be suspicious of whatever you want particularly of Democratic establishment motivations. I'm telling you I'm personally motivated by puerto ricans getting proper representation, and I don't see any alternative to statehood being a viable solution. So you can have a secondary debate about motivations if you want, but I'm more motivated by the substance here.
I was responding to what seemed like a principled stand, i.e. the people of PR (and DC) _deserve_ representation. And it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
I believe you're sincere about PR deserving proper representation and statehood being the _best_ way to do that.
I appreciate the additional details about why you think statehood is best! I genuinely did not know why 'representation' was being 'rounded to' statehood.
> it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
"rounded to" seems willfully obtuse. They literally can't have voting representatives in congress without being a state. What else would representation mean?
I'm replying again because I'm not sure you realized what your PR+FL proposal implies. It would be a massive win for Democrats, turning 2 lean-R Senate seats lean-D for a D+4 net and potentially swinging the electoral college to favor Democrats again. It would be a massive, massive win for Democrats, far beyond adding PR as a state.
That no one is arguing for this implies the *exact opposite* of what you're suggesting. The tell is that you don't see any of the Republicans who want to coerce DC and VA or MD together advocating for PR joining FL as well, even though that would be a consistent position. They realize that would be a political disaster for them, so they only apply this logic to DC.
The Democrats have the luck of a position that is both just and politically advantageous. The Republicans can't even keep a consistent answer on the two questions because there is no consistent answer that maintains their advantage other than "no representation for American citizens we don't like".
Great point on the politics, but PR as part of florida doesn't make much sense on any level imo. It should just be a state. Republican legislators are working in many states to just make voting more difficult, as the party seems to have decided people voting in general is just not in their interest. That strikes me as quite bad in a democracy, and the party really is quite lost.
Yeah, like I said above, coercing PR into FL is a terrible idea on the merits (like coercing DC into another state). But that Democrats aren't proposing this undercuts the idea that this is all a cynical ploy by Democrats. There are more advantageous cynical ploys than the straightforward democracy-is-good position Democrats are advocating.
Sorry! I'm not arguing for or against statehood as a partisan. I don't think there's a clear ethical conclusion that that's the best thing to do.
I'm also not familiar with the specifics of debates about this.
"Deserve representstion" tends to implicitly mean "representation proportional to population". Which the current senate setup doesn't do
If you were to add 4 Dems today you'd have 54 of 104 though. Particularly in the context of DC being liable to give properly partisan Democrats, you've suddenly got room for a Manchin or a Sinema or someone to defect if the rest of the caucus wants to swing for the fences on a reconciliation package (or kill the filibuster lol)
Thinking through the derivative is of course something plenty of people will get stuck on, but "more Democrats is good for the Democrats" is the important takeaway.
Whether or not Puerto Rico would actually send 2 Democrats to the Senate is another story (a 1-1 scenario is honestly fairly likely), but we'll see what happens (assuming that the 50 existing senate Democrats can even pull it together to let us find out).
It makes some difference, but even a solid blue Puerto Rico and DC would only move the senate bias from R+2.9 to R+1.4. It's the same sort of narrow marginal difference you would get from, say, the effect Democrats taking the Texas state house in 2020 and blocking partisan gerrymander would on the house - noticeable for people who build careful election-forecast models but not really enough to sway the long-term balance of power, and something that would be a sidenote at best in most political history books.
In the context of the 2022 midterms that could surely be the difference between Democrats or Republicans controlling the Senate!
And if the lean had been shifted that much regarding the 2020 senate races then we could hypothetically have had 51 senate Democrats today instead of 50 (this is the dumbest of counterfactuals to be working through but bear with me). Having room for Manchin and Sinema to take turns defecting would be a big deal.
"Does Biden get to appoint any judges to the courts?" is a fairly important question.
My sentences got into the wrong order, so my bad lol.
So it does have some effect in a narrow horse-race politics sense. What I mean is more - when you look at the history of polarization, it has this huge trend from relatively low polarization to almost everyone in the country hating the other party (and often their own). The big trend in polarization is several orders of magnitude larger than the difference between an R+2.9 and an R+1.4 senate.
Also even in the horse-race sense - you're right that it could make a difference, but the probability that that makes the difference isn't that high (it's a bit less than the difference between 2018's ~D+8 environment 2020's ~D+6 environment). "Dems would only need a very good year but not a total outlier to win the senate" is an improvement, but not a game-changer.
Everyone discussing whether statehood is a good idea or who it'll benefit is missing the point. How would it reduce polarization? There's no plausible mechanism. The real reason Ezra Klein includes it in his book is because he wants to increase the power of his tribe, and/or because he thinks the people deserve representation and statehood is the best way to achieve it. Not because it'll reduce polarization.
Give me more power and there will be less polarization.
Its an extension of median voter theorem. To simplify, both parties want to win, so will adopt the set of policies and campaigning to get 50+% of the senate seats. Moving the balance of the senate left, and closer to the median voters, doesn't mean the democrats win eternally, but that the republican party reconfigures to appeal to more voters, moving closer to the centre
how quaint and how surprising it is to hear somebody discussing polarization as an issue between Democrats and Republicans.The polarization is between those who know we are ruled by a corrupt oligarchy intent on bankrupting a majority of the country, and those who like to pretend we live in a democracy.
But Power loves people who repeat that Democrats versus Republicans narrative. They've spent so much money on it, after all.
Yes, I believe it is a club requirement.
That's because of the fact that it's an issue between Democrats and Republicans (or the political left and right, at least), and the "corrupt oligarchy" is at least half mythical.
They all have the same donors. They all vote for consistently for imperial war. They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. They all vote to shovel money to rich financial outfits and corporations at every opportunity. They all forbid criticism of Israeli policy and regularly swear obeisance to a foreign state. They all (still) hate Trump in an irrational manner. They all not to talk about deficit anymore. We haven't had such unanimity in the ruling class since the 50s. This is simply a matter of voting records and published policy, not myth.
You do realize that Trump has been the most pro-Israel president in history, right?
Underscoring their point about the irrational level of hate. Trump largely served the interests of the elite, making the uniform revulsion of him seem strange. Was his low-brow persona enough to rile stir their ire? I think there's more to it that we don't understand yet.
He's gauche in the extreme and played the powerful for fools. The entitled were not amused. Sadly, he basically sat around tweeting shit that went way off-script and playing golf for a couple years, but his existence laid bare for all to see the uniparty for the corporate globalist plutocracy that it is. Note how quickly they moved with EOs to "restore order" and declare "America is Back." Can you really believe Biden is capable of this? He's clearly just a front man they prop up in front of a camera from time to time. Ezra Klein keeps the the script.
> the the script
I saw what you did there.
It's one of many things. He made it very clear that he was Not One Of Us. Not just by his personality, but also by aggressively attacking them at every chance. (And to be fair, probably half of those attacks were deserved). And of course, he's a terrible human being, an incompetent insecure martinet of a leader, and frankly just annoying to listen to.
The funny thing is, only true believers and partisan democrats payed any attention to him. He was easy to ignore, and I was always shocked when a friend starting going off about something Trump had said, suddenly furrowing their brows an spewing flames.
Not surprising with Jared in charge.
Why yes. Who put Jared in charge of that file, again? Was that person blindsided by the fact that his son-in-law was Jewish? Because it sure looked to me like Trump was extremely proud of those deals, and of being a strong supporter of the Israelis.
The fact that American ruling class agrees with Trump on some of his policies doesn't mean they don't hate him.
The donors are much more polarized than they used to be. See https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors - the first one to donate more than $10k to both parties is #32 on the list, and only 10 of the 31 above him donated even a single dollar to each party. In the top hundred, the single most balanced donor is a couple who gave $231,046 to Republicans and $3,380,179 to Democrats, over 14x more. (And almost all of that GOP money was to a PAC that tries to push pro-LGBT views among Republicans, not a more typical Republican group)
The last war that can plausibly be called "imperial" was Iraq, which started 18 years ago. Republicans in Congress voted for it by a combined 263-7 vote, and Democrats voted against it by a combined 110-147 vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#Passage_of_the_full_resolution) That's before Scott's suggested beginning to increased polarization, but even back then there was pretty clear polarization.
The military budget peaked in 2011, and fell for four straight years after that, falling by a total of one-sixth in nominal dollars. Obama left office with a lower budget, in nominal dollars, than Bush did - once you adjust for inflation and population growth, it fell by 27% during his term. (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2021-TAB.pdf, pages 60-61 of the PDF, looking at the top line of each)
They do shovel a lot of money at banks - I can't argue with you on that one.
"Forbid criticism of Israel" in what sense? It's hardly illegal.
I agree that some hatred of Trump is irrational, but some is perfectly rational. He's an overgrown 13 year old with a penchant for sexual harassment and clueless bombast. He is hilariously thin-skinned, taking mortal offense at things that any other politician would ignore. He's incompetent at managing any organization unless he's an absolute dictator. And he did kind of try to steal an election on basically zero evidence, just a couple months ago. But despite that, there's a huge gap between the parties on Trump - the GOP has mostly bent the knee(with a few exceptions), while the Democrats hate him with a fiery passion.
There's a little daylight between them on the deficit. Democrats say that deficits are awesome, and spend accordingly. Republicans say that deficits are terrible, and ignore that when it's spending time. (Only a little daylight, in other words)
So which voting records and published policies are you referring to?
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all still going. Biden is likely to add Iraq sooner rather than later. MSM won't print criticism of Israel or publish pro palestinian views. Hatred is never rational. The rest of this rant isn't worth a comment.
Afghanistan was before Iraq, and Iraq I discussed. Libya was pretty flagrantly illegal, and Obama did it over Congress' objections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Libya%2C_2011). Syria seems to have been approved on the understanding that it was just support for rebels, not an actual deployment, and that trust was broken. But in fairness, both Trump and Obama did that, so you can call that one bipartisan.
More generally, you miss important detail by filing it all into "they support imperial wars". If the Republicans want to triple the military budget and the Democrats want to double the healthcare budget, they're both supporting roughly the same amount of new spending, and you can say that both support big government. But that's still a pretty huge difference in practice, and lumping them together would miss the point.
Sorry, hit Post too soon.
Regarding MSM criticism of Israel, is CNN mainstream enough? https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/middleeast/israel-apartheid-regime-report-intl/index.html
How about the Washington Post? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-vaccine-palestinians-coronavirus/2020/12/18/f1d8d572-4083-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html
(Of note: Those were literally the top Google results for "cnn israel" and "wapo israel", and those were the first two outlets I looked up - I didn't need to go digging for those links.)
Hatred can be quite rational. You're actually supposed to hate sufficiently bad things.
And the points you refused to address because they were a "rant" were two data sources that clearly prove you wrong, me 100% agreeing with you on one point, and me agreeing with you (with a small quibble) on another. So is it me agreeing with you that's a rant, or is that I linked to solid data sources?
"They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. "
The defense budget as a fraction of GNP has been trending down for the past sixty years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
Let's compromise: we live in a corrupt democracy intent on bankrupting the country.
The thing about this seemingly-enlightened take is that it makes predictions that don't bear out in reality. Rich people would prefer more immigration, especially high skill immigration. Immigration remains pretty locked down, especially high skill immigration. Rich people would also prefer for there not to be extremely restrictive zoning rules in cities so they could build more things, but we don't have that either.
The world we live in looks like it suffers from a lot of dumb populist impulses, not a shadowy elite pulling the strings behind the scenes.
So you speak for all rich people, do you? Immigration, particularly "skilled" immigration, has gone up every year. I know because I oppose it and Trump unsurprisignly did not deliver on his promise to stop it. Are you actually complaining that you can't destroy parts of cities you don't like and replace it with something else? It makes me wonder what kind of people are on this list.
Immigration has not gone up each year. It has actually dramatically declined several times. This chart doesn't have the 2020 data yet, but when it does it'll show a dramatic dropoff:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents?width=850&height=850&iframe=true
H1B (the major high-skill immigration pipeline) has been capped for years, which were restricted further by the Trump administration so that a few thousand more talented people were forbidden from working in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Modifications_in_2020
Regarding development: I am complaining that the same basic free market mechanics that made smartphones ubiquitous aren't allowed to operate on real estate, resulting in catastrophically expensive supply shortfalls and skyrocketing rents and property values. When there is not enough of a thing, I think it's a good idea for people to be allowed to consensually buy, sell, and develop goods to create more of that thing in response to market forces - in this case, housing.
And you'd already know about this stuff if you'd attended the seminar on how to speak on behalf of all rich people with me.
H1-b visas ceilings continue to go up every year, which is what I believe is relevant here, not permanent legal residences, which may very well have gone down, IDK.
The comment about what kind of people are here appears to be an implication that zoning prevents people from destroying other people's property. I don't think that's an effect of zoning, which mostly affects what you can do with the parts of cities you already own.
If extremely restrictive zoning laws were repealed, more housing stock could be built in those cities. And yes, some rich people would presumably do that and make money. But that increased supply would reduce the rental and sale value of existing housing stock in that city, already owned by... Who owns that again? I forget.
Right, I think this is getting to the root of (this) problem: not the billionaires, but the hundred thousandaires. The 1% can't overrule the locally-optimizing incumbents who can vote.
Developers and investors want to build, technocrats want to build, but the upper middle class doesn't, and the populists want to hurt the developers and investors. So the upper middle class and the angry populists team up against the rich and the technocratic to make sure that everything stays expensive and terrible forever.
Maybe we're thinking of different base cities to some extent, but it's making it hard for me to find the hundred thousandaires argument compelling. I know zoning is a huge problem in SF, too, with more traditional residential housing. I'm from NYC.
When I sit in a 60-story residential skyscraper in NYC and look out at the smaller buildings below, and wonder who'd want those adjacent lots not to also become highrises, the first people I'm thinking of are the people in the already-developed building I'm sitting in. Way more new units in the same spot (impeding these units' view) would tend to hurt the current skyscraper owner more than the 4-story owner. The 4-story owner can flip their lot for a lot of money if it's gonna become a high-rise. Renters obviously want there to be more housing stock so landlords can't bend us over the barrel quite as hard.
The people living in the buildings I'm thinking of are definitely millionaires, and obviously their developers/owners are many times more wealthy than that. You don't think there's literal and figurative rent-seeking behavior happening from the Trump/Kushner set? It's hard to think billionaires are my natural ally in this situation. If I'm a developer, why not keep the zoning laws in place generally and just secure specifically favorable treatment for myself vis corrupt means? Then I have the best of all possible worlds. This has happened in NYC for decades.
Ugh... Via* corrupt means. You can't edit these, right? Following SSC here is my first substacking experience.
Because it's hard to get all the rich people in the world to cooperate on a rule that only helps a few of them while denying opportunities to the rest. Jane Q. AmoralInvestor just wants to make money however she can, and if that's by financing the construction of a new building and renting out units, who cares if it cuts into John P. Incumbent's profits?
Competition is the secret sauce that turns greed into everyday utility. It's why I'm composing this reply on a device that would have been an impossible miracle a few decades ago that now costs me under $1/day including amortized device cost, electricity, and network data fees.
Zoning restrictions end the competition before it starts - so greed instead channels its energies into extracting the most value it can from the fixed situation. But the answer to this is just to let greed fight greed and walk away holding all the profits greed had to give away just to stay in the game against itself.
You don't have to sell me on competition being good, and that's not the question I was asking. At least we agree, it seems, that John P. Incumbent himself isn't going out of his way to kill zoning restrictions. Certainly we agree Jane doesn't care if his profits stay up.
But let's say I'm Jane Q. AmoralInvestor... it's also my incentive to buy lots whose value is depressed by current zoning laws, and then secure rezoning for myself. Once I have that stuff, I don't want to abolish zoning law entirely (unless I just bought the whole city), just the zoning law that impacts me. Because as soon as I get that, I'm Jane Q. Incumbent, and new development not undertaken by me is also to my detriment. (I guess I married into the family, under these naming conventions).
> Klein links this polarization to "vetocracy", the idea that it's impossible to do anything nowadays because somebody will prevent you. Sometimes this is a literal presidential veto. Other times, it can be something as stupid and venal as the party out of power using filibusters and every other dirty trick to make sure nothing improves, because if something did improve the party in power would get the credit
This seems a little scrambled to me. More polarization actually could make things move! "Nothing" gets done now because in a closely-divided Senate, there are a few holdouts on both sides - Collins, Manchin, and the like. If they gave into polarization, the majority would be able to ram through its agenda.
Partisanship and Polarization are not quite the same thing. People can be intensely loyal to their own party whilst in practice the two parties do not differ substantially from each other.
This is because of a) the fillibuster, and b) different parties often controlling presidency/house/senate. It's incredibly rare for either side to have a filibuster-proof majority, so they almost always need votes from the other party to get anything non-budgetary through the Senate alone. And then if you don't control the House and the Senate you need the permission of the Chamber controlled by the other party. And unless you have a big majority in the Senate you need the President not to use their veto as well.
These structural features of US politics are really really important in explaining why nothing gets done (insofar as it doesn't.) In the UK parties are strong and ideologically sorted, but we usually have one of them with a majority in the single chamber that can basically make laws all by itself (Commons can always overrule Lords after a delay). So for us polarization hasn't led to paralysis. (I know we've had two coalitions recently but neither have involved the need for co-operation between the two main parties that hate each other.)
I'm struggling to understand the 'loss of geography' section. In particular:
> As cable TV, Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment, it turned out that almost everyone in Kansas was more similar to everyone else in Kansas than any of them were to people in New York, and so Kansas went solid Republican and New York went solid Democrat. But a national Democratic Party that has to include Kansas Democrats under its tent is a Democratic Party that's going to naturally be a bit conservative, a bit sensitive to the interests of religious people, a bit sensitive to the interests of farmers, etc. Once you move from within-state sorting to national-level sorting, things get a lot more sorted very quickly.
Wouldn't this *decrease* polarisation at the national level? I think I get the first bit: when people are focusing on local or state-level politics, the Kansas political parties find their way to the Kansas center, so that ~half of Kansas voters see themselves as Democrats; but when people start focusing on national-level politics, most of the Kansas Democrats realise that they lean right relative to the rest of the country, and so they become Republicans. But I can't figure out the last two quoted sentences.
If the national Democratic party was half Kansans and half New Yorkers, and Kansans are all rightist and New Yorkers are all leftist, then the national party is half rightist and half leftist and probably compromises on being centrist. If the Kansans leave and more New Yorkers come in, then the national party is all leftist, and moves to the left. So moving from geographically homogenous to geographically sorted increases polarization.
It's weird to describe that with the phrase "loss of geography" - but I think this is an issue that comes up in a lot of these related discussions, because what we see is that regions no longer matter, but urbanism does. One aspect of geography (that is arranged in a chunky way) has stopped being relevant, but another aspect of geography (that is arranged much more fractally) has become extremely relevant.
The point is that while you may impose a new geography on it, the only thing *required* for Scott's hypothesis to work is that the old geography no longer holds sway. If instead of being along an urban/rural split, democrats were now 60% of New York at random and 20% of Kansans at random, his proposed mechanism would still work.
Huh, if we instead think of it as the Democratic party exchanging the left half of Kansas for the right half of New York, then this actually doesn't guarantee that the party will become more uniform. That happening is dependent upon the right half of New York for being more left than the left half of Kansas.
But I think this factor mostly goes away when we imagine more than two states. If I picture a bunch of bell curves, with medians uniformly distributed around the origin, then it's pretty intuitive that exchanging the left halt of bell curves to the right of the origin for the right half of the bell curves to the left of the origin would result in more uniformity within the parties.
Even better if, instead of exchanging halves of bell curves, you just put a uniform cutoff at the origin. There is still a Democratic tail in Wyoming and a Republican tail in Vermont, but they're only about a third of the state.
I think what he's saying is that in the pre-communication era, the e.g. Democrats would have to incorporate the Kansas Democrats in their platform. And the Kansas Democrats would be more to the right than the national average perhaps, dragging the Democratic platform a bit more to the right. Whereas now, ~everyone in Kansas is Republican, so you don't have that effect.
It's the difference between taking the average position of the most liberal half of 50 random populations, some of which as a whole are more conservative than others, and just taking the most liberal half of the entire population. In the first scenario, the pre-communication era one, you still get some signal (within each state, the Democratic party is more liberal than the Republican), but it tempered by the difference in the base local orientation.
Another way to phrase this point is that politics became less a way to get things done locally than a game or entertainment for self-expression.
In a way, this lowers the stakes, and makes people less immediately accountable for indulging in pure partisanship.
If indulging in partisanship means the local library or road won't get built, I might rein myself in. If the effect is more diffuse, I have less incentive to do so.
While this is an argument some people might make, it is not the hypothesis Scott put forward, so you should avoid saying things like "Another way to phrase this point" that imply the two hypotheses are similar or isomorphic.
Its not necessarily a entertainment vs. "getting things done" split. On a purely self interest level, whether the national government implements universal healthcare or not, or crashes the economy, or starts wars, etc. has a massive impact on my life, bigger than local issues. And people's judgements aren't purely self interest but include moral/ideological preferences, if in another part of the country something bad is happening, then I would want to vote to stop it, even if it doesn't influence my daily life.
I read this book earlier this year and I found it very engaging (read it in 2 days), but was overall unsatisfied with his proposed solutions; particularly it did read to me that he was saying that the cure for polarization is for the Democratic Party to achieve complete and total victory.
What's amusing to me is that for some (myself included) this prescription is seen as accelerationist.
I picked up the exact same thread before reading your comment. So count me in, I guess.
'Total politics' - I'm sure that someone has coined this before but it seems a good term for the optimize-for-short-term gain Scott talked about.
Also interesting are the parallels between the 'cure for polarization by going *through* polarization to a total Democratic victory' thread you pick up on and the post-Landian discussions around accelerationism. Klein could be read as espousing a very moderate form of left-accelerationism (or perhaps a moderate u-accellarationism, if that is even coherent).
I think what you have to remember here is that we have a two-party system, and over time that system will always self-correct so that both parties have roughly equal access to power (averaged over decades).
If you change a rule so that Democrats have a big advantage (like, popular vote), Democrats may win the next election cycle by a lot, but that but means it's time for Republicans to re-adjust their branding and strategies to be competitive under the new rules. The system re-adjusts to equilibrium.
So, the question is, is the re-adjusted system better than the old one?
For instance, from Klein's perspective, does the new Republican party that wins under the new rules do so by being less focused on white identity politics, or less hostile towards sexual minorities, or some other compromise with centrists/mild leftists, in order to grab more of the centrist voters who were on the fence? If so, that's a win for the country from Klein's perspective, even if the Republicans end up winning elections again next year.
I think Klein is mistaken about what would improve Republican chances of success. Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
Yes, but he still did abysmally compared to Biden.
This is sort of like the 'eating burnt food increases your odds of cancer by 50%' thing - that's from .000001% to .0000015%. I'm not sure how meaningful it is to any larger discussions of population-level trends.
Trump actually won majority Hispanic parts of Florida & Texas vs Biden. And he'd already done better than prior Republicans with minorities when he ran against Clinton, so this was a continued trend. He lost this time because suburban whites shifted against him.
'hispanic parts of florida and texas' is getting into local weather records territory (eg, 'highest recorded windspeed during a storm of 2-5 inches rain/hour during March in Minewok, Illinois).
Given the number of different minorities and the number of different 'parts' (ie small geographic areas) across the country, you could easily get many thousands of such groups to measure. You should expect some of those to be outliers just by random chance, assuming anything like a normal distribution.
I'm not saying there was zero real effect - I'm just saying it was small, and cherry-picking the very specific places and measures on which it looks largest doesn't actually make it more impressive.
Florida & Texas are some of the most heavily hispanic states in the country, with multiple majority hispanic districts. There was initial skepticism of whether the exit polls showing his higher support were reliable, and place-based data confirmed it. Here are some actual numbers from those exit polls: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wins-highest-percent-of-nonwhite-voters-of-any-republican-in-60-years-doubles-lgbtq-support-from-2016-exit-poll/ar-BB1aJJJS
There are very few majority Hispanic areas that Trump actually *won*. He did a lot better than he did before, or Romney, but not reaching a majority.
> Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
I'm having a very hard time seeing metrics where this is true, other than something facile like "raw number of votes received not adjusted for turnout or total population". For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?
To the core point, Trump outperforming GOP candidates that lost isn't quite tautological but comes damn close. It also isn't to surprising if there is a regression to the mean due to Obama's extremely strong minority support in '08 and '12.
Percentage, not raw numbers. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wins-highest-percent-of-nonwhite-voters-of-any-republican-in-60-years-doubles-lgbtq-support-from-2016-exit-poll/ar-BB1aJJJS
If you are treating a retracted tweet as a source, *several* thing have gone wrong with your process.
That url isn't to twitter, it's to a news article. The news article does contain one tweet, but goes through a lot of data in an exit poll which was not in that tweet. Could you provide a citation regarding Adrian Gray retracting anything?
"For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?"
Rio Grande Valley.
Apologies, that was an epistemological "where" instead of geographic. You can absolutely pick individual areas that have trended one way or another (and this is useful data for ground-level operations), but it's a large enough degree of freedom that it kills your statistical power. Broad claims about demographics absolutely require aggregated data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Exit_polling
According to exit polls on Wikipedia, Bush did much better among Hispanics and Asians than Trump, especially in 2004.
As someone who went from complaining about polarization/broadly skeptical of liberal orthodoxy to a 100% unmovable Democratic partisan in the Trump era, that's basically my take.
It's not possible to settle on a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium with people who cannot accept the bare results of an election: they are playing 'defect' right up to the destruction of the game itself. As of polls *after* 1/6, 70% of Republicans thought the results were illegitimate. (The number was nowhere close to as high - 28% - for Democrats even when their ultimate boogeyman Donald Trump was elected. Source is Morning Consult polls as cited at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/)
Actually, this might be an interesting question for the next survey. Conditional on partisanship, how many people think the 2020 election was fairly counted?
Counted? Or run?
The (IMO) unconstitutional election law in PA says to me that it wasn't run fairly, but I have reasonable confidence that the ballots were properly counted and probably weren't fabricated. (Modulo the usual trivial screwups)
The poll was framed as "counted", but I suspect respondents probably did not strongly distinguish the two.
I recall reading some comments that a high % of Democrats actually thought there was significant election fraud in 2020 as well, like 25%+, which I find bizarre
There is not a good chance they actually believe that. It goes down overtime. Its also worth noting that majority of democrats believed that russia hacked machines to win the 2016 election.
I vote mostly for Democrats but I don't know if this is the best idea. States like California where this has happened aren't exactly all that well governed -- and being a de facto single party state gives voters less influence & represents less healthy competition. The Republican electorate isn't about to go away, and Republican senators/representatives mostly seem more thoughtful and reasonable than the electorate they represent, so wrecking the GOP might just see those people replaced by true believers.
In case you are interested, here's my review from last year of Ezra's book:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-anti-larry-david/
Probably I should have some strong opinion on this, but I'm still focusing on the part where Ezra had a staff of eight for his blog. Not in a negative way - just trying to think about what I could do with a staff of eight. It would probably be a disaster - I don't have his managerial talent.
I believe Andrew Sullivan had a staff of ten at one point for his Daily Dish blog a number of years ago.
Maybe you should be one of the staffers rather than the manager then :P
You joke, but that's basically how a lot of small businesses based around a particular talent (musician, writer, artist, etc) work. The talent works on their area of expertise, and has someone else to do the "business stuff". Whether that person is notionally their manager or their employee is somewhat irrelevant as they are the main source of revenue.
Here's my issue with the Zach Goldberg chart: If you made one of those 60 years ago, most of the issues would have been stuff like interracial marriage, Jim Crow laws, damming the Grand Canyon (which Goldwater proposed). Go back another 50 years and you have child labor laws, women's suffrage, workplace safety laws. Go back further when public libraries, national parks, belief the Chinese will never ever assimilate, and the question of should humans be allowed to own other humans - were the hot button issues of the day. Stuff we basically identify now as progress.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now. Same with healthcare - of course the US shouldn't be the only wealthy nation on earth to deny people healthcare based on pre-existing conditions - that's just common sense. Of course [X group] will assimilate, and of course immigrants aren't a net drain on society.
History leans progressive. Many of the hot button issues of today become common sense of tomorrow. You can always make a chart that makes it look like progressives are going off the rails.
The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
The chart is agnostic as to whether the direction the Democrats are moving in is progress or insanity, it's just conveying the point that the Democrats are moving in a direction and the Republicans are staying still (or moving slowly in the same direction), rather than the sort of polarization where both parties move in opposite directions, or the Republicans get more conservative and the Democrats stay still, or anything like that.
My point is if you don't take into account basic incremental progress that all society undergoes, of course it will always look like the progressives are going off the rails to the left.
If we're going to say it means something that Conservatives won't budge while progressives change their opinions and move left, then let's take it back further to the hot button issues of yesteryear. I think most would consider it fairly radical for someone to still be against interracial marriage today. Yet if it's somehow illustrative to look at who moved and who didn't - I guess the person who is still against interracial marriage gets some kind of credit for being the one who didn't change? If not, then why are we implicitly giving Republicans some kind of leg up here for being the ones who didn't budge on gay marriage or pre-existing conditions?
Refusing to budge on slavery in 1860 is pretty radical when you take into account what the rest of the world was doing at the time. Who changed their opinion on the issue and who didn't really isn't illustrative of anything. Or if it is - I would contend the group who doesn't change their opinion generally comes out the worst in history on most issues - which I am pretty sure is not the intended point those charts showing Dems moving left.
The point isn't that there hasn't been social progress over the years, the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong. If you include the issues from yesteryear, what you'll see is that the Democrats have gotten significantly more liberal on them, and the Republicans have also gotten more liberal. Obviously, slavery is outside the Overton window right now, along with your other examples.
What the chart shows is that Democrats have gotten much more liberal on a host of issues, while the Republicans have gotten more liberal on some, and more conservative on others (with a long tail towards more liberal, just eyeballing it). Adding older issues would just make the Republicans look more liberal-trending, which is the opposite of the original claim, that the Republicans have "gone completely off the rails".
I understand that. But my point is if you could somehow subtract out basic progress, it could easily look the other way. You might see that Democrats are basically drifting with the current of progress, while Republicans are actively fighting against it. That's the reason I don't find these "who moved where" charts very meaningful.
I'm not sure what you mean by subtract out basic progress. How would you construct a chart that makes it look like Republicans are going off the rails while Democrats are remaining constant. Do you mean adding points like "view of gay marriage vs the societal mean" and showing how those are trending more conservative (because the mean changed while the Republicans stayed put)?
Republicans and Democrats used to generally agree about increasing the minimum wage over time. Nixon and Johnson both did it. Now, Democrats still think that we should increase the minimum wage over time, while Republicans don't. A similar framing can be used for basically all of these issues.
Imagine the underlying chart was moving to the left (as progress does). Now Democrats are just drifting with the chart and Republicans are actively moving against the chart. All of this is based on looking at past hot button issues which became the common sense of the next generation and extrapolating out that stuff like gay marriage will be the common sense of the next generation.
Obviously there's no real way to quantify it. But then again these charts are pretty subjective to begin with. If you want to make a point you can always run the study enough different ways and cherry-pick the results you want. I used to work for a statistical consulting firm. That's all we did.
Plot the two parties against the median voter, basically.
The dataset can be shifted to make the republicans look like they are going off the rails instead of democrats.
If we plotted the Democrats' and Republicans' viewpoints against the average trends in peer nations like Canada, Germany, Uk, etc., then we would end in a chart where the Republican's are swinging further and more extremely to the right, and the democrats, are all also shifting more slightly to the right.
So including and focussing on the above chart where Republicans stay the same, is implicitly suggesting that America n years ago was some kind of ideal that its good to stick with. Choosing to compare against other peer nations shifts the values to a more progressive set.
So I guess you can just choose which chart you want. You want the Democrats to look like they are going off the rails, then compare them to the Democrats 20, 50 or 100 years ago. If you want the Republicans to look like they are going off the rails, compare to similarly wealthy nations.
I feel like people sometimes willfully forget how comically right-wing the american left-wing is by international standards.
>the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong.
But as I understand it, that's very much *not* the claim.
The claim is something closer to 'Democrats are relatively stable, and Republicans have gotten really crazy over the years.'
If social consensus/civilizational advancement is trending in one direction, and one party stays in step with it while the other gets further and further away from it, then this would seem to loosely support *that* argument.
Your argument is based entirely on rejecting Republicans as being part of American society:
'Democrats are rapidly moving to the left, so society is moving rapidly to the left, which means that Republicans are radicals for not moving along with society.'
Yet if you accept that Republicans are as much part of society as Democrats, then this framing is absurd.
Yes or no, average approval rating towards legalizing gay marriage across all Americans has increased dramatically in the last 30 years?
'Republican voters' is not half of the population; in a year with record-breaking turnout, Trump got 75million votes, or about 23% of the total population of the US.
It's very possible for Republican voters to stay still, and for society as a whole to move on without them. Even when you average them into 'society'.
Yes, if you set the frame to move at 20 mph, then the progressives moving at 22 mph look stable and the conservatives moving at 5 mph are veering into a ditch.
If you set the frame to 0 mph, then the 22 mph progs are in the ditch and the 5 mph cons look stable.
And the best part of all is that where you believe the frame should be set will be determined by, you guessed it, whether you're a con or a prog and the prior associated with each.
I think its a mistake to try and map polarization to some particular set of issues. Better to map it to what the views of the population are. As the median voter has shifted more "progressive" on the issues you mention, the democrats have also become more progressive, staying slightly more progressive than the median voter. Whereas if the set of beliefs the republicans have the unchanging, but fewer and fewer people in the general population hold them, then they are getting further from the average voter
By "the rest of the world" do you just mean the British empire? Because they were forcing what we would now call the third world to give up slavery. It didn't have to be abolished in continental Europe because it had already been replaced by serfdom there long ago.
It depends on the framing! If your question is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no". If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no".
But surely that framing, which uses a nominal dollar amount, is just silly, right? $7 in 1980 isn't $7 in 2021. The first "Inflation calculator" I happened to google says it would be $22 in 2021, and even if that specific number is off, it would certainly be much higher than $7.
You make a mistake in this analysis focusing on particular policy positions. The reason Republicans are seen as going off the rails is their relationship to the truth and democratic systems, not because of their positions on capital gains taxes or infrastructure spending. Storming the Capitol, rejecting election results, believing a deadly virus is a hoax, arming as if for war, embracing violence, casting their opponents as pedophiles — these are the things “going off the rails” means. The Republican Party has been less and less concerned with public policy (Republicans didn’t bother to draft a platform in 2020), and more and more concerned with maintaining power, with or without democracy. Malcolm X wasn’t considered radical because he sought expanded civil rights; so did MLK. It was because he advocated doing so “by any means necessary.” The Republicans are analogous.
These actions are attributed to republicans by democrats. You describe fringe group activity and falsely attribute it to all republicans. This is nonsense.
Since the vast, vast, majority of recent GOP voters prefer to go along with this dreadful, anti-democratic, lying, racist coalition than to vote for a Democrat, the comment is far from nonsense. Latest polls say a big majority of the GOP still believes the last election was stolen. So what are the rest of us supposed to make of all this collective behavior?
On this issue, a majority believe there were serious violations of constitutional law, software "glitches," and ballot shady ballot harvesting that may have and probably did effect the outcome. There are statistical arguments warranting an investigation, of which there was none to date. This is a legitimate concern, though your use of that slogan, though catchy, isn't helpful. The other things you mention are in fact edge cases not much crazier than the last four years of screaming Russia did it talk and investigations that came to nothing from Democrats.
There was quite a bit of investigation - several dozen lawsuits, most obviously. Zero of which won, and quite a lot of which were thrown out for a lack of evidence before even making it to trial - basically, that's judge-speak for "Even if everything you say is true, and the other side doesn't show up, you /still/ couldn't prove your case".
I'm fine with investigating, and defended Trump's right to file those lawsuits. But let's be honest, the investigations turned up nothing more than dry wells and stupidity.
Months of nationwide leftist rioting. 25-30 deaths. Over 2 billion dollars in wanton destruction. Thousands of assaults and injuries.
All of it institutionally encouraged, supported, and even funded by the corporate, institutional left at every level.
Your faux-righteous indignation over January 6th is hilarious.
I'm curious, did any Democratic house or senate members ever condone the violent part of the protests/riots?
I don't know the answer to that^, just genuinely curious.
To me it seems like maybe Trumps actions immediately prior to, and during the jan 6th thing were on another level.
What I mean is, from what i know most Democrat representatives have tweeted support for Black Lives Matter. But did they, knowing send messages of support for rioters during a riot, when members of congress were being threaten with nooses, etc? There's also the difference of communicating from the presidents office, being the one who is supposed to call the national guard and keep the peace, etc.
Not to mention stoking tensions and inflaming your base, by drilling lies about stolen elections into their heads for months.
I also dispute that "leftist riots" are to blame for all the terrible things you mentionned. Its a well known and well documented fact that police used aggressive and violent escalations against protesters and turned many peaceful situations into violent ones. Who's to blame for that?
There are many videos of police kettling protesters, tear gassing them for no reason, knocking them down for no reason. Just remember trumps bible photo op that he did.
And the left is seen as going off the rails because of things like riots, destruction of property, CHAZ, Covid restrictions selectively enforced against religion, conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, Title IX, Biden getting a pass with #metoo, etc.
Some other equivalents:
believing a deadly virus is a hoax - believing travel restrictions are racist
casting their opponents as pedophiles - casting their opponents as racists, sexists etc.
how are those in any way related to each other?
If some people believe that travel restrictions are racist, thats an independent claim that could be evaluated on its own. You could look into whether there's a clear scientific basis for the travel restrictions, or whether experts are recommending it, and you could probably come to a conclusion.
its not related to some other people thinking a deadly virus is a hoax. that's a separate thing.
I'm not saying it's related, I'm saying it's equivalently crazy.
What's key here as well is the radicalization of the right following the widespread overreaction to 9/11. I suspect Republicans' stances on issues like accountability for war crimes, torture, surveillance and the place of Muslims in US society have shifted pretty far "to the right."
Aside from the thematic conflict of the metaphors involved, I don't think that 'staying in one place' and 'going off the rails' are mutually exclusive.
Consider evaporative cooling of group beliefs. As the beliefs of a group are either proven to be flawed or merely go out of fashion, we expect a lot of people to abandon those beliefs. The ones who still hold them in the future may be much more abnormal (in ways that could be called 'off the rails'), and they may hold them in ways that are very different (more fanatical, more oppositional, less data-driven, more conspiratorial, etc).
X years ago, it would be pretty normal for most enlightened scholars to believe in phlogiston. But if a scholar today believed in phlogiston, it would be very likely that they were 'off the rails' in some important way, even though they 'merely stayed in place' all that time.
It has dawned on conservatives that "staying still" -- in the form of blocking any and all processes of government has no policy downside from their perspective (since government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub anyway). Any risk is strictly political to them -- which they have grown more and more confident of being able to manage with assorted hardball tactics, and "owning the libs."
The point is that they have enjoyed a default advantage when it comes to accepting gridlock and even popular disgust with government, while liberals have to keep convincing voters that government is not the enemy. The question is whether the majority is finally fed up with the conservative strategy and their unholy alliances.
I do think the current battles are more profound than Klein suggests (but I haven't read the book), which is why the divide today has become so dramatic. Seems to me we are literally, again, debating competing native worldviews about survival-of-the-fittest-ism (say, Ayn Rand vs. the increasingly socializing/equalizing trajectory of the past five decades). Because the stakes seem so high, conservatives today have largely abandoned what the rest of us have been seeking agreement on since the age of enlightenment: reason, facts, and truth as the lingua franca of the civilized age. This is untenable to us liberals, and, so, a "middle ground" is a nonstarter.
Democrats aren't about to allow the Republicans to achieve any policy goals that their base actually wants, so the best they can really do is stay still.
Republicans had the "trifecta" from 2016-2018, and it seems like they did achieve their goals.
"Republicans did indeed secure their big high-end tax cut. They also got a major boost in defense spending, though mostly via appropriations deals with Democrats that gave them corresponding generosity in domestic spending the GOP would have preferred to reduce. And they did indeed use the budget reconciliation process for both their tax and Obamacare-repeal legislation to sidestep the Senate filibuster."
from: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/what-did-republicans-get-out-of-their-lost-trifecta.html
I suppose it was also a long term republican goal to avoid acknowledging climate change is real so leaving the Paris Accord was a major achievement?
And I suppose that having fresh new conflict on the border of turkey and Syria was another accomplishment?
Its a bit hard to know exactly what Republican's goals are some times. But i guess we can assume that a Republican's actions are achieving Republican goals.
And they captured many of the courts for the next million years which I guess is considered progress towards their policy goal of overturning Roe V Wade and maybe getting of workplace protection for LGBT people.
I guess they didn't build as much Wall as they wanted.
My question is to you: If there was some big, long-term policy goal that Republican's are trying to do, did they propose it in 2016-2018 and it failed?
In my opinion the Republicans simply don't have that many grand shared policy goals and seem more interested in obsessing over pop-culture social issues.
> The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
Staying where you are in a time of such rapid change *is* radical.
The Amish stayed where they are for the last century and a half or so. I don't think anyone alive would say they aren't the very definition of a fringe group. So why doesn't the same go for the religious right?
At one time, everyone thought smoking was fine. Then we found out it wasn't. Someone who refused to update their beliefs about smoking and continued to claim it doesn't cause damage would rightly be considered a dangerous lunatic today. So why doesn't the same go for climate-change deniers?
Polarization may not be the right word for it, but to stay where one is is not a passive act. For a person who is informed, it requires an active choice to take the knowledge one could gain and reject it. It isn't sitting still in a calm sea, it's swimming against a clear current so as not to move with it.
Policy positions are largely not knowledge based, but values based. The comparison with smoking is not appropriate.
They made the comparison between smoking and climate change. The comparison is extraordinarily appropriate and extremely common, because second hand smoke and carbon emissions are negative externalities illuminated by scientific research.
Carbon emissions are also positive externalities. They decrease deaths from cold winters, increase crop yield through CO2 fertilization, make more land warm enough for humans to live in. The popular catastrophic climate change rhetoric counts only the negative externalities and makes no attempt to actually calculate whether the net externality is positive or negative, as an actually knowledge-based argument would do.
I am skeptical-at-best of these claims, but I don't think we even need reach them. The value judgement has to follow the acknowledgement that (a) the planet is warming and (b) human emissions are why. Virtually all experts with any knowledge in the area agree on these facts. But the public does not.
84% of liberal Democrats say human activity contributes "a great deal" to climate change; only 14% of conservative Republicans agree (it scales smoothly from one to the other, source: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/). Conversely, 59% of conservative Republicans think natural forces contribute a great deal; only 14% of liberal Democrats agree.
Again, one of these positions simply is in line with overwhelming scientific consensus, and the other is not.
So is second-hand smoke, right? Also a positive externality? Because some people like the smell. And it keeps away people who would whine about the smell, which many appreciate.
Sorry I'm having trouble figuring out why "but this could also be good in some ways" means we can't call things negative externalities anymore. My belief is actually that emissions are a *net* negative externality.
Is your complaint in this reply, then, that I have to say "net" whenever I say negative externality now? You haven't really specified in this reply whether you just want to point out that many have failed to do a cost-benefit analysis, or whether you actually think warming nets out positive.
Wouldn't a knowledge-based argument accept that we simply don't know or can't know the entire effects of Climate Change at this point?
Is it really possible to sum up all the pros and cons of co2 emitting activities?
I think the consensus on the left is that its bad to take enormous unnecessary risks that could potentially cause enormous amounts of human suffering.
I mean, potentially that suffering will never occur because someone will invent some amazing tech solution next year that blocks sun rays, or captures carbon from the air, but that doesn't change the fact that the wise thing to do now is to take the careful route with less risk.
I think I head somewhere that the anti-second-hand-smoke thing was unscientific as it turns out?
But by staying still they are getting further from what the median voter believes. So are more polarized in the sense that they are getting further from that midpoint. Whereas the democrats may be further left than the median voter, but they are staying consistently the same amount further left, and updating as the middle moves.
Seeing the things you list and others as being part of a singular tradition is your interpretation of them. Certain people on the center right will insist that the modern definition of racial progress is antithetical to the definition of racial progress as concerns the civil rights movement. old school Feminists being outflanked by Tran rights issues is another example where depending on your outlook, progress 1.0 and progress 2.0 run parallel, orthogonal, or opposite. This hasn't happened quite yet but the very notion of universal healthcare in the US might be undermined by the idea that race-based-means-tested government healthcare is morally superior to universal healthcare.
Moral outlooks, including and especially those of the last hundred years, are not mathematical conjectures that are suddenly proven by some academic and then accepted for the rest of human history.
It's certainly true that all intentional change which catches on gets called 'progress' retroactively, regardless of it's actual direction on any number of axes.
That said, society does *change* consistently, in one way or another; anyone who doesn't change with it is out of step with society for some reason, and that trait of being out of step is likely correlated with a lot of other traits that might be of interest to this discussion.
How is this different from 'might makes right,' where you are not radical if you have the power to shape (and indoctrinate) society?
By the same reasoning, Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
It isn't. There is a sort of natural selection of ideologies and policies, where the victors get to be called progress and natural order of things, and the defeated - backwardness and villainy.
I think one of the reason for polarization that isn't often mentioned is the total ideological victory of the West in the Cold War, led by USA. The Civilized World was happily united in their fear and hatred of the Obviously Evil Extremely Dangerous enemy for many decades, and then suddenly it disappeared, or at least was greatly diminished for a time.
There was a brief euphory about this, The End of History and all that, but it turned out that the West still had many problems and no obvious enemy to blame and hate, and so it began hurting itself in its confusion.
> Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
I'm pretty sure this just isn't true, and that's why they both needed strict police states to keep their own populace in check. But I'm not a historian, so I won't argue it.
But nothing I'm saying here is about right vs wrong. It's merely an observation that people who are many standard deviations away from their culture's accepted norms and values tend to be weird people, regardless of what those values and norms happen to be.
I'm not really smart enough to grasp what all this means. I just like to keep it simple and go with examples I can wrap my head around. Off the top of my head here's a list of progressive causes in the last 200 years in the US that were controversial hot button issues in one generation, and common sense in the next:
40 hour workweek
child labor laws
women's suffrage
ending slavery
ending Jim Crow
ending poll taxes and literacy tests
desegregation
toll-free interstate highway system
national parks
public libraries
miranda rights
Medicare/medicaid/disability insurance
unemployment insurance
OSHA
USDA
Americans with Disabilities Act
Labor Day
Clean Air and Water acts
California emissions
workplace harassment laws
interracial marriage
gay marriage
minimum wage
smoking bans
seatbelt laws
nutrition labels on food
calorie counts in restaurants
killing onerous bank overdraft fees
lemon laws
pre-existing conditions shouldn't make health insurance impossible to get
.
.
**Now here are the ones I think went wrong:**
Prohibition
55-mph speed limit (although we probably should have stuck with that for our grandkid's sake)
rent control (maybe causes more problems than it helps)
That's my list. What am I missing?
.
I'm not talking about something someone yelled at a protest, or a scientific fad in the 1800s when science was basically in its infancy and doctors still used leeches. I'm talking about actionable progressive policy - like the examples in both my lists above - that went wrong or right. I get the idea of survivorship bias. But surely we should be able to come up with a few more actual implemented progressive policies that went wrong, right?
It looks to me like several of those in your list are still being opposed, or are being given lip service while being commonly evaded, and not just by those on the fringe.
Official (legally required) segregation seems to have been replaced by an individually chosen form of the same old thing. Jim Crow also seems to be protean.
Minimum wage is routinely opposed - by some respectable set of US right wingers. And some economic orthodoxy.
Workplace harassment laws seem to me to be frequently seen as on the one hand, excuses for empathy-less HR reps to make trouble for innocent people - and on the other hand, to be a toothless tiger for any employee seen as sufficiently valuable, particularly managers, executives, etc. At least in a subset of companies, some of which are notorious. (Uber is my go-to example of such a reputation.)
The "Americans with Disabilities Act" is another case of a bureaucracy decried for imposing meaningless requirements to accommodate hypothetical people - while at the same time Apple's architectural award winning new headquarters building had to have retrofits for simple things like access to washrooms for people in wheelchairs.
And I haven't noticed any reduction in absurd fees from rapacious banks.
And oh yeah, public libraries are great - but there's very often no room for them in the civic budget. I tend to be pleasantly surprised - and spend a lot less at e.g. Amazon - when I live somewhere that has such a thing.
And poll taxes and literacy tests seem to just get replaced with other ways to keep the "wrong" people from easily voting. I.e. lip service, from most, but inadequate implementation. again.
Clean Air and Water acts - it's politically mainstream in the US to decry the EPA for imposing excessive costs, delays and uncertainty, in favor of species that aren't cute or photogenic and thus don't matter. Few people want the river they live near to catch on fire, or smog to the point of measurable impacts on life expectancy <em>for them</em>. But they seem a lot less clear about the environment that other people live in.
I think you're much too quick to dismiss survivorship bias, honestly. There have been thousands of ideas brought up by what we might now call progressives that have been rejected for various reasons. This often happens in their infancy, killed by other progressive types who know it will not work. Often it happens when the ideas are introduced to a wider audience and their flaws are identified.
In a functioning society, very few ideas will live to get implemented without a thorough vetting. When that happens (prohibition), it's often regretted and reversed.
Your list appears to be an attempt to recommend further progressive policy, but may in fact recommend the thorough vetting of thousands of ideas more than it recommends cart blanche approval of progressive planning.
I'm late to the party, but I think you're missing Social Security as something that went wrong. Regardless of whether you are in favor of such social programs, the implementation was based on faulty premises: the larger, younger population will transfer money to the smaller, older population; that population will generally continue to increase; that 30 years working is enough to fund indefinite retirement.
We now know that it's a better plan, generally, to have forced savings. If each individual's Social Security taxes were instead invested for the benefit of those paying them, then the plan could never run out of money.
As a conservative, I think people should be responsible for their own retirement planning, and am against the government getting involved in it. But I accept that many people don't know even the basic principles of financial planning, and that liberals want to provide help to everyone. As a compromise, then, I understand the need for government intervention. But the implementation of Social Security is fundamentally flawed.
Who is the we that knows this thing?
I thought it was generally recognized that 401k plans are the way to go, instead of Social Security, which I also thought everyone thinks is going to run out of funding. Easily found example: https://www.cnbc.com/select/will-social-security-run-out-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
From where I sit, that's merely a US conservative talking point, that they hope will be believed if they repeat it often enough.
The advantage of social security and similar schemes, is that they distribute risk. In particular, the risk that you will live longer than expected, and outlive your savings. When planning for retirement, I had to save as if I might reach 95th percentile or even higher life span. It's equally likely that I'll only reach 5th percentile. With any kind of pooled risk scheme (like social security, or old fashioned private pensions) that risk averages out, and the amount needed per person is only the 50th percentile amount. (Perhaps a bit more, to allow for potentially increasing lifespans.)
The rest of the common talking point is social security running out of money, for what seem to me to be primarily political reasons. If politics doesn't allow social security to be managed providently, or contributions to be increased, or for that matter the country to import young adults to pay into the system, that doesn't mean that an entirely different type of scheme would be better. It means that US politics is dysfunctional.
I see your point, but even if you subtract a "basic progress" metric it still looks like democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm - for example, net support for gay marriage moved up 45 points in ten years (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/06/26/support-for-same-sex-marriage-grows-even-among-groups-that-had-been-skeptical/), while it took over twice that for the same shift in interracial marriage.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Public_opinion_of_interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States.png )
In the pew research link you sent, there's a chart breaking down support for gay marriage by political party between 2007-2017.
Republicans go from 20%to 47% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
Democrats go from 49% to 76% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
It looks like they both parties followed the same trend and went up 27% to me. So i'm a bit curious on what you mean by:
"democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm".
I guess you mean that the whole population is changing its mind faster on this issue, than it did for interracial marriage?
Then maybe a new question is: how fast should progress go?
I would argue as fast as we can while maintaining strong democratic institutions. Its hard for me to think of a way to make this specific though. Did we go too slow changing our minds on interracial marriage or too fast on gay marriage?
How fast do we want the other party to be able to move?
"In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now" I think the same-sex marriage vs interracial marriage equivalence doesn't work.
You have religious and cultural traditions about marriage going back thousands of years, which are still adhered to by a majority of people in the majority of countries in the world; the idea that those traditions are wrong is (to a great extent) a historical novelty, an idea which is less than a century old, 20 years ago most people in first world countries opposed it, and even now, the majority of countries still have majority opposition to it.
By contrast, interracial marriage bans are much more of a historical anomaly. You can count on one hand the number of countries that have ever had formalised bans on interracial marriage – the vast majority of countries never have. It is not an idea with thousands of years of heritage behind it, in fact it only really dates to the 17th century.
Overturning something which has existed for a few centuries maximum, and only ever in a handful of countries, is a lot easier than overturning something that goes back thousands of years, and is found in the majority of countries around the world.
In 20 years time, there will still be a substantial minority opposed to same-sex marriage. It quite possibly will have shrunk somewhat – although the high birth rate of religious ultra-conservatives counteracts that – but it certainly will be a lot larger than the minority opposed to interracial marriage will be.
Just to be clear your position is that interracial marriage bans are easier to overturn because they only existed for a few hundred years, while you believe formal gay marriage bans have exited for thousands?
How does your hypothesis account for Shaked Koplewitz's comment above, that gay marriage support went up 45 points in ten years while it took 20 years to elicit a similar shift against support of interracial marriage? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-why-were-polarized#comment-1227231
Because the interracial marriage work was done first. Part of the gay marriage argument was "this is the Civil Rights of our time!" and part of that was deliberately making the comparison with interracial marriage. So people who had grown up with "ban on interracial marriage wrong and bad and evil" were much more likely to be persuaded on "ban on gay marriage wrong and bad and evil" because the deliberate comparison had been made "you don't want to be a *racist*, do you? of course not! but being anti-gay marriage is the exact same thing as being a racist who was anti-interracial marriage!"
That argument only really works in the US though, because it is one of the few countries in which a ban on interracial marriage existed and became a big political issue. The vast majority of countries never banned interracial marriage; even in the few others that did, it almost never became a major political debate. (A good example of that is France, which had on-and-off-again bans on interracial marriage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they often went unenforced, and eventually finally disappeared without most people even noticing – indeed, most French people forgot they ever existed, if they ever knew they existed to begin with.) It probably also has some salience in highly Americanised Western countries (especially English-speaking ones), but that says more about the cultural dominance of the United States than anything else. I don't think you'd get very far with that kind of US-centric argument in most of the Middle East, Africa or Asia.
I know your topic is specific to marriage, but how does your thesis account for what appears to be the greater overall stubbornness of racial discrimination in the United States? It's been 165 years since the end of the Civil War, yet racial discrimination and bigotry hang on stubbornly. Marriage equality and other civil rights for gay Americans seems to be gaining acceptance at a much quicker pace. Seemingly, if the taboo against homosexuality, because it is so ancient, has a stronger hold on the culture than bigotry on the basis of race, there would be far higher resistance across a host of issues. But that seems to be the opposite of what we see.
So one big difference is to what extent we are dealing with a US-specific phenomenon versus a global phenomenon. Interracial marriage bans were largely specific to the US, few other countries have ever had them, and their defenders in the US found few supporters in other countries. By contrast, a majority of the global population – even in 2021 – still supports limiting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Conservative American Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have been receiving support from Christians in Africa (and other parts of the world) where opposition is still the clear majority position, and there is no certainty it won't still be in 20 years time – witness the strong support African Anglican churches gave to the conservative ACNA breakaway from the US Episcopal Church, and their strong support for a global Anglican alliance in defence of traditional sexual morality, GAFCON. By contrast, American Christians who defended interracial marriage on religious grounds found very little support from overseas Christians. I think globalisation and increased diversity of immigration add to the picture – conservative American Christians can today call on support from conservative Christians in the Global South, in a way in which they couldn't have in earlier decades even if those Christians had been inclined to support them (which on the issue of interracial marriage they were not). And I think broadly the same point applies to some other religions as well, such as Islam.
If you made one of those charts in the prior progressive era, it would have included major progressive issues like eugenics and prohibition. It's easy to construct a narrative saying that things are coherently moving in a certain direction if you ignore everything inconvenient to its narrative. It's a teleological view without a clear telos, and a historiography, quite frankly, based on flattering the preconceptions of people like you.
History leans Christian. And at least a Christian view of history has a clear telos. Yet somehow I doubt you believe that Jesus is coming back.
Eugenics was quack science seized on by racists. That's nonsense. I'll give you prohibition.
Sure, that is how we view it now: quack science seized on by racists. But plenty of intellectuals of the day championed it. Maybe people a hundred years from now will say similar things about any number of progressive issues out there right now. My point isn't that X issue is good and Y issue is bad.
My point is the opposite: some perspective and epistemic humility make it quite hard to view something as progress before you really know how it will turn out.
The fundamental problems with eugenics aren't scientific, even though the science used to support some specific implementations of eugenics has been rubbish.
There's no fundamental scientific problem with the idea that people would overall be better off if more people tended to be born with genes for better health, fitness and intelligence, though. The problem is in translating that into an actual policy that isn't somewhere between "horrifying" and "really really really horrifying".
Eugenics is a classic "progressive" policy. "Progressive" policies tend to be about boldly making big changes to society because they sound like a nice idea at the time while giving insufficient thought to the unintended consequences which in practice tend to always outweigh the intended ones. Eugenics is one of those idas that sounds like a great plan when you've thought about it for five minutes but turns out to be horrible when you've actually done it for two decades.
The reason that I'm (mostly) a conservative is not that "progressives" are always wrong, but because they often are, and because I think the world right now needs more people capable of saying "Hey now, stop right there, think about the unintended consequences" and fewer who say "Hey guys I have a radical proposal to fix everything!"
Matt S, a lot of people think that woke beliefs are in large part based on quack science seized on by anti-white racists.
Being quack science seized on by racists doesn't mean it's not a progressive issue. It was promoted by progressives as part of a progressive ideology to remake society.
The science wasn't the problem — some human characteristics that matter are heritable, and humans have been changing animal strains by selective breeding for a very long time. And the people who "seized on it" included Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, ... . Its principal opponent was the Catholic Church.
"History leans progressive" is an illusion created by survivorship bias. Only the issues on which progressives eventually win get branded as "progress".
When the "progressives" win, things change, and this is branded as progress. When the progressives lose, nothing changes, the issue is forgotten, and the change for which they fought is retrospectively rebranded as "not progress".
I was really struck by this when I started reading GK Chesterton. Now, GK Chesterton was a fusty old conservative even in his day, so in a world where "progress" was a genuine direction in political space you'd expect his writings to be busy defending ideas that nowadays seem ridiculously old-fashioned. And yet he's not, he's mostly out there defending sensible principles, because the "progressives" of his day were in favour of forms of "progress" such as the abolition of private homes and families for the benefit of a government-mandated eugenics program.
Prohibition was a massive progressive failure. But it's not like we all forgot about it.
I can rattle off about 50 off the top of my head where one era's controversial issue became the next generation's common sense.
That doesn't mean that the current beliefs of progressives will become the common sense of the future. For example, racial 'blindness' was the progressive standpoint of progressives of yesteryear (see MLK's most famous quote), but current progressives advocate judging people by their race. So either people who had similar beliefs to MLK were radicals who didn't have 'common sense', or the current progressives are radicals who don't have 'common sense'.
You entire argument hinges on your claim that you know that the current beliefs by progressives will become the common sense of the future, which you cannot know. We can certainly point to others who falsely thought the same thing, like communists.
'Progressives advocate judging people by their race'. This is something of a strawman. It probably fits well with how some social justice types on twitter actually behave on twitter. But virtually no one actually defends 'form a judgment of how virtuous any individual is on the basis of their race.
There are scores of articles and papers on the evils of whiteness and white people. Just one example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/racism-white-women.html
I'm honestly getting real tired of people who claim that this is not happening.
Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. I don't think anyone would call them anything other than progressives.
That framing in that article-treating this as something white women do as a collective rather than as something individuals have done-is bad and racist and bigoted (doesn't *necessarily* mean the phenomenon it's talking about isn't real: compare a racist on the right talking about high crime rates in black inner city areas) but it's not advocating for the position 'judge individuals on the basis of their race' but rather saying that there is a problematic trend in white culture with using the idea that black men are a threat to white women to control or drum up violence against black men. I actually think very few bigots on either the left or right *ever* advocate directly for "judge individuals on the basis of their race', post-Jim Crow, apart from actual Nazis* and Nation of Islam black supremacist-types. King's famous remark in the I Have a Dream speech made sense because he was talking in the context of laws that forbade *all* blacks from doing certain things, but that's seldom advocated for these days against either whites or blacks. (At least at a legal level.)
*Even not all of them maybe. The son of the guy who runs Stormfront once said in an interview with the NYT about him abandoning white supremacy that his parents were generally fine with people of colour on an individual level, and that there
'Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. '
Again, not really (regardless of one's views on the wisdom of affirmative action, a topic on which I don't have strong views.) They usual defences of Affirmative Action are that it will a) make society equal overall by giving blacks more power (on the assumption that they currently have less than their fair share), b) will somehow compensate blacks as a group for past injustice, c) will lead to greater "diversity" of experiences amongst the student population and hence a richer educational experience (maybe no one actually believes this one, but officially this is the *only* legal justification for affirmative action) or d) help compensate for the fact that the grades of black students don't reflect their actual levels of talent because of racism. Now maybe all of a-d) are total bullshit, I'm not taking a stand on that, but none of them involve deciding that whites are worse students or worse people because they are white.
The most obvious big miss was economic, not social. Prior to the the 1980s or so, it was absolutely standard for progressives to be all-in on communist economics, massive nationalisation programmes, class warfare etc. The British government between WW2 and Thatcher was very far to the left economically. She rolled all that back and the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant, that no political leader since has seriously considered bringing it back with the exception of 70s throwback Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced.
The whole gestalt of progressivism throughout most of the 20th century was totally abandoned, hence their now near-total focus on identity politics.
This is my observation too. I've tried to think: "If I take an outside view and place my self randomly sometime in the last 200 years, were the liberals or conservatives more likely to be correct / moving in the right direction?" And I found that both sides are likely to be wrong about a ton of things, obsessed about a ton of things that really don't matter, but when they have clearly articulated differences the liberals are probably more right about social issues and more wrong on economic ones.
There's plenty of exceptions. But if you're trying to figure out what your priors should be: liberals are probably right on social issues and more likely than not to be wrong economic ones is probably a good place to start (then obviously update on the evidence in the specific case).
How are you measuring "right on social issues"? Are you simply determining which you agree on today, that were argued [X] years ago?
That is indeed a problem with trying to judge the correctness of social issues. Economics at least has somewhat objective metrics that you can use to compare different societies - the USSR collapsed and adopted capitalism (sorta), the USA became an economic superpower. 1-0 to the conservatives.
With social issues like the importance of free speech, gay rights, feminism etc it's not really clear how you'd objectively judge them, especially within the system. It's easy to do so subjectively: isn't it clearly better and happier that gays are no longer oppressed? Well yes, but, that's a circular social judgement - the societies that oppressed them believed by doing so they were creating the better world, and arguments on both sides would boil down to feelings (though I suspect oppression of gays actually had some sort of economic roots to do with needing children that were voided with the arrival of the welfare state).
"the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant"
Actually the majority of British people today would welcome a massive nationalisation programme – at least for rail, water and energy. See the survey below. "State ownership is still the preferred option for a majority of people across most of the industries we asked about."
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/05/19/nationalisation-vs-privatisation-public-view
Everyone is in favor of lots of stuff when responding to surveys and costs are not factored in. This is true of every pet project of any camp - not just nationalization. Ask people if they want better sports stadiums on surveys and they are in favor. Ask them in the next election if they want to implement a tax hike to pay for better sports stadiums, and they vote it down (at least here in the US). Thus, the joke about Abortions for Some, Free tiny American Flags for Everyone!
Well, for rail at least they got it thanks to lockdowns. The UK rail industry is effectively nationalised now.
Online panel polls seem to have a bias towards any answer that can be perceived as pro-social, and this is apparently a known issue to pollsters (source: random internet comments from people claiming to be ex pollsters, season liberally with sodium chloride). So am I skeptical the population really wants this to the extent these polls claim. Ditto for lockdowns.
I also suspect people's views on rail could be shifted radically should it ever become a popular topic of debate, because there are strong arguments in favour of privatised railways but politicians don't bother making them. The only time any serious politician advocated for nationalisation the Tories decided to focus 100% on Brexit, which was clearly the right choice. Look at the graph of railway usage over the history of the system. It is V shaped, with the bottom of the V being exactly in the years when the system was privatised. That graph alone is pretty compelling
The polling problem is suspected to be a mix of factors, one of which is that people are paid to take part and this seems to create a bias towards saying "yes" to things because a fraction of users believe if they don't give the answers the question asker wants to hear, they might not be invited to take part anymore.
Another problem is simpler: what kind of people spend long periods in their evenings and weekends answering long online surveys in return for trivial sums of money? (a) People who are time rich but money poor e.g. people on benefits, students, etc who tend to be left wing. (b) People who feel answering polls lets them influence government and the news (YouGov explicitly advertises this as a benefit of joining). The left is more into influencing people via media, hence the greater prevalence of left wing media outlets than right wing. Rich conservative business execs with 3 kids aren't going to spend time answering long surveys in return for 10 quid, so will inevitably be under-represented.
'Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced'
This is true, but a bit misleading. Corbyn fought two elections not one, and although he got crushed the second time, he did quite well in the first one, only losing narrowly and improving on Labour's performance 2 years earlier. Indeed, Labour gained their largest % of the overall vote since 2001 in the 2017 election. Further, what changed between 2017 and 2019 was not Corbyn's leftist economic policies (it was something of a factor that the 2019 manifesto promised more spending, but by no means the most important) but the fact that anti-Brexit people had become radicalized and didn't see Corbyn as anti-Brexit enough while (more important) pro-Brexit voters now saw him as trying to overturn the referendum.
You're take that Corbyn lost because ordinary voters saw that his economic policies were crazy-because-socialist is suspicious, because it implies voters vote on policy, and there is very little evidence that that is true. I have to say that when Corbyn was elected Labour leader, I thought his leftism would doom him, because people would trust the mainstream media's claims that he was extreme (which of course, in one sense he was, he did represent a big shift to the left, love it or loathe it). But after 2017, I stopped thinking that this was anything like a strong enough effect to guarantee that a politician as far-left as Corbyn couldn't become PM.
To be fair, it is a little hard to say just what 2017 indicates, because the Tories ran a famously shitty campaign, resulting in Labour soaring in the polls relative to where they were at the start, when they were 20 points behind and it really did seem like 'Corbyn too socialist to achieve anything other than massive defeat' was the right take.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married.
Maybe. But what about bet on other progressive ideas? What is your bet on efficacy of "defund the police" movement and overall policies on crime? What about progressive ideas on how to solve homelesness and drug addiction problem we see on West Coast? What about progressive ideas on housing crisis? What about progressive ideas on fighting systemic racism by implementing large scale diversity trainings? Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?
I think most of these will fail spectacularly and then will be just whitewashed. "No true Progressive" believed in these ideas back then. They only believed in ideas that proved to be successful.
"Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?"
Seems like it. Under what circumstances do you expect the Republican Party to seriously fight them?
"History leans progressive" isn't even true for one country (America) in one short time period (1960-2020). Economically, public policy since Reagan is significantly to the right of where it was in the 1960-70s. The anti-tax movement is one of the most successful political movements in American history. Unions are far weaker than they used to be; the minimum wage has plummeted when adjusted for inflation; state control of the economy is largely anathema, replaced by a neoliberal consensus that both parties subscribe to.
Following up on my previous comment, it's definitely not true that history leans progressive overall. History is fundamentally unpredictable. In 100 BC, Rome was a semi-democratic republic where you could more or less express your political opinions and believe in whatever religion you want. Its philosophers tended to be rationalists, skeptical of religion and smiling on its absurd pieties. Then the centuries-old republic fell, replaced by the Augustan autocracy. Then an obscure religion rose out of a backwater desert in the Middle East and took over Europe. By 500 AD, this religion had an iron grip on politics and philosophy; the rational skepticism of 100 BC turned into the all-consuming theological autocracy of the Middle Ages, an orthodoxy enforced by the mob, the kings, and the clergy. Christianity was spreading so fast that Christians must have thought it would take over the world. Then a random orphan in another brutal desert invented a new faith and united the tribes of Arabia; shortly after his death, his followers destroyed one superpower (Persia) and nearly destroyed the Christian Roman Empire within a single generation.
What will happen in 500 years? There's no reason a theocratic autocracy enforced by mass digital surveillance can't happen. Insert your favorite boogeyman as the religion (Christianity, Islam, social justice...)
I hope someday you sincerely try to tackle the "why cant we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" question.
It seems to be the most pressing current question. Unfortunately, It does not appear to me that the left takes it seriously. The left answer appears to be "more of what we have been doing, and do it with new people."
On the right, there are some who write directly about the question and try to sincerely answer it, though very few people of stature bother to address the arguments.
I would love to see you take a serious shot at answering that question from the ground floor.
You should read the left more. "Everything stopped working around 1970, because neoliberalism" is basically dogma on the left; "why can't we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" was <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/issue/failure-is-an-option">the theme of the most recent issue of Jacobin</a>.
Of course you might think that the left diagnoses are wrong, or that their remedies would make it worse, but that's separate from the left not taking the question seriously.
I probably do not pay enough attention to the non-neoliberal, non-woke left. Though my impression is that's just communism with more epicycles, which may be wrong. I would be interested in going down the rabbit hole. I wish your link wasn't paywalled.
On the link: if you scroll down some, you can click on most of the articles
On the left: there's a wide range between the US and communism that leftists tend to advocate for. Nationalized health care is obviously a big one, and one which most of Europe is to the left of the US on. There are a number of individual-focused changes like parental leave, vacation time, and work hours. Leftists also often advocate for more societal-focused changes like nationalizing natural monopolies, increasing the funding for public transit on a national level, increasing the power of unions, or mandating that company boards have workers on them.
Those are all policies that could entirely be part of a capitalist society, where businesses are still generally owned by individuals instead of by the state. Of course, many on the American right would describe those as communism (apparently Joe Biden is a "communist"!), but doing so isn't really an accurate description of anyone who would call themselves communist. And some on the left certainly are communists, calling for a revolution by the proletariat and an abolition of private property, but that's a small minority.
I assumed the Seth Ackerman article that's paywalled was the one addressing my question. Which of the others addresses the issue squarely? There are quite a few.
Just so we share a mindspace, I've read Oligopsony's comments on SSC for 10 years and am aware of non-US politics.
I am extremely extremely doubtful that the problem is variations on policies such as parental leave, funding levels for various nice social programs, or making company boards more diverse. I am curious how you think your examples would result in some general improvement in government capacity? Would government with the various policies you mentioned be able to tackle COVID effectively?
The problem I identified in the original post extends to basically all of the western democracies. Europe spectacularly failed on responding to COVID and also generally appears moribund and unable to act efficiently or effectively. Perhaps its not as bad as the US, but there does appear to be a general phenomena in the west on this front.
Ah, I was mainly answering what the "non-neoliberal, non-woke left" has that differs from communism.
The Ackerman article talks about how most of the systems at the top of the American political system are set up to stop change. The Supreme Court can override the legislative branch, the legislative branch needs the president to approve, the president needs the legislative branch to create laws, and House and Senate need each other to agree, the Senate needs a supermajority to get past the filibuster, and so on. Thus the system as a whole can't actually produce any significant change that hasn't been wanted by a large majority of the US population for a long period of time.
That's obviously not entirely true, but it is true for a lot of the issues. 67% of Americans want a $15/hr minimum wage[0], but it's looking doubtful that it will happen, despite the president and most of the House being in favor. Similarly, 69% of voters want Medicare for All[1], but there's almost no chance of it.
Of course, that doesn't explain Europe, other than perhaps saying that they too have too many checks and balances, and that they need a more unilateral populace-based control. But, on a lot of issues, European governments do have a lot more government capacity. The US pays a lot more than Europe (other than the UK) for building public transit, for instance.[2] Leftists would probably explain it as partly caused by privatization.[3]
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/two-thirds-of-americans-favor-raising-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-an-hour/
[1]: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-poll-69-percent-of-voters-support-medicare-for-all
[2]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/08/01/case-selection/
[3]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/10/30/what-is-neoliberalism-anyway/
Sorry for the paywall, but glad I inspired some interest!
On the contemporary socialist-or-social democratic left (I won't say "non-woke," because that's a very elastic term, even moreso than socialist) I'd say there are two schools of thought on the stagnation question: the fatalist Marxist response and the anti-neoliberal response. The first is generally a bit further left than the other, but not perfectly so (because there are other issues at stake.)
For the fatalist Marxists like Michael Roberts, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Cockshott, things are slowing down because of capital accumulation. Specifically, rates of profit are falling, and *have been falling*, for a very long time, in accordance with the dynamics of capitalism. This long-term secular trend was slightly obscured during the middle of the twentieth century, which had plenty of new places to build and destroyed old things to rebuild, and which was throwing a lot of growth into consumer goods rather than capital accumulation - there's your epicycle, if you like - but then reasserted itself. These agree with the anti-neoliberal social democrats that the slowdown is associated with the shift to neoliberalism, but see neoliberalism as a way of reasserting profitability by privileging capital - a response to slowing growth rather than its cause. (Although the politics are quite different, you might notice a similarity to some of Tyler Cowen's explanations in a steady decline of low-hanging fruit.)
For the anti-neoliberal social democrats like Branko Marcetic, Thomas Piketty, or many of the MMT types, neoliberalism led to a slowdown by shifting the income distribution upward and encouraging that upward wealth going towards financial assets rather than real production. A change within capitalism - one that empowered labor unions and governments alongside shareholders, and that increased the share of effective demand coming from consumers as well as investors - could change the incentives structure of production towards more long-termism. These groups also tend to see public goods as underinvested in. A nice blog series that outlines some ways of thinking about how neoliberal solutions can be anti-growth - written in the kind of insight porn that SSC readers are likely to appreciate - can be found at https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/category/coasian-hell/
I'd say Jacobin is a good place to go to start keeping tabs on the left, not because they're perfect by any means - they can often be quite shallow, as any publication that tends towards mainstream success can be - but because they represent a nice sampler of thought in this sphere without presuming that you've memorized everything about some particular weird inter-left debate. Getting from there to less shallow stuff is often as simple as following an author to their private blog.
If you had to recommend a book length in-depth treatment of the "fatalist Marxists" position (or just another long running blog i could pick through) I'd be very interested to read it.
I've read picketty, i wouldve put him in my "neolib" camp, lol. whoops! I'll read harrowell.
Thank you for your links, I appreciate it.
Michael Robert's blog, or for a book-length treatment, Andrew Kliman's "Failure of Capitalist Production" may be helpful (though Kliman is a cranky fellow in both senses and can be somewhat exhausting to deal with at book-length.) Roberts also has edited a book of papers from this perspective entitled "World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability."
I don't know what Substack's linking policy is, but you should be able to find these wherever fine books can be found.
that's good enough for me. Thanks!
If the problem was neoliberalism, Japan wouldn't be doing worse than the U.S. (which is still the richest real country in the world).
I'm probably missing something here, but I'd always heard that profit margins are pretty high now - how does this interact with the decreasing-profit-margins case?
The decreasing profit margin on building something tangible... Physical capital. Instead, the system is now set up to be more profitable for those who invest in financial instruments.
But the opposite is true. It's much harder to earn a living by investing compared to working.
Profit margins are the ratio of sales to profits, whereas Marx was talking about the ratio of capital investment to profits. So, if you invest $10,000,000 and sell $5000 of products, but $4000 of that is pure profit, your profit margins are great, but your rate of profit (profit relative to capital investment) is appalling.
I don't know what a good reliable source for rate of profit over time graph would be, but this was the first google result I found, which shows the claimed downward trend: https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/image001.jpg
More generally, I *think* a big conceptual disconnect is that Marx is working on the labor theory of value. The claim is that capitalists can only make a profit by capturing the surplus value created by human workers, so as the ratio of human workers to automation falls, the ratio of profit available for capture to overall capital investment also falls.
The claim also explicitly includes the caveat that capitalists can temporarily fend off this fall in profits by exploiting the workers harder - longer hours for less pay, worse conditions, etc. I think adherents to this view would vaguely gesture at graphs of wages not rising for a long time, wealth inequality spiking, etc. as evidence that capitalist are doing exactly this right now, allowing profits to stay high, but that this is not a stable system and can only lead to a long economic bust when exploitation reaches intolerable levels.
The relevant distinction here is between capital share of income (how much new wealth goes to capital, currently high, as far as things go) and rate of profit (how much income you expect per time period per amount invested, currently low, as far as things go.) Ceteris paribus raising one will raise the other, but if rates of growth are low - precisely the situation we're trying to puzzle out! - then you can have low rates of profit even with a high capital share of income.
For the neoliberal take on what happened in the 70s, you can read Scott Sumner:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/more-evidence-that-neoliberalism-worked/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/on-or-about-december-1978-the-worlds-ideology-changed/
Importantly, he compares countries that embraced neoliberalism to a greater vs lesser degree rather than just having everything after some date represent neoliberalism while everything prior to it doesn't.
I think your point is a little lost because I have no idea who you're referring to on the left or right. Are we talking about mainstream Republicans and Democrats, in which case I dont see any attempt at big diagnosis on either side, or a bit further to the poles?
I didn't want to get into a debate on the relative merits of these authors and their politics, I was just noticing a trend that may or may not be real. I was not speaking from a mainstream politician perspective, but the various intellectuals that address these questions.
For example that may prove the rule, Matt Yglesia does write about this issue, and he gets quite a bit of flack for it. His most recent book One Billion Americans book can be considered a "take" on this question.
Something that bothered me about the book is that it doesn't link the people's affective polarisation with the political parties. There's definitely an increase in political polarisation across the world - incl Marine le Pen in France, Brexit, German far right parties rising fast, India, Hungary and more. I'm not sure how to square that seemingly benign affective polarisation chart with the political outcomes. And while Dixiecrats move would've had a role in creating a better party mix, I'm not sure why that would've led to more polarisation relative to all the other party mixes that have happened in the past.
One option, which I wish the book had discussed better, is the rise of mass media. Media creates a transparent information economy for the whole country. It ensures the speed of information transmission is rapid or instantaneous. So any political action you take has to have an immediate and positive effect. If that's the case, then naturally compromise gets harder, because you compromise to get something you want later. But the immediacy of feedback makes us all hyperbolic discounters. Makes us do things like McConnell not giving everyone $2k even though that would've won him all 3 branches of the govt.
Ultimately it makes us all greedy algorithms. And that's not a US specific topic, it's true around the world.
So I don't know too much French history, but if Le Pen really is more extreme and more polarizing in France than previous politicians, wouldn't you expect to see an increase in French people with a negative opinion of her party? (and, among her supporters, more hostility towards Macron)?
I think we are seeing some of that, though I think you meant a positive opinion of her? - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/01/macron-camp-clash-le-pen-border-closures-poll-sees-closing-french/amp/
https://www.ft.com/content/6d8b9c7a-412c-11ea-a047-eae9bd51ceba
So to clarify, what I meant is that you should see a reduction in people who think both major candidates are fine, and an increase in people that really hate one (or both) of them. If you assume the alternative to Le Pen is a more mainstream centre-right figure who appeals less to the fringe, then you would expect to see less net hostility to the mainstream alternative than you do to Le Pen - and if we're assuming Le Pen's predecessors as the main opposition figure were more like that, then Le Pen should get more hate than they did.
I can't see the body of the articles because paywall - going by the headlines it looks like Le Pen is seeing more support? But that's not necessarily a sign of more partisanship (or of less partisanship - you can have a Reagan-like fringe politics figure or a Biden-like mainstream figure both pick up a lot of support against the incumbent, for opposite reasons).
Ah I see. That makes sense. Sorry about the paywalls.
But this is one of those cases where defining "polarisation" is interesting. You could see it as the chart above re Rs and Ds creating a nice bimodal distribution, or you could purely look at % of people with antagonistic views towards the other party, or you could look at the level of pushback against the "mainstream" parties in the middle of said distribution. My point was that most of the world is seeing the latter.
But yes, if MLP were more moderate, the reaction would be to cause less net hostility to her. But she's not, which is what creates the furore. So MLP does get more hate than her predecessors. But she (much like Trump) also gets more love for her extreme views. Whether this is a strategy (get visibility through extreme views, moderate to get acceptability) remains to be seen.
Also, to your point, to me the interesting aspects would be to see how it plays out too - there's a likelihood that her route from strong minority to majority relies on relaxation of some of the views, which could be a victory (much like Scott writes about the Democrats).
To me whether or not a party becomes polarising is therefore more easily explained by the efforts of the party to have clear, simple policy positions, and ensure that the media-feedback-model shows them as always on the attack + never giving in. It's less about the specific person, and more the fact that such political polarisation is not purely a US phenomenon.
Brexit isn't an aspect of political polarisation. I understand it's often framed that way in the USA, but in fact all three major political parties at the time were dead set against it, and either suppressed or sidelined euroscepticism for years.
The only reason the referendum happened at all was because of the rise of a small third party (UKIP), which threatened the incumbent right wing party just enough to convince Cameron to promise a referendum he - and everyone else blinded by the Westminster consensus-quo - was convinced he had zero chance of losing. Cameron saw in it a chance to unite his party, because beyond UKIP the only serious outpost of euroscepticism was a minority amongst his own ranks. The choice of a plain Leave vs Remain call was made specifically to crush the eurosceptics completely by forcing them to advocate for an option some of them didn't actually want (i.e. a lot of eurosceptics would have preferred more distant relations but not a total exit), to lose, and then to give up completely. Polling gave him plenty of reasons to believe that.
Well, obviously it didn't work out that way. The Leave camp made better arguments and won a large number over to their camp, but more importantly, the Remain campaign turned a lot of people off, as it became clear that the supposedly warm and fuzzy EU project was in fact motivated by feelings of fear and helplessness. The fear based campaign was also justified by polling - polls that asked voters to split three ways, along remain, "leave at any cost" and "would leave if there were no economic consequences" showed that a clear majority wanted to leave, and it was fear of "punishment" that was motivating a lot of the remain vote.
Summary: Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and the formal Conservative party were ALL pro-Remain, with just UKIP and some splitter rebels in the Conservatives arguing pro-Leave. Describing what happened during that time through the lens of party-related political polarisation is thus very difficult. Leave was represented by only one of many political parties, a single issue party with only a single MP (a defector from the Tories), and no real power. Once the vote was won that party basically collapsed. Leave voters came from both the left and right, motivated by a variety of issues.
I take all your points. It's a very fair characterisation.
However by that metric can we classify anything as polarising? It'll always seem like "this is a fringe view" until it wins and then the Overton window shifts, and the PM and the Tories now take Brexit on as 'their' issue, so it means we're never actually polarised, it's just that a new view has emerged.
Not saying that's incorrect btw. But by this thought process, polarisation on any one issue is the normal way for any idea to become popular. And if multiple ideas start getting held together by the same people, then overall polarisation, which is a sum of people's preferences that seem autocorrelated, also rises.
So for example it would be like if Brexit view becomes correlated with other policies like immigration, taxation, social services etc, partially through the sales pitch and partially because it's the same people. And if any "popular" issue gets adopted by a party, and you have feedback loops that make their position entrenched (because you can't back down etc) then it'll seem like polarisation would naturally increase as time goes on.
To be clear, I would classify Brexit as polarising (obviously!) but not along party-political lines, and not caused by a two party system or the Rise Of The Right or anything like that. The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I expect this issue to become much less polarising with time and traditional left/right politics to re-assert itself, partly because I expect the population of people who strongly identify with Remain to shrink a lot. This would mirror what happened in other rich countries. Consider Switzerland where their original join/not-join referendum was even closer than Brexit was, at less than 1% margin of victory. So Switzerland was split perfectly down the middle, but with the passing of years joining the EU shrivelled into being a fringe position. Likewise there's no serious movement to fully join (as far as I know) in Norway, Iceland, etc. Fundamentally the EU is an unattractive proposition, and it became polarising because of what some people thought it represented and said about their identity, rather than what it actually is. Now that Remain has become Rejoin the set of arguments involved become entirely different and much harder to win, so eventually this will become an obscure issue again and left/right politics will re-assert itself.
Thank you - you've made me rethink the polarisation theory. Which is fun because I wrote about it a while back so good time to revisit :-)
My amended thought is that people have a grabbag of positions. Say
x1 = f(a, b, c, ...z), same for x2 all the way to xn as people, and a to z as 'positions'. and f() just multiplies each position with a coefficient from -1 to +1 and creates an array.
Initially let them be randomly distributed.
First comes a level of media that helps everyone know what the general consensus is on positions a, b and c. So some folks start updating their own positions towards either extreme.
Then comes new issue z, which originally wasn't an issue, but now is. z now moves from being a 0 on everyone's scale to now be bimodally distributed (this is Brexit).
If z, or any other position like a, b, p, becomes bimodally distributed, and it's public enough that enough people now know it's bimodally distributed, people will start sorting "for" and "against" it, and within each of those camps the positions start becoming similar. The 'a's update towards becoming similar to other 'a's and so on.
That is the argument for overall polarisation. Admittedly it's an observational argument and not a deductive one.
The next step very well might be that new issue comes up and preexisting polarisations get dissolved, or they sort into existing camps. That part's harder to predict. Just like it's harder to predict if Republicans will go full Romney or full Margaret Greene.
> The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I don't think leave/remain will ever replace left/right. But I do think a cluster of issues and positions that is crudely encapsulated by leave/remain -- but crucially does not actually include rejoin/don't rejoin the EU -- may well replace the current left/right.
If the Tories move closer to a pre-Thatcher conservatism with a stronger focus on the nation and an acceptance of a role for the state, and lock in the change by making a success of "levelling up" retaining some of their northern gains they could redefine the meaning of right wing to something you might describe as "leave". There's some signs to be oquptimistic if you like this stuff. The success of the vaccine taskforce taking the sting out of the words "national industrial strategy", the failure of the global marketplace to deliver PPE and success of moving production back onshore. My reading is that the party is divided, Boris is pro this shift and Sunak is less so. But I'd say there's a reasonable chance it happens.
If this happens the question is how does Labour respond. Does Starmer try to copy the plan leading to something like the very unpolarised Blair/Cameron years - https://www.youtube.com/watch/PPgS7p40ERg. Or does Labour position itself as it's anthesis and embrace globalism and, dare I say, anti-Britishness. There's definitely a faction in Labour that want to (witness the reactions to Starmer saying he wants to see more union jacks around) but I can't see the party letting that unelectable faction take power... again.
You should really, really, really read Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He makes a pretty compelling argument that the things you are pointing to are due to the current communication infrastructure where "NO!" is easy to get behind but proactive solutions are easy to get behind. Then those ultimately fall apart once the NO! take effect. In the US, Occupy and the Tea Party were two faces of the same coin... that ended up changing nothing. He has many international examples. For a small taste, check out his Pairagraph: https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686cf7fce19/1
Cool - ordered!
I think both the comparison of whether Democrats or Republicans are radicalizing more, and of the relative success of their "rebel flanks," might be improved by separating economic and cultural issues.
QAnon and "it's racist for white people to eat sushi" have something in common: elites think it's dumb, but it doesn't really affect their bottom line, so they're willing to play to it when the polling says they can pander to those activists without weirding out normies.
Social democracy, much less a more vigorous model of socialism, *would* threaten the people who run the Democratic party. So Democratic leadership is willing to move left on race and gender, at least on the representational aspects of those issues, while making sure to keep the economic and foreign policy left out of control of the party.
Good to see you around again! I miss you on Tumblr, though maybe I just haven't figured out the right oligops- word to search to find the new one.
Happy to be around! If I get back on tumblr (which is still the least bad general-purpose social media site, so maybe) I'll certainly let you know.
But Democrats have moved left on economic issues - see e.g. $15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A.
That said, I think there is something here, except the "people who run the democratic party" isn't politicians or oligarchs, it's journalists (or occasionally younger office staffers), who grew up UMC, went to fancy ivy-league schools, and spend too much time fighting culture wars on Twitter. And the things they control aren't so much actual politics as the narrative around politics - you see this a lot with Democratic politicians trying to talk about healthcare and social security, and the media bringing everything back to race and idpol.
It may be significant that the two issues you list "$15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A." are both, at the moment, purely theoretical. Neither has happened. Biden has now explicitly called for a delay on a $15 dollar minimum wage and long ago ruled out backing M4A, explicitly promising to veto it if it passes.
Not saying it won't happen, but if it does it will be after a great deal of delay.
The minimum wage was put off the table for legal reasons (and has been passed in states by a bunch of blue state governments) though.
No state, ignoring DC, has a $15 minimum wage.[0] Some individual cities do, although the living wage there is often a lot higher than $15/hr.
[0]: https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/minimum-wage-by-state
NJ is legally moving towards it believe a $1 increase every year passed a few years ago.
You may be surprised to hear that FL, land of conservative rubes and yahoos, passed an amendment last election instituting a statewide minimum wage of 15/hr by 2026, I believe it is, with more than 60% approval. The republicansin the state legislature concerned primarily with corporate profits would never have approved this. We'll see what happens. Medical Marijuana was approved here a few years ago in the same process, but the state found a way to delay or prevent it's implementation.
I'm not sure a $15 dollar minimum wage affects too many democratic voters? I'm pretty sure I haven't taken advantage of any labor that was less than that in the last year. Lots of poor people take advantage of low income labor by shopping at Walmart or such but not really welathy professionals. And my sense is that employers of people at less than $15 tend to vote Republican but employers of wealthy professionals tend to vote Democrat.
Ignoring the last year being COVID, would you have eaten at any restaurants that aren't fine dining? Bought food from a grocery store? Those are both minimum wage jobs.
I've been ordering out so not counting waiters. Probably there are dishwashers I should have included? I've been doing a lot of ordering things online through Amazone but I have actually used a CVS so that's actually probably another less than $15 job. Still, not too many of them.
What planet are you from? A very large percentage of democratic voters are dirt poor. And Walmart gets the gov't to pay the expenses of its neglected work force though food stamps and medicaid and so forth. An argument for the $15 wage is that this would greatly reduce the need for gov't programs due to this scam Walmart currently runs agains the American people.
That assumes the raising the cost of low-skill labor has no significant effect on how much of it is hired, which is unlikely. If half the minimum wage workers get a raise and half become unemployed, surely the need for government programs goes up, not down.
That's a different issue, isn't it? Walmart can't fire half their workers. If that were true, they'd've done it already.
Walmart, or MacDonald's, or any other employer faces tradeoffs. Capital can substitute for labor — consider the increasing use of self-service checkout lanes. Skilled labor can substitute for unskilled labor. Walmart uses unskilled labor instead of alternative inputs if and only if doing it that way costs less.
The same is true between firms and products — if MacDonalds gets more expensive because it has a lot of workers whose wages have been pushed up, that may mean people buy more TV dinners and fewer Big Macs.
What you observe at any instant is the solution to an elaborate optimization problem. It's natural to assume that if one of the factors changes, everything else stays the same, but that isn't what happens.
To add to Dr. Friedman: regardless of whether Walmart can replace a worker with a machine, they can and will fire a worker if they can no longer employ that worker profitably. If you hire someone for $11 an hour and get labor out of them that is worth $14 dollars to you then that's great: if you suddenly have to pay them $14+ dollars an hour then you're just losing money on the transaction. And who goes through all the trouble of hiring someone to lose money?
I think what you mean is that Walmart cannot operate as large a business (in terms of stores, amount of goods sold, etc) if they fire half their workers. Which is true: that just means they'll have to scale back if they can't employ them profitably.
There's a decent chance that Walmart could successfully pivot to a model where they have fewer but better-skilled workers.
Note that the low-skill workers who used to be employed are out of luck in this case.
Americans support M4A consistently at about 60% or above. It is no longer a partisan issue, if it ever was. It's the Insurance industry lobbyists against the American people. The congresspeople of both parties simply do as their told by the lobbyists to thwart the will of the American people. From Obama onward DNC pics promised it in some form then reneged once in office.
This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost. Trying to make a version of it that penciled out (which required raising taxes and limiting coverage) sunk Warren in the democratic primary.
The polls are consistent on this -- it isn't just democrats, it's everyone. The poor aren't concerned about having to pay more in taxes, and plenty of studies show how much cheaper single payer is than the mess we have now.
Vermont has a GOP governor because the voters didn't want to pay the cost of M4A.
> This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost.
Which is ironic, because the US already spends more per capita on health care than any other country. Arguably, having a single payer conveys more bargaining power to negotiate lower bulk pricing, so Americans would probably end up spending much less overall under M4A.
So there's a case to be made that it could help (I do support some form of M4A overall), but I doubt it would bring American costs anywhere close to in line with other countries' - there are a lot of other reasons US healthcare is expensive. Some of those are general cost-disease reasons (which implies we shouldn't expect M4A to significantly lower prices), but others might be due to the issue where the US government has massive spending for worse results compared to other rich countries (see e.g. transit, infrastructure, education), which implies that socializing healthcare could potentially make it more expensive overall (because the US government is bad at cost control). The Sanders plan specifically seems to go that way - it differed from other government-provided healthcare plans in that it basically planned to cover everything for everyone (for comparison, the NHS only covers things that fall below their Pound/QALY threshold).
I'm Canadian, so I'm well aware that socialized medicine typically doesn't and shouldn't cover literally everything, but from my understanding, Medicare already doesn't cover everything, so M4A wouldn't either. I think Americans would be happy with M4A that doesn't extend coverage any further, with the option to supplement insurance with a private insurer.
I think one of the reasons the US government is bad at cost control is because they try to implement half-assed pseudo-market "solutions" in an effort to appease numerous special interests rather and give the illusion of choice, rather than simply and directly implementing what makes sense (too much money in politics).
So they could do a simple but bad M4A where all of the existing insurance companies continue operating as-is, and they just bill the government for standard coverage. That would be horrendous and I agree, it probably wouldn't cut costs, because the unnecessary bureaucracy is still there and the pricing is not standardized.
Doing it right means bargaining with the hospitals to establish standardized pricing for what's covered (all emergency care should be covered), and creating an independent agency to pay the bills issued by hospitals.
I can't imagine this wouldn't cut costs, because it eliminates all of the bureaucratic and administrative red tape, hospitals can no longer just make up a bill for whatever they think you'll be able to pay to make up for shortfalls due to non-payers and no need for collection agencies, and negotiated bulk rates would be cheaper.
But I share your skepticism that the any administration for the past 20 years, including the current one, would actually be effective at achieving such an outcome.
Democratic donors are left of Democratic voters on economic issues too.
The idea that political elites could or would put down otherwise popular ideas because they would lose out on money falls apart as soon as you notice that politics doesn't pay very well. Almost everyone in politics could make more money doing something else. Senators don't rent out dilapidated townhouses in DC to share because they're in it for the money - it's because actually care about some issues, institutions, or have an egomaniacal need for the validation that comes with winning elections and having titles next to their names.
But it's almost never about the money. If money rules politics, immigration policy would look much better than it actually does.
Can I get a source for the claim about Democratic donors being to the left of Democratic voters? It wouldn't be too surprising, but this seems to suggest the opposite: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Whose%20Voice%20Whose%20Choice_2.pdf
Also, is this Democratic donors in total (which would include small donors- including the enthusiastic Berniecrat donors) or is it Democratic donors *weighted by size of contribution*? When people talk about donors in this context, they surely mean people who make donations, at minimum, in the tens of thousands- really at least the hundreds of thousands.
Here's one article https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/23/21035165/donors-political-views-wine-cave
In general donors do seem like true believers.
The problem is- unless I'm misreading- it doesn't seem to be weighted by contribution size. When people talk about the donor class in this context they're really talking about the small portion of the donor class whose contributions are so individually significant as to give them a palpable degree of power as an individual or corporation over politicians.
That didn't come out right. They do do an analysis excluding donors <$1000, but I'm talking about the people on this sort of list: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors
This feels like cheating, but it's a strong data point: Sanders vastly outraised Biden in the primary running to his economic left. Sanders is an overwhelming economically-oriented candidate, and pretty close to Biden on social issues.
Biden nearly went broke in the primary, and none of the economic moderates came close to Sanders in fundraising - in number or total raised.
I think when people talk about donors in this context, they're primarily talking about big players who make very large donations with specific policy strings attached- or at least on a money for access basis. Small donors are a wrinkle in this narrative, but they're relatively new, and so their effects have been modest so far, plus they'll never have the leverage of the big donors, because their money is spread out between far more heads, making it harder to bargain.
But the even more decisive argument is that Bernie lost. For that reason, his small donors are effectively cut out of influence.
So I think it's sensible to talk about a "donor class" re: the dems that doesn't include Bernie's small donors.
Doesn't this seem like a just-so story? If Bernie won, it would have proven how important money is. But since he lost, it just proves that only some kinds of money matter. Are there any possible observations that would cause you to update in the direction of money not being very important?
I don't think it's at all clear that donor money is important- I'm very open to the possibility that it's other factors that discipline politicians. Personally I'm probably 50/50 on it. I just think that if we're going to grapple with the idea that it is important, that hypothesis is usually focused on a very specific sort of donor- the kind of donor that has conversations with politicians in smoke filled rooms.
Two things:
When people talk about "donors", they often blur the lines between whether they are talking about the small number of megadonors that fund the SuperPACs, or the large number of small-dollar donors that fund the parties. I'm not sure that one of those groups gives more money in total.
Also, there's a specific set of issues that Democratic megadonors are right of partisan activists on, but on most issues they are still left of the median Democratic voter (but not left of the median Democratic small donor).
I thought the claim in the "Republicans suck" section was similar to what's discussed in "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly.
The "Neutral vs. Conservative" post was more about the dynamic, and how the lack of neutrality of the mainstream institution plays into things. Klein's argument (I imagine) is more about the fact that this pattern exists. (Klein maybe also puts more of the responsibility on the rightward offshoots rather than the left-neutral institutions which inspire them, but that seems like a secondary question).
"The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly."
Not sure how true that is anymore in present year. Fox started the open tribalization of media outlets, sure, but when "neutral" outlets run lines like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" amid a backdrop of burning buildings and "antifa movement seeks peace through violence", we're pretty squarely in the realm of reality-distorting partisanship, not just neutrality with some preference for one political camp.
It's not a huge issue with the article, but the impression I got on the first read through was that at the start of part 3 you were only linking Ezra Klein's article as an offhand reference, as you often do. So I did not expect the next paragraph to be outlining what Klein said in that article instead of his book stance, which you had been almost solely quoting him on up to that point. It took me until most of the way through the paragraph to realize my misreading, thinking at first that you were going to detail Klein's argument for something to the effect of "Polarization causes problems but the alternative is so much worse."
I like Ezra Klein, but this sounds a bit like "The problem is that the outgroup is too polarized."
I guess there's no such thing as a completely objective and neutral analysis of this stuff though, so I'll probably still read and enjoy the book, and just price in the fact that he's a Democrat to my own biased interpretation of it.
That is pretty close to what he's saying, modulo s/too polarized/responsible for the current polarization, and fwiw I think he's more right than wrong. I think it's dangerous to use pattern-matching to dismiss "the problem is that my outgroup is acting badly" without consist the object-level issue - many conflicts are not six of one and half a dozen of the other.
"One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be. "
If anything, I think causality might flow the other way, if there's any relationship at all. IIRC, Fox is by far the newest of the bunch; all the others have been around for many decades, and Fox filled in a gap starting in the 90s by being the only one that wasn't extremely liberal. (Perhaps part of the polarization story should include why all the major news networks were liberal by that point in time! Were they always that way? Did they follow Congress, but precede the public? Has media trust decreased over time? My impression is yes, but I don't know, but it might be relevant.) I think the most likely explanation is really "there aren't enough conservatives who want to go into journalism to support more major networks."
(If you're interested in questions of media bias, I recommend the book Left Turn by Time Groseclose).
But also, I would want to see data indicating Republicans actually are less ideologically diverse before accepting that there is anything to explain. I don't trust Klein's impression, since Republicans are his outgroup, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity exists. Speaking of, you discussed party identity, but perceptions about the other party might be more important than the reality: http://gsood.com/research/papers/partisanComposition.pdf
That paper suggests perhaps the easiest intervention for decreasing polarization, namely literally just tell the truth about both parties: "When provided information about the out-party’s actual composition, partisans come to see its supporters as less extreme and feel less socially distant from them."
Moreover, if journalistic bias contributed to popular polarization, could academic bias have done the same? Academia is probably even more liberal than journalism (e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264003803_Political_Diversity_Will_Improve_Social_Psychological_Science) and it looks largely like liberals and leftists pushing conservatives out rather than conservatives choosing to leave. Much is made of the "decline of trust in expertise" but if major institutions are increasingly biased, isn't distrust a logical reaction?
On the question of ideological diversity within the parties ... . Throughout my lifetime, libertarians have tended to identify as Republican, although less so recently. Insofar as the Republican party had an ideology, it was fusionist, a hybrid of libertarian support for laissez-faire and conservative support for traditional values. I'm not sure the post-Civil Rights Act Democratic party contained as sharp a split.
Perhaps the polarization was mostly kicked off by the Democrats finally stepping on a couple of middle Americas sacred cows and middle America deciding to dig in. Specifically in regards to Christian moral values being the guiding factor in our cultural/political norms and American patriotism/nationalism/exceptionalism no longer being a widely accepted truth. That split seems to more or less have solidified around 2005 with the Iraq war and lgbt issues being a couple of the main splitting points.
I'm honestly surprised that you missed two related, enormous, obvious-in-retrospect things:
1. Polarization among people tracks with the development of a right wing ecosystem, starting with talk radio in the 90s, then Fox, up through today. This ecosystem, in particular Fox, were explicitly built to cultivate a monolithic partisan voting block. It worked and continues to work. The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
2. The GOP didn't get more *ideologically* extreme, but more *institutionally* extreme - or rather, anti-institutionally. The GOP of 20 years ago would have balked at sending out checks, but Trump backed it. Third is because the GOP is ideologically rudderless, and not really more conservative than it used to be. The old GOP also wouldn't have encouraged an angry mob to attack the capitol by perpetuating bald-faced lies about election fraud. This is the dimension on which the GOP has gotten much more extreme - dangerously so, as Klein correctly points out.
The institutional degradation under Trump was genuinely new and concerning, along a dimension completely divorced from liberalism/conservatism. If that's the only lens you look at things through, you're missing most of the story.
How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Also, what are your thoughts on my claim that polarization was mostly driven by Democrats going further left while Republicans stayed the same? And if it's true, what would that look like in the absence of FOX News? The Democrats go just as far left as they did, but the Republicans come with them and so maintain a lack of polarization? Or would the absence of FOX somehow have prevented the Democrats from going left?
(pasting to reply to the still-existing version of this comment)
You're still thinking about this in ideological terms. I don't know what happens to the party platforms in that alternate universe, but I'm fairly confident that the disagreements focus more on policy and less on the fundamental nature of reality, and consequently don't result in a level of reality-disconnect that leads to a large crowd taking control of the Capitol in an attempted coup because they think the election was stolen.
Guess: Median voter theorem suggests that the absence of a GOP monoculture means there are more conservative voices in mainstream media that are incentivized to appeal to a broad audience instead of a radicalizing subculture that's tuned out mainstream sources, while mainstream sources are still incentivized to appeal to conservatives as much as they can. So that would tend to suggest that at least some conservative ideas would fare better than they have and ideas on the left would get more (sane) pushback than they have in the world where the GOP exists in a parallel media reality.
The left is massively amplifying the narrative that the right are detached from reality.
Do you mean to suggest that this amplification is taking an under-appreciated fact and bringing it to light, or taking an appropriately-appreciated fact and making it seem bigger than it is?
Or maybe even a third option, spreading a falsehood.
Not the OP, but I'm pretty skeptical of it being the Democrats moving left that generated polarization. There are two things that might be measures of how polarized a group is:
* the physical party platforms, which mostly doesn't matter
* how much your people hate the other people, which matters a lot
What Fox and talk-radio made widespread was the fomenting of targeted hatred at Democrats, rather than any particular voting bloc. In an era of bipartisan news, people still hated people, but hatred was more based around stereotypes, or local issues, or race or ethnicity. Now you just hear about all the awful actions of either "libtards" or "trumpies" and that's that.
You haven't dealt with the Right's attack on empiricism. Or the market forces there. It's the line from hpmor about telling one lie and the truth ever after being your enemy.
Take something like global warming. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive. Two parties should have tracked eachother on this. There was some policy dispute... but the Republican party mostly went to the "global warming is plot by grant hungry scientists and evil globalists in support of agenda 21). That's not.... "The right stayed in the same place". Nor does it contend with how right wing media served the Republican donor class.
Walter Cronkite didn't have Phillip Morris on to promote cigarette use... Therefore he's a raging liberal.
The directionality goes the other way.
"Tune in to hannity where we interview a scientist who says that he was told to publish climate research because he was told that it would make Christians cry."
That's going off the deep end on the right.
This is cherry picking. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive that different gender outcomes are due to a strong gendered difference in interests.
Yet even saying that among leftists is going to get you branded as a hateful person.
>How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Well, for starters, there is the fact that one of them happened before the other: Fox News started in 1996, and you've argued the polarization of regular people started in the early 2000s.
> How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
I don't have a test but perhaps a mechanism.
You already told the story of how local news (& politics) was subsumed into local news (and politics). When Kansas had their own newspapers & TV stations, they were able to tailor their stories to local populations and could be as conservative as they needed to be. As those local media outlet disappeared (because of the internet & cable TV), there was a need for a national, conservative media outlet and Fox filled it.
Someone else up-thread addressed the point that the culture all over the western world has been moving left on (e.g.) SSM, healthcare and a host of other cultural issues for decades. Perhaps we should be measuring the movement of progressives and conservatives relative to that current rather than to where they each were 50 years ago. The cultural river has flowed since then.
>The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. If you disagree w/ the American right on 90% and agree on 10%, they will invite you to come learn more.
There's asymmetric cultural extremism there.
That common observation predicts that Biden wouldn't have had a chance in the primary and Sinema and Manchin shouldn't exist. It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. The common observation definitely implies that the most popular and widely respected leader of the blue tribe wouldn't go on record telling people to cut out the woke scolding, but Obama did just that.
This "common observation" is wrong because it extrapolates from the most obnoxious people on twitter, which is not real life. Everyone's takes will improve when they recognize that the social dynamics of Twitter, while real and important, only describe a small part of the world.
You're mostly answering a different question here. It's perfectly coherent to say that the American left will ostracize you for dissent, *and* that dissent wins when we use a secret ballot. As for Obama, he's among a very small number of people who've been able to get away with saying stuff like this, and they've also been going for his blood recently.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter" seem to be having a substantial influence on Biden's admin: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression-fc4 Twitter is the social media that comes closest to being our "public square", where politicians, academics, company founders etc. spend unhealthy amounts of their free time posting under their real name. It is very much not the case that "what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter", and a quick look at recent US history confirms that.
There's also the question of how stable this situation will be. Have you seen any of Christopher F. Rufo's reporting on critical theory trainings in elementary schools and places of employment? It could be that the "dissent wins at the ballot box" thing is mostly a function of an older generation that was raised on different values. This stuff was previously dismissed as "just crazy college students", but those college students are graduating and exerting major influence on their workplaces etc. What do you think the endgame looks like? Overall your objection seems a bit like saying "global warming isn't a problem because the Earth hasn't warmed up very much yet".
Im replying just to highlight your comment. Wholeheartedly agree
> > It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. [...]
> [...] It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. [...]
Note: ostracism doesn't matter at the ballot box because it's secret.
Odd to say the right isn't keen on punishing people who agree on 90% of issues, since literally in the last week they've been voting on whether to expel one of their congressional leadership who agrees on everything except the question of if Trump should be impeached. And were threatening to kill the literal vice president, of their party, because he didn't agree the election was stolen.
What do you mean by "common observation"? Sounds like a Weasel word to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
It sounds like you're saying that in your personal experience you enjoy hanging out with Republicans more than Democrats.
What does it mean to be "ostracized" from the American left?
Like they're not inviting you to dinner parties or something? Or they post mean twitter comments at you?
The current governing Democrats includes a pretty wide range of viewpoints, from maybe AOC on the left to the more centrist representatives from swing states. and they're working together i guess without ostracizing each other.
If you mean in terms of the workplace or something, then yes i think both the left and right often make work decisions informed by politics, religion, and other personal beliefs. Like firing someone who refuses to use a colleagues' preferred pronouns on the left, or a church group refusing to hire Lesbian or even just female preachers on the right.
You didn't mention it in this review, but does Klein discuss the transition from delegates picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms to open-primary systems where every step is determined by the popular vote? To my eye, one of the primary drivers of polarization has been politicians becoming more afraid of primary elections than general elections.
This explanation does have the merit that it predicts polarisation changing differently in the USA compared to other countries.
I actually have no idea how this happens in other countries. How do the UK/Commonwealth parliamentary systems decide who stands in West Eastershire or whatever?
In New Zealand, the majority of politicians get there through the party list, which means that they personally did not receive the votes as a candidate but their party did, and they are chosen by the party to fill the seat. I don't think there is a particular way parties have to construct that list, in practice most parties do it differently, but parties have very low membership in New Zealand so it's a lot more akin to the closed door agreements than a public contest.
The UK Labour party famously had a change in leadership selection procedures in 2014, from unions and parliament having 2/3 of the vote to having none of the vote, which promptly led to Jeremy Corbyn being selected leader:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Labour_Party_leadership_election_(UK)#Procedure
But it's not clear that the new system caused anything, because Corbyn won by so many votes that he would have won under the old system, or at least come close, depending on assumptions about new voters. You might suppose that voters didn't know that and were afraid of "throwing away their votes," but the previous system was a ranked choice system with little cost of expressive voting for the token left-wing candidate. Something weird happened and I think many people are too quick to draw a lesson from it.
(Incidentally, you could say that unions lost their special votes, but you could also say that they were promoted from half votes to full.)
In the UK, the various parties have very different systems for choosing their leaders.
In the Labour Party, the electorate includes all members of the party or of affiliated unions. Around half a million votes were cast in last year's leadership election. The Lib Dems have a similar system.
By contrast, Conservative MPs hold most of the power. Conservative party leaders are chosen by multiple elimination rounds by MPs only until there are only two candidates remaining. All party members vote in the final round but, even then, the conservative party is much small and only 140,000 voted in the last leadership election.
Crucially, the four biggest parties in England require that their leader be a member of Parliament so you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Leader of your party the way that Trump and Sanders did.
The way that parties choose local candidates has changed a lot in recent years. It used to be that Conservative candidates for parliament were chosen by local conservative parties but the rules were changed to require that candidates be selected from a central approved list.
Labour had this rule until recently but now gives local parties more autonomy.
Again, you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Labour candidate for East Westchester.
Parties have internal selection procedures, which aren't entirely stable. In the UK the Conservatives mostly delegate to local chapters.
I think the primary system used in the USA is probably better. The less democratic system used in the UK creates a number of problems.
One is that it creates a lot of groupthink. As I've written elsewhere on this thread, Brexit was not actually about party-political left/right polarisation, even though it's often depicted in foreign media as somehow a part of a general rightward trend. To the extent it was about polarisation at all it was a polarisation between an out of touch groupthink-dominated political class and the general public. Open primaries allow for outsiders to come in and shake up the political consensus, as happened with both Bernie and Trump. In the UK the closest equivalents were Corbyn (only able to become Labour leader due to Labour adopting an equivalent of open primaries), and Nigel Farage, who had to re-make his own political party to get things done.
A less obvious problem is that when positions are dished out via internal mechanisms, on the left the result has become that men are banned. Biden is no exception - Labour and the Lib Dems use explicitly misandrist policies that ban men from standing in some constituencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-women_shortlist
I'd go as far as saying that the only places in modern politics where men can get and hold powerful positions are where the selection process is competitive and democratic. The leaders of political parties are usually selected this way, but other positions aren't, and this leads to leftist institutions filling up with a lot of extremely weak people. This is to the detriment of everyone.
The USA has this problem right now with Kamala Harris but the EU has the same thing, where von der Leyen was picked via opaque means, but supposedly one of the criteria was that the next head of the Commission had to be a woman. She then insisted (in violation of the treaties) that half the commissioners selected by the member states had to be women. Just months into the job she's being called on to resign due to rank incompetence and dishonesty, but she won't, because there are no primaries or even elections at all for the role of Commission president. In the UK Labour has a variant of the same problem amongst their front bench where people like Diane Abbot were made shadow ministers for race/gender reasons despite being unable to achieve the most basic functions of opposition leadership, like remembering what your policies are. One of Labour's problems is that it's still being regularly undermined by its very weak group of MPs.
Was Abbott overpromoted because she was a black woman, or because she was Corbyn's ex-girlfriend and long time political ally?
Probably both. Abbott is a famous example because of her mind-blowing interview with Nick Ferrari, but even under Starmer they have a lot of remarkably weak female MPs who struggle with the basics. I don't mean this in a "I disagree with their politics" way but in a "they need to learn MPing" kind of way.
Just a few random incidents that pop to mind: the current Shadow Chancellor showed in an interview she has no idea what the current support arrangements for businesses are, she has no idea how much money her party would spend on a third lockdown if they were in charge, and even her parties own voters think she'd make a worse chancellor than the current one. Left wing voters prefer a right wing chancellor to their own! Another MP gave a speech where she produced a list of crony contracts supposedly awarded to Tory donors and allies, except one of them was for ventilators from a firm that has actually donated to Labour but never to the Tories. So she was attacking a medical device company and her own donors in public, without even realising it. Another one turned up to a Zoom call drunk and then couldn't remember the name of her party's Scottish candidates (her answer: "you're not recording this, are you?"). Another was recorded on Zoom praising a pamphlet and when later asked why she supported those ideas, asserted she never did and it was all absolute rubbish, apparently either forgetting her previous position or not realising it'd been recorded.
This sort of thing isn't even rare, it's a regular occurrence.
Truly competitive processes in a healthy institution would eliminate most of this.
In the UK although the candidates are chosen by the parties, The Party as an organization is much more powerful. The US is fairly unusual among developed countries in how candidates raise a huge amount of personal funding and run on personal brands.
Parties as institutions have more incentive to be moderate than individual candidates, because they need to win with the general electorate. So the party being more powerful means you tend to get more moderate policies, and the successful politicans are mostly the ones who buy into them.
Other European countries are broadly similar in that respect
This is an important point, and I can't remember if Klein discussed it.
The U.S. was fairly polarized pre-1920s, which was definitely still the smoke-filled rooms era. Presidential candidates George McGovern and Jimmy Carter weren't in a polarized era, but Mitt Romney was.
McGovern and Carter were the two candidates that took advantage of the new party primary system, and are often seen as major left outliers from the party at the time, because of their knowledge of how to run under the new system.
Klein does discuss it (unfortunately my copy of his book is at the office so I can’t cite chapter and verse). But it is clear that he thinks the old smoke-filled rooms with party stalwarts picking candidates is better than the primary system. Partly this is because the only voters who turn out for primaries are hyperpartisans, a fact which leads them to vote for more extreme candidates.
Good thing primary elections are never rigged in any way!
Political scientists seem to think the primary system is not a big driver of polarization. See e.g. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9949294/ansolabehere_primary.pdf?sequence=1 (though I wouldn't update too strongly on this, since finding this was the result of a *very* brief literature search on my part).
Fivethirtyeight also had an interesting interview recently https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-what-could-the-gops-future-look-like/
with some GOP commentators who claimed that [around t=23 min] a) From 1988 onwards, the winner of almost every Republican primary has been someone who assembled a coalition from the center and left of the party, b) Trump was most supported in the 2016 primaries by voters who described themselves as "somewhat conservative" or "moderate." I don't know what to make of this - on the one hand it sounds like primaries are having a moderating influence, but on the other if "moderating" means Trump gets elected than that's not very reassuring...
I can't put much credence in a paper published in 2010, because 2010 was the start of the big Tea Party wave in which an unprecedented *three* incumbent Republican Senators and dozens of representatives were knocked out in the primaries, and culminating in 2014 when they took down the party's number two House leader and heir apparent to Boehner. This in turn cemented a shift among the GOP from Clinton-Gingrich deal-cutting to white-knuckle obstructionism because any compromise was seen as selling out. Perhaps it's open primaries combined with some other factor that caused them to be an actual threat as opposed to incumbents mostly cruising until then.
A bunch of people are replying to my comment as though it is about Trump and responding with observations about Presidential primaries, but it's not. Trump's "radicalism" was largely a matter of affect and disregard for process. He ended up signing pretty much every bill Congress put in front of him and only really vetoed restrictions on Gulf arms sales. The real difference has been seen in Congress.
Thanks, the clarification that you meant Congress is helpful!
Oh and as to that "other factor," I wonder if it's predominantly geographic sorting + gerrymandering? It looks like 2010 was right around when the percentage of landslide districts crossed 50% https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/as-swing-districts-dwindle-can-a-divided-house-stand/ so it would make sense for that to be the time when House primaries started mattering more than general elections.
hi everyone. i'm a "it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium" guy. so i just wanted to chime in to say: i think it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium.
What happened in the 1970s then, to cause this shift?
it's a good question. i sort of implied the "it" here to be "polarization", but i guess i'm also including "dysfunction due to polarization". if we really have the same level of "affective polarization" now as sweden or norway have had for a long time, why does it seem like their governments work way better? i think "because proportional systems result in centrist reform rather than pendulum swings" is pretty plausible.
but i could also make up a bunch of ad hoc forces that previously kept polarization in check that are now gone, like, the US used to have lots of powerful international enemies and now it doesn't. after all, one of the few things democrats and republicans can agree on now is that china is bad.
The Dixiecrat thing still seems like a reasonable hypothesis: the system we have always trends towards polarization, and there was a big weird thing happening that fought that trend for a few decades.
This exactly. The issue seems to me, and it's surreal that no one else mentioned this, the US only allows two parties to exist. Negative partisanship only works when they're are exactly two options. On the graph showing international polarization trends, consider that most other countries have more political parties -- I know that Germany and NZ with MMP certainly do, and the UK does as well.
(This doesn't explain any of the historical change in the US, so please take it as more prescriptive than descriptive).
because if you go with prop rep, you get too many parties, worse polarization, and extremists that have their own parties, out of control from the center. Two parties at least should tend to keep the extremists under control
That's only if you use proportional representation. Use range voting or approval voting, which eliminate spoilers, and you get multiple parties without it. Also, the most moderate candidate tends to win in those systems.
idk, should i really believe this? in the US, the republicans have obviously done a terrible job of keeping extremists under control. when i think of "countries that spun out of control because of proportional representation", where should i be thinking of if not all the stable european countries using it right now?
Several European countries now have 10-25% of their elected representatives from nationalist parties (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006). This is enough to produce significant influence when they enter into a 51% coalition government. Also, Brexit. From the other side, most of Europe was much quicker to adopt socialism during the Cold War.
I'm not sure how Brexit is relevant? It was passed by popular referendum in a country without proportional representation.
Part of the benefit of a multi-party system is that you aren't forced into a coalition on one side or the other of the spectrum. AfD may have 13% of the vote in Germany, but the center-right CDU forms a coalition with the center-left SPD instead. Similarly, the conservative government of Austria is currently in coalition with the Greens, keeping the nationalist FPO out of power.
I tried to check on a bunch of other countries listed in that link, and got sucked down a rabbit hole of trying to understand idiosyncrasies on other country's political spectrums. Suffice it to say, sometimes the center-right forms a coalition with the far-right, sometimes they don't.
This seems superior to me to what happened in the US, where a populist very few intuitional Republicans supported got the nomination and won, becoming the leader of a majority party. It's hard to imagine this happening if a Trump-populist party had to compete with / form a coalition with a christian democrat party.
The UK uses proportional representation. The vote may have been a referendum, but the voting system obviously affects the country's politics.
The problem with PR is that it is often the case that the two centrist parties together don't break 50%, causing all possible coalitions to include an extremist party on one side or the other. You can easily get dangerous results like 22% far right, 29% center right, 20% center left, 29% far left. Then the center right has to choose between far right and far left, and has the obvious disincentive to choose the far left which allows the far right to exercise outsized influence.
Whereas Trump was a brash, arrogant liar who was pretty objectionable as a human being but from a policy perspective did a lot of largely boring mainstream Republican things like enforce existing immigration laws and try to promote domestic industry. There was plenty of room for reasoned disagreement but despite the hyperbole it was hardly concentration camps and Jim Crow.
Moreover, the point isn't that the US status quo is ideal but rather that we should use range voting or approval voting instead of PR. I don't think Trump wins an election with range voting.
Duverger's law is false. It's a theoretical argument, but the conclusion is only true in the USA. Lots of countries have FPTP and all the rest have third parties (non-geographic). I don't know how they manage it.
I'm not American, but the poetical story I always told myself is that Americans are fighting themselves after they lost the things they fought for together. To me, it seems that over the past 50 years Americans cared about lots of cool things like spreading democracy and capitalism, and now they only care about dealing with local problems. And who causes all of the local problems? The other party.
And this isn't a chicken and egg thing. Everyone seems to say Americans care about local issues now because of Polarization. I think it is very clearly the opposite, Americans are polarized because they don't clearly perceive any external threats to themselves (which bdw, America looks like it has a ton of external threats it should be concerning itself with).
I think both parties are worried about what Russia and China are doing, but we're filtering that concern through partisanship: The other party are shills for a hostile foreign power!
I think of "local issues" as being things like zoning, not things that would be decided in DC.
This is one of the hypotheses discussed in the WaitButWhy megaseries on polarization and tribalism:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
There's been an interesting mitosis effect where the US and USSR were allies against Nazi Germany but then turned on each other during the Cold War. Dems and GOP were allies against the USSR but turned on each other after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This is my working hypothesis as well. The end of the Cold War removed the main constraint that was suppressing polarization. The specific manner in and rate at which it reemerged were not easy to predict, but I'd claim that its reemergence was predictable.
I am cautiously optimistic that, if China does not change in ways that make it a worthy successor to the US on the international stage, it will unite enough Americans against it.
I think you're missing a crucial point with the "Republicans moving further right vs Democrats moving further left" issue, which is the social versus economic split. I don't have the fancy data to support this, but if you look at social issues (such as gay marriage or race equality), I don't think many people would say that Democrats haven't moved further left. However, if you look at issues like reducing poverty, increasing labor laws, etc, you'll see a very different view. In the into the 1970s, both parties often supported increasing social security (Truman created Social Security), labor rights (Nixon introduced OSHA), nationalized healthcare (Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid), the minimum wage, and more. George H.W. Bush signed a tax hike while every Republican president since has been in favor of tax cuts. Right now, Democrats support continuing those changes while Republicans generally prefer to go back on those changes.
To clarify a bit, I think it's about the framing of an "issue." If the issue is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats generally agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no." If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no."
Republicans have stayed at the same place, while Democrats have stayed at the same velocity.
The Republican position on minimum wage has stayed at the same place only if you don't account for inflation.
Some events that could have contributed to polarization of the general US population around 2000:
* Newt Gingrich's strategy of partisan obstruction.
* Founding of Fox news
These are coincidences, not causes. I don't think it was a coincidence that the 2000 election was the inverse of the 1916 election.
This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
>I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People. Here he makes all of the impassioned and convincing arguments he avoided in his book
Regarding how Ezra has different styles in the book and elsewhere, he said in a podcast 'I only put things in the book that I think I could prove...this is my first book and I wanted it to be very grounded. So there are things that I think are true but cannot really prove it, so they did not go in the book'. It is at 19:40 in episode 'Your Questions Answered'. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-questions-answered/id1081584611?i=1000479525981
There is a lengthy, deeply grounded, and deadly serious argument that the Republican party has actually gone totally off the rails. It's a shame to see it mostly dodged here. But I point you to the events of January 6th as a good starting point, and you can work your way backwards. Or start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Even_Worse_Than_It_Looks
That's a terrible book. Attempts by both parties to increase their power in Congress are not unique to the GOP. It is, however, true that Republicans are more ambitious on solidifying their hold on power via gerrymandering.
Are Republicans more ambitious at gerrymandering, or just in a better position to benefit from it?
If you understand how gerrymandering works, it's obvious that Democrats have a natural "packing" effect by having very high % of populations in cities, while Republicans are more spread out. Unless you gerrymander extensively to have city cores "spoke out" to the neighboring countryside, the 70+% Democrat cities are going to elect fewer representatives per total population.
Robert Putnam taught us that social capital (i.e. the network of relationships among people, both formal and informal) has been dropping in the United States for 75 years across all incomes, education levels, and demographics. This has led to decreases in social trust, cooperation norms, and a sense of shared identity. It is not hard to believe that this alienation of the American people from each other is leading to higher degrees of polarization. The specifics that Klein talks about certainly are part of the question, but it all sits in a much broader context.
This goes beyond the United States though - suburbanization and the internet have happened in many places.
I want to chime in on the idea of polarisation being some kind of lynchpin of problems, that if we fix everything would become a lot easier. I live in New Zealand, which is less polarised than the USA (you can see that in the graphs above). But despite this, our government (whether red or blue) has been strikingly unable to do anything to solve a number of the big problems the country faces. NZ has the worst housing costs in the developed world, one of the lowest productivities in the developed world and has so far done almost nothing to reduce our carbon emissions despite having a substantial proportion of our capital and people deployed in areas threatened by flooding and sea level rise. We're going in backwards in education levels, too. This seems inconsistent with the idea that if polarisation were reduced, the USA would find a way to solve its problems (but then again, maybe aside from the polarisation the USA otherwise has very good institutions? I'm not sure).
I'm surprised to hear that. NZ has a reputation in the US as a very well-governed country, though I can't remember how much of that comes from the coronavirus response.
People are often surprised about areas where New Zealand isn't doing well. For whatever reason, our reputation continues to punch above our weight. I'll absolutely grant that our coronavirus response was very good. Most politically inclined people I know here sort of agree that we've been very good at handling sudden emergencies, but relatively poor at dealing with long, chronic problems.
In some ways we have the opposite problem to the USA in that we have a large group of swing voters that genuinely do switch from one major party to the other election to election, and that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are. This has made it difficult to make the kind of changes that would reduce rent and housing costs, reduce carbon emissions etc.
New Zealand's COVID response succeeded through good luck far more than good management. Case in point, the latest outbreak in Australia is due to the fact that they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice. Had we had a higher population and been less isolated we would have been in the same boat as everywhere else.
Australia has had a very good pandemic by the standards of almost everywhere but NZ, and the latest quarantine-hotel outbreak currently consists of 5 people plus the family of 3 who seem to have been the source. So 'no better than Australia', even if true (which it doesn't seem to be; NZ showed more willingness to lock down hard and early, which clearly paid off) wouldn't be all that bad.
> they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice.
That quote is about inadequate testing of staff, not of quarantinees. I believe the latter are tested twice in most parts of Australia; the current debate is over whether to follow the lead of one state which recently added a test on day 16, i.e. two days after release.
A quick search does suggest that mandatory testing of staff may be more lax in NZ, though. This article (https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/voluntary-saliva-testing-offered-quarantine-workers-monday) says they recently brought in optional daily saliva tests, "in addition to their regular weekly testing".
> that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are.
I see a lot of people becoming more conservative due to the dysfunction of government. For example, a lot of Dutch people are in favor of green energy, but don't want wood burning plants that are very dirty and that don't achieve a reduction of greenhouse emissions in the medium term, even though the treaties and such say that we need to achieve a reduction fairly soon.
The government also claims that moving to electricity is 'green,' regardless of how that electricity is produced, which is obviously wrong.
Converting gasoline powered cars to electric coal-powered cars is actually green, it turns out :)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/?sh=787d496d2320
The article actually claims the opposite. It claims that when most electricity comes from coal, like in Poland, EVs are more polluting. It argues that EVs are cleaner when a high enough percentage of the electricity comes from renewables.
However, the article makes a very common error.
It assumes that the emissions caused by EVs can be calculated by looking at the average carbon emission of creating electricity. However, you actually have to look at the emissions caused by the production of the additional electricity which is used by moving to EVs.
There is widespread agreement by experts/scientists that we cannot reasonably scale wind and solar beyond a certain point. In the absence of a electricity storage breakthrough (or such), we can probably only increase the percentage of no/low-emission electricity by building more nuclear plants, but the West, the trend seems to be to get rid of existing nuclear plants, rather than build new ones (if we can even still do that, with the current level of regulations).
So there is a pretty good chance that the extra electricity used by EVs, comes from coal plants. For example, right now in Germany, coal plant capacity is kept in reserve to match supply to demand. Every extra EV that goes on the road in Germany, will cause more electricity to be generated with coal plants.
Not something I've seen in NZ, mostly people here are becoming more radical due to worsening personal situations, but of course that could just be my bubble. I didn't notice it when I lived in NL either, but I wasn't very plugged into the politics there at all!
I don't understand the idea that New Zealand's COVID response is good. It looks catastrophic to me. The underlying logic appears to be "wait for a vaccine, vaccinate everyone, then we can open up again". But it was well publicised for all of 2020 that vaccination is a very risky strategy because nobody ever made a successful coronavirus vaccine. The problem is not that you can't do it but it mutates so quickly that vaccines are quickly rendered irrelevant. That now seems to be happening, with the UK - supposedly doing so well in this strategy - claiming that some new variant beats the current vaccine. So wrecking this strategy appears to have taken evolution all of, what, 8 weeks? Additionally it's still unclear if they're actually vaccines at all or more like therapies (i.e. you can still get sick and transmit, you just don't get sick as badly).
Assuming vaccines go the same way as they classically have done and can't stop the virus from spreading, New Zealand's strategy of sealing the border will eventually be recognised as delusional. It's left with no way out except to eventually re-open, which will let the virus in. Hopefully by that point therapeutics and drug based treatments are sufficiently far advanced that it won't be as big a deal as it otherwise would have been but there's no evidence Ardern is preparing people for that outcome.
Most overseas coverage of New Zealand is a form of romanticism. Obviously it depends on the metrics you choose, but there aren't really grounds for holding up New Zealand as a poster child for good governance. On the contrary, our unicameral parliament allows politicians to follow extremely poor process when it suits them. In the last term of parliament, one minor party in government was effectively granted a $3b pork barrel fund.
New Zealand has some structural advantages in this area over the US. In particular, local government has much less power:
(a) Local government does not have a general power of competence, i.e., it can only regulate on any given subject if the central government has explicitly granted it the power to do so.
(b) In particular, local government does not have the power of eminent domain.
(c) The police are run by the central government, not local government.
(d) Schools are run by the central government, not local government.
My gut feeling is that it also helps to not have a separate layer of state government, but I'm not sure that would work for a big nation.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that New Zealand is badly governed.
Enjoyed the post, minor nitpick, you refer to both Bill and Hilary Clinton as Clinton in the same paragraph, and it's a little confusing.
Thoughts.
I think liberal, conservative, and polarized are terms that are all used in unclear ways here. For example the graph linked to in the twitter post reads to me as Democrats have become more Democraty than Republicans have become Republicany. The issues in the graph, for the most part, don't have an accepted coherent philosophy unifying them, other than Republicans take one side of the issue, and Democrats take the other. Reading the graph this way fits with the Democratic narrative that most Americans agree with the Democratic position on most issues:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics/democratic-positions-majority/index.html
So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular. In this respect the Republican party is more extreme because it differs more from the median American position.
The other graphs also make me wonder. Does it make sense to measure historic liberal and conservative values of various parties, if the hot issues of the time were different, or the opposite positions on said issues were considered progressive? As an example I challenge you to consistently map US foreign policy to liberal or conservative over US history.
Along a similar set of lines I wonder what is being measured by the polarization over history graphs. Is it measuring difference in opinion or willingness to cooperate? Difference in opinion probably reduces the likely hood of cooperation, but it is not sufficient. Both parties may want to pass infrastructure reform, but are unwilling to make minor concessions lest their opponents get a policy win. Regardless of how polarization is measured, I think it's fair to say that we are not at a polarization high point considering we have not had any duels or canings on congress recently.
I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization since this is a common talking point in Vox among other places.
"I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization"
It can't be a cause of gerrymandering because the Senate has also polarized.
In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists.
"So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular."
Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
People point out gerrymandering as a cause of polarization because it negates the need for a representative to appeal to the median voter. In this respect you could consider the senate gerrymandered as well because Republicans hold a fundamental advantage in the senate map as well.
"In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists."
I don't really understand what this means. What does extreme mean? I think you have to define along the lines of the overton window, in which case I would say that Democrats and republicans are roughly symmetrical in how extreme they are, but Republicans have a larger portion of extremists. In other words an extremists is just someone who hasn't gone mainstream yet.
"Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump."
If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats. Even if you are talking about democrats, I don't see how the electoral college is the correct metric in the context of this conversation.
"If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats."
Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is. Medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases are very popular, while handing out drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants and affirmative action are not.
I should note that I don't know that I buy the democratic narrative. I haven't looked into it enough to decide, but I disagree with you that "Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is". Polling exists and is very useful for this kind of thing. Yes people can ask biased questions and it's hard for a layman to interpret what the results mean, but it's far better than elections for determining how popular a policy is. Elections carry so much more baggage such as the candidates who are running, and most voters probably don't even know all of the positions their candidates have.
> Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes. Democrat positions - or at least Biden compared to Trump - are more popular among voters.
Oh please. Trump hatred, a deranged of off-the-rails extremism if there ever was one, got Biden installed. He had no policy position other than Orange Man Bad and He's Killing Us!
Look at the presidential elections since 1990 then - Democrats won the popular vote in all of them except for 2004, and that was at the peak of Iraq and with an incumbent president.
Seems you're changing the subject.
Itamar Levy-Or: "Democratic positions are more popular"
Eharding: "Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point."
Me: "Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes"
radrave: A comparison of Trump with Joe Biden doesn't tell you about popularity of Democratic positions
Me: A comparison of all the recent presidential elections might tell you about popularity of Democratic positions
Does that seem reasonable, or did I miss something somewhere?
Joe Biden won the electoral college 306 to 232. Trump won the electoral college by 304 to 227. Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes, a 4.5% differential. Trump lost the popular vote by around 3 million, a 2.2% differential. It seems to me that using the popular vote as a proxy for popularity isn't unwarranted.
The gerrymandering-polarization narrative never really made sense. The Republicans got to draw a lot of districts following the 2010 census, and supposedly their own gerrymandering made them extreme. But Republican gerrymandering means cramming Democrats into a few super-blue districts and spreading Republicans across numerous slightly-red districts. But you'd think slightly-red districts would elect moderate Republicans.
You're failing to take into account elasticity:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/swing-voters-and-elastic-states/
Congressmen aren't tailoring the districts so as to have a competitive election they just barely win, they want to have an competitive election they just barely win.
Certainly they build their red districts with a margin of safety to make sure they win even when elasticity goes against them. But still, concentrating the other party's voters and spreading out your own is fundamentally how gerrymandering works.
Would you mind rephrasing your final sentence?
I don't know the details of real world districts, but consider a state where 60% of the population is a member of your party. If you drew every district to have 60% of the voters be members of your party, you will have gerrymandered the state to grant your party all the representatives with only 60% of the vote, without it ever being close.
"Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
Yes, except if we rewind to 1970, Clinton's positions (at least the economic ones) look moderate and Trump's... well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions, but the Republican Party would look insane and ultra-far-right. Both parties shifted to the right a lot in the 1975-2000 period, and the Democrats starting to swing back left is part of the more recent growth in polarization.
My belief remains that having political differences between parties is a good thing, though I'd distinguish between 'ideological diversity' and 'polarization', because the latter case implies having precisely two poles (/tribes), which *is* a problem but also may be decreasing a bit now (and in any case is the fault of the two-party system).
<i> well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions</i>
Trump's economic positions go back decades. He hates trade, he hates getting involved with other countries outside of mercantilism.
The economics goes back centuries, it's the view of trade that Adam Smith attacked and Ricardo demolished. Unfortunately, the false version (absolute advantage/favorable balance of payments) is easier to understand than the true version (comparative advantage), and makes a better fit to the political interests of many of those controlling trade policy.
I didn't say he was right. I said Trump had a coherent (and consistent) policy.
> If you had some limited number of resources, and you wanted to improve (US) politics as much as possible so that the government made better decisions and better served its populace, what would you do?
Lawrence Lessig makes a compelling argument in Republic, Lost (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11814478-republic-lost) that the best way to improve US politics would be reversing Citizens United and getting money out of politics. Because both parties are in such intense competition, they spend all of their time fundraising instead of governing. If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
Voting system reform is far wiser. Implement score voting so the most popular candidate wins, rather than the candidate most popular among the plurality of the plurality. But I oppose democracy and instead support a wise government by superforecasters.
Was US politics doing just fine prior to Citizens United but suddenly got a lot worse after that? Because this polarization trend discussed above preceded that.
I was more making the point that if we could only solve one problem in politics, "money in politics" is more impactful than polarization, and might have a side-effect of decreasing polarization.
Polarization was already increasing prior to Citizens United. And is it really that "impactful" if it started after 2010?
Ignoring candidates trying to argue about CU itself, how does an alternate-universe without CU play out the 2016 or 2020 elections any differently?
I'm saying that if Citizens United had a big impact, shouldn't we be able to see it by comparing what things were like before vs after? Some kind of trend-line test?
We'd be far better off if we reversed Wickard v. Filburn so that most policy was handled locally, like it's supposed to be.
Yes.
> If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
I agree on getting the money out of politics, but I doubt very much they'd stop trying to get voters to hate the other party. When real currency is out the window, votes are the only currency left so it will become a battle over different populist positions with all the same incentives.
Operating on the assumption that "populist" means "popular but useless or harmful", and "good policy" is "popular and helpful", I think that populist positions require advertising (aka money) that you are doing them and that they are working in order to get people to vote for you. Good policy should be self evident with a "are your circumstances better than they were four years ago?" test.
Policies that are unpopular and unhelpful (using public money to build yourself a private waterpark) or unpopular and helpful (force-feeding people vegetables) feel mostly unconnected to how much money political campaigns have to work with since the political incentives are to keep them quiet anyways.
The article about polarization data from 9 countries article doesn't seem to totally back up the idea that the internet/social media isn't to blame. Looking at their raw numbers, instead of their 2nd derivatives, Britain and Australia are roughly equal to the modern day US (which matched my understanding of their political climate), but are shown as having about an unchanging level of polarization over the past 20-30 years.
It could be that one conclusion is that the internet has nothing to do with polarization, but another potential one is that the internet raises polarization up to a certain cap, and other countries were already at that cap and have been even before the internet. Looking at the graphs, only 3 countries show a trend downwards from their current level of polarization, and they are all still (excluding Germany) currently at a level of polarization that roughly equals the US (45).
While this is a more complex explanation and thus goes against Occam's razer, it also seems really unlikely that the internet has nothing to do with polarization. After all, the Loss of geography section seems like it perfectly fits with the internet being to blame.
"That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness."
Republicans are less ideologically uniform in Congress. Probably less ideologically uniform among the general population, too. In both the Democratic and Republican parties, the primary opposition is from the right.
All evidence suggests the American party system (based on the electoral college) naturally tends toward polarization. America depolarized beginning in the 1920s largely because old debates were becoming less relevant, and the 1930s created the left-right ideological axis as the new primary difference between the parties, resulting in depolarization over the next forty years as the old pattern of polarization dissipated. In the 1970s and later, party constituencies became increasingly coherent to match the left-right ideological axis on which issues were debated. Even as late as 1976 you could see a presidential election that wasn't TOO different from that of 1876. No longer.
I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion. A big part of the changing dynamics of the 80s into the early 90s was the complete embrace of the Republican part by evangelicals, along with their re-entry into the political sphere after generations of trying to separate from society. Much of the socially cultural issues that caused deep divisions from 1980-2010 were in that area - abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, flag burning. The weird thing is that seemed to have a delayed effect up through the mid 2000's, when you people started abandoning organized religion, and the Democrats really started to be the party of the youth. This then naturally merged into the racial divisions that were exacerbated by right-wing opposition to Obama as a legitimate president.
I would have liked to see much more discussion in the book about the dimensions and correlations of religious/political polarization in the US. That could explain why we are so different from other WEIRD countries.
Evangelicals weren't especially anti-abortion early on. Catholics (who leaned Democrat at the time) were. They basically captured the intellectual heights of the conservative movement (how many Protestants are on SCOTUS?) and converted evangelicals to their cause.
You're right that evangelicals weren't that anti-abortion early, and until the 1980s they were still holding over a lot of anti-Catholic feeling. But the disappearance of Protestants from the SCOTUS didn't really get going until the late 1990s/2000s.
But the bigger issue stands, in that starting in the 1980s the parties developed a strong religious polarization. And the religious issues tended to drive some of the bitterest division. People weren't screaming about marginal federal income tax rates the way they were about abortion and gay rights. I think there is a part of this story about how certain issues that inspired the deepest division were religious, and that the religious polarization by party intensified that trend.
>> "I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion."
Yes, I also think this is a MAJOR part of the story.
I'd frame it a little differently, though: America used to be united by religion, which set a limit to how far its political divisions could go.
The cultural glue that gave Americans a sense of investment in a set of meta-level norms for resolving political disagreement was the civic religion Will Herberg in the 1950s called Catholic/Protestant/Jew. That religious mainstream has undergone a long, slow collapse, of which we're only now beginning to reap the fruit.
> America used to be united by religion
It was. But then the elites started letting all those Catholics in ....
From some folks I've talked to, it seems like the leadership of many organized Christian denominations in the US seems to be much more Left than their followers. So it's possible that the leadership was pro-abortion, but it took a while for the signal from the congregants to get out.
It's also possible that the law-and-order impulse of people recoils against Roe v. Wade, which ultimately is a *terrible* legal opinion, even if I mostly agree with the results.
Many "Mainline" Protestant denominations have leadership that is much more to the left than their followers, but they're hollowing out, while Evangelicals (who have very conservative leadership) stay roughly the same. I don't have the best data on hand right now, but according to Pew in 2007 Mainline Protestants made up 18% of the US population while today they are only 14%, while over the same time period Evangelicals went from 26% to 25%. And in 1970 Mainline Protestants made up 30% of the population! It's been a long steady decline for Mainliner's while Evangelicals are holding out (or at least declining, much, much slower). So while the Mainline Protestant leadership is getting further to the Left, there are fewer of them overall year by year.
This is a good essay that gets to a good place and raises lots of good points, but I'm going to quibble with you on one point and then just point something out, but let's just understand I'm only quibbling on the point, not the overall piece.
OK? Cool.
Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
That's more an observation.
To quibble: I don't agree with you that the GOP is reacting to the craziness of the Dems. I agree the Dems are crazy! But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party.
That was quite crazy too. Not as crazy as now but it was crazy. And it sewed a lot of seeds for today's identity politics, particularly along the sexual faultlines.
In sum, each has brewed their own crazy and they both go way back. Each has also positioned themselves in contrast to the other, as well, though. Both things have happened. History is a mess. Anyway: Moderatism doesn't sell tickets.
And as an aside I've always had a hard time with moderatism on some issues. For example: I want to see a pretty hard ass approach to climate change. The time for moderation has passed. And even if it hasn't passed, if it turns out we go to far, we'll still come out with a nicer, cleaner, more healthy world on the other side of going hardass on it, so it's fine regardless. The utility value of going green is quite high to all even if the threat is overstated.
But I don't think it is.
This feels a little like a digression but I don't think it is. A mushy middle isn't really the answer. Restoring a consensus of nationhood and we all have more of a responsibility to that consensus than we do to political points seems more important.
To your point about an EA of politics: I've long thought crushing gerrymandering would be the best effective altruist solution here. If districts were more politically muddled and primaries were more of a contest we would see a different politics.
Gerrymandering is more important than the money. Usually people get mad when I say that but I suspect this crew won't.
>> "But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party."
Do you remember the "black helicopters"? And SNL's "Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol"? :-)
>>>Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
----
Out of curiousity, have you been to different regions of Germany and spoken to different types of people?
Half the country that is like 40+ years old, grew up in the Soviet Union, and the other half didn't. Some cities like Berlin have far-left ararchist movements that are blockading streets and burning cars when a squat is evicted, other cities are majority catholic and have huge beer festivals. The west and east had different immigrant populations that were arriving from ww2 on, like all the vietnamese in the east, and the turkish guest workers in the west.
I'm not sure why you would assume that farmers would get on perfect with city folks. Its my understanding that a lot of the far right party AFD, has a more rural base.
but yes, Germany is smaller than the US.
To be honest, I've been to about 15 states in the US (i'm Canadian with family there) and sure you're a diverse country, but but not strikingly more so somehow than other countries.
caveat: I'm just responding to your comment, I haven't read Ezra Klein's book or that article in a few months.
The thing that always strikes me about US political polarization is how clean of a rural/urban split it is, where urban areas all over are strongly Democratic and rural areas all over are strongly Republican. When did it start being this way? Do other countries see this same split?
"When did it start being this way?"
Most straightforwardly, the 2000 election.
I'm no historian, but wasn't there long migrations of black people, moving north, and out of rural areas into city centers. And then white people moving out of city centers because they didn't want to live near black people?
If that is true (and correct me if its wrong), then I guess its pretty easy to imagine that the white people that moved to suburbs and rural areas because they didn't want to mix with Blacks ended up in the Republican Party. And that conversely the city people were more progressive, also included immigrants from elsewhere and ended up in the Democrats.
But I'm curious about your take, how did the 2000 election drive a rural/urban split?
In Australia we have three parties -- to first approximation the Labor Party is for the city-dwelling poorer-than-median, the Liberal Party is for the city-dwelling richer-than-median, and the National Party is for rural areas. The Liberals and Nationals are in a permanent centre-right coalition.
As a city-dwelling rich(er-than-median) person I find it strange that I have no natural place in US politics. When I first moved to San Francisco I thought it obvious that rich city dwellers should support the right-wing party -- after all, they want to lower our taxes while the other party seems to spend their time talking about how evil we are. I never understood why my fellow rich city-dwelling friends didn't see things the same way.
It might be useful to look at the 1896 election also.
The urban-rural divide is global. e.g.
- India: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2009/4/16/indias-growing-rural-urban-divide
- Europe: https://www.era-learn.eu/network-information/networks/governance-14-2018/democratic-governance-in-a-turbulent-age/the-rural-urban-divide-in-europe
- Japan: https://thediplomat.com/2014/02/japans-rural-urban-divide/
- Argentina: https://www.thebubble.com/argentine-urban-rural-divide
Heh, after I collected that list, I found this Atlantic article which uses the same examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/electoral-college-trump-argentina-malaysia-japan-clinton/512153/ So if you want nicely organized analysis, start there.
"I'm not sure I fully understood Klein's explanation of exactly how this happened. After all, since identities are not 100% correlated (ie not all farmers are Protestant and not all city-dwellers are poor), you can't actually do this for the whole population at once. I think Klein would say that these correlations went from kind of random, to the ones that capture the biggest slice of the population."
Two things here:
1) People underestimate how very NOT diverse America was until recently. We were an 85%-90% white country from 1860-1960, and over 90% Christian, so those were not identities that you even could polarize around. There was some slicing and dicing of the various Christian sects (e.g. Catholics overwhelmingly supporting Democrats), but I think that's how this has shifted--the "big" identities have become much more polarized because they've become smaller.
2) Klein sort of misses something in this analysis, which is that polarization can be explained as much by the *erosion* of identity as by the *realignment* of identity. The question of the book is of course "Why are we polarized?" but as you do a good job explaining, the real question is more, "Why did we go from a system where you had conservatives and liberals supporting each party, to one in which conservatives overwhelmingly support Republicans and liberals overwhelmingly support Democrats?" But you could also pose the question as "What kept a bunch of conservative white people in the Democratic Party for so long?" The answer in the South was that the Democratic Party was completely tied up in white Southern identity. In the North it seems to be labor unions, or more broadly that they saw the Democrats as the "working man's party," that kept them in the party. I think the breakdown of the labor movement--and the class consciousness that came with it, not just the material benefits--kept a lot of conservatives in the Democratic Party.
As far as what polarized the parties, I see it as (in chronological order):
1) Civil Rights Act: As you said, this led to the decline of the Democratic Party in the South, essentially pushing conservative white Southerners closer to the GOP)
2) Reagan: He actively campaigned against moderate Republicans before becoming president and strongly pushed the idea that the Republicans should become a conservative party, basically making the conservative wing of the party ascendant
3) Iraq War
4) Obama: I don't think he tried to polarize the country, but he was basically the liberal dream candidate--black, son of an immigrant, intellectual, more dovish than Kerry, Gore, and Clinton--and the conservative nightmare. The 2010 election was basically the end of the conservative Democrat in Congress, and I don't think you can disentangle that from conservatives who had historically voted for Democrats being turned off by Obama.
5) Trump: Basically the mirror image of Obama
"Iraq War"
Seems quite irrelevant; 00 election was very strongly correlated with 04 election and Democrats are fine with neocons now.
1972-PREZ seems more like an election for the post-2000 era than 1984.
You are correct that the parties changed due to certain identities (e.g., Catholic v. Protestant) becoming less important.
I actually feel more confident about the Iraq part than the rest. The lead-up to Iraq was not very polarized, but the 2004 election seemed to polarize strongly so that if you were FOR the war, you were absolutely for Bush, and if you were against the war, you were for Kerry. Even though basically all of the pro-war Dems kept their prominent positions in the party, they all had to self-flagellate over their original support for it (and arguably, Iraq is why Obama beat Clinton in '08). That's very different from previous wars, which other than the Civil War seemed to not have a strong partisan division, even when they were unpopular. And that hard line also aligned with some regional polarization and seemed to beget a lot of the "Red State=Jesusland full of hicks trying to shove Bibles down your throat, Blue State=Latte sipping socialists."
Why was the 2004 election so strongly correlated with the 2000 election? https://againstjebelallawz.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/1916correlation.png
It's a great question. I think that--to use my examples--basically by 2000 the realignment caused by the Civil Rights Act and Reagan had taken shape, and then Iraq just solidified it. If you didn't like Bush in 2000, you HATED him in 2004.
Maybe even if you liked him. Bush the first time was the last time I voted for a Republican president.
I don't know, it's true the country was 85-90% white by today's standards, but back then the different European ethnicities were quite distinct and there wasn't really a monolithic 'white' culture the way we see it today. Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white, and even the germanic/nordic communities throughout the midwest largely spoke their native languages and held onto their native customs. Yes they all treated each other as superior to black/brown populations, but to say they were an assimilated mass with little diversity between them would be wrong
You're right, and we did actually see partisan sorting along those ethnic lines that trumped ideology--you had strong support for Democrats among "ethnic" whites until Nixon and strong support for Republicans among WASPs in the Northeast. I just meant "white" and "Christian" weren't identities you could polarize around, so saying "white people are starting to drift to the Republican Party" would have just meant "America is shifting right" and not "America is polarizing."
"Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white"
Looked down on, perhaps, but "not really being white" certainly not. America had a legally enforced racial caste system, and European immigrants always classified as white under it.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/
Yea they never legally defined Italian/Irish as non-white, but I think my comment still stands that the prevailing opinion among Anglo/Germanic communities was that non-Anglo/Germanic Europeans weren't really 'white' like they were.
I wish there was an ungated version of the paper linked there available, because it does actually go into social (rather than merely legal) distinctions. They again find that European immigrants were lumped in with other whites, not African Americans or Native Americans.
There was a tiered hierarchy. Angle-Saxons at the top, then European immigrants (who themselves were divided based on their origin). Then they drew the line and declared those to be "white." Then there were African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and others.
The European immigrants still counted as "white," but they definitely weren't treated the same.
There's an important sense in which your 3, 4 and 5 are horribly missing the point.
For 4 and 5, Obama *spoke* like a dove but governed no less hawkishly than Bush while Trump *spoke* (kind of) like a hawk but governed more dovishly than any American president since Carter. Which gets to the meat of why 3 matters: Obama cultivated the persona of a political outsider at exactly the time when the Iraq war and the 2008 recession demonstrated incontrovertibly that the political insiders running our foreign and domestic policy were at best disastrously incompetent and at worst malevolent. When his neoliberalism turned out to be indistinguishable from Bush's neoconservatism in practice, just with rainbow flags in place of crosses, a lot of people in both parties started looking for the door.
Which is, to my mind, the essence of today's partisanship. If you reject the Washington Consensus which formed the mainstream of both parties pre-Trump (and which has been desperately trying to claw back control of the Republicans post-Trump) then your choices for elected officials are very limited. Without a genuine outsider to vote for, the best bet is just to gum up the gears of the Washington machine by threatening to primary any politician who tries to reach across the aisle to pass another part of their shared agenda. If a new war or a a new bailout or a new expansion of the surveillance state is worth it to their donors they'll take the risk, but forcing them to play defensively on the smaller issues means Democratic and Republican elected officials have that many fewer opportunities to defraud the American people.
I don't think you're wrong or I'm wrong here, I think we're describing different but simultaneous phenomena that pushed the country in the same direction. You are right that Obama was not (as he may have seemed at the time) a strong departure from the Washington consensus, so people who wanted that probably were turned off by him. What you write helps explain why we're seeing rising numbers of independents but not rising numbers of swing voters; there are a growing number of people who do see the two parties as indistinguishable and/or just bad actors, but who nevertheless have strong policy preferences one way or the other.
I think the synthesis for our ideas is this: Obama was not that different from previous iterations of Democrats, and people on the left saw him as basically a normal Democrat. This actually turned off some people, who had been hoping he would push against the grain more, and lead them to demand a more extreme version of liberalism a la Bernie Sanders. Many conservatives, on the other hand, perceived Obama as a radical, dangerous departure from the norm, possibly more because of who he was rather than the policies he pushed, though I'm sure they had their reasons. This led them to demand from the right for less cooperation and more ideological rigor. You could basically argue the same thing about Trump--Republican voters saw him as a businessman who deviated from Republican orthodoxy in speeches, but ultimately his big accomplishments were tax cuts, deregulation, and appointing conservative judges. If you asked Democrats, though, he was a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics, pushing them to cooperate less, and the cycle repeats.
Er, no, it had nothing to do with "who [Obama] was". It wasn't even what policies he pushed. It was what political tactics the Democrats used under him.
What both wiped out the "conservative" Democrats in 2010 and convinced the right that the Democrats had radically and dangerously departed from the historic norm was that in 2010 the "conservative" Democrats in Congress took the radical and unprecedented step of committing mass electoral suicide in order to push through a massively unpopular program on behalf of their party leadership. When even the people of the State of Massachusetts were opposed enough to Obamacare to elect a Republican in a special election to try to stop it, the Democrats went ahead and rammed it through.
You want "a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics", THAT was the moment.
At that point, the idea of there being such a thing as a "conservative" Democrat, or even one who would reflect and respond to his constituents' desires, died in the minds of America's right. They're now convinced that there's nobody to persuade or compromise with in the Democratic Party. And so any Republicans in office who act like there's any Democrats in office who can be persuaded or compromised with are either idiots or traitors.
And so that illustrates what they're really demanding of Republican politicians. The demand is not for ideological rigor; Trump went ahead and talked positively about the British NHS in a Republican Presidential debate, after all. What they demand is that the Republican politician agree that all that's possible with the Democrats is war-to-the-knife, and pledge to fight it.
RE international comparisons: which other developed countries have two-party systems? From a cursory Wikipedia, it seems like the answer is Malta and that's basically it.
Other contenders:
South Korea often only has two big parties, but which two seems to change every election.
Australia has two big groups, but one is the Coalition of two parties, and the senate is elected via PR and has 20% minority representation.
I am more familiar with the UK and don't think it counts, we had a coalition government pretty recently and the Scottish National Party are pretty big.
Any others?
Taiwan.
I think the UK definitely counts as they have only had two major parties for pretty much their whole history.
Many countries have a mostly dominant "natural governing party" and then a smaller opposition party. In Canada that was the Liberal Party, while in Japan it was the Liberal Democrats, and in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Singapore is a more extreme case of this, where the natural governing party has (so far) never been out of power.
There is an argument that this is just like a single city always electing Democrats: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/11/democracy_in_si.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/the_puzzle_of_o.html
Its not just the two party system, but that we don't have a parliamentary system, so the coalition politics of a parliament don't apply.
Arguably the American system is more analogous to various south American and African countries with strong presidential powers. Who tend to have the presidents party and the other one.
As a Canadian I feel like while we are multi party, we share some of the problem's with the US because we use the first past the post. Because there's basically just 1 party on the right and 2 big ones on the left, we basically have a constant spoiler effect on the left where the vote is split too much for either major left wing party to win. And so we end up sometimes with the Conservative (rightwing) party winning, even though 65% of the country voted for a left wing party.
I think of being a 2 party country and being a first-past the post country as almost one and the same problem. It greatly incentives voting against the one you hate rather than the one you want. And that's a huge barrier to entry for new parties and so should trend over time towards 2 consolidated parties.
Inequality began its explosive rise starting in the late 70s due to globalization, the loss of labor bargaining power, the rise of the managerial class, etc. As the producer of the world’s reserve currency, the US has a unique role in globalization which magnifies the effects (both good and bad). The massively divergent outcomes among members of society, plus what I would argue resembles stagnation at lower rungs, created fertile ground for a loss of social trust and a rise in angst. In the absence of deep, productive debates on the true underlying issues, we simply default to tribal partisanship and culture wars.
Economic inequality has been rising since around the late 60s. I agree globalization is a major factor (but it increased bargaining power for workers in many other countries), but automation has also been a major factor. I'm not sure what constitutes a productive debate on the underlying issues, but it seems to me that economic inequality is possibly the single most constantly talked about issue there is.
Sure, we talk about inequality but mostly in naïve, tribal ways that fail to address root causes, nevermind actual solutions. What i mostly hear is "tax the rich," "systemic racism," "throw more money at failing schools," etc etc. Regardless of what you think of such issues, they are not going to put a dent in inequality - which has been rising ever faster the more we "talk about it."
We need real discussions on trade policy, monetary policy, dramatic tax reform, supply-side revolutions in healthcare/education housing etc. Mostly what i observe is the use of emotional issues to avoid having the real discussions that are necessary - and which would probably prove financially costly for the elites.
Inequality and "economic inequality" aren’t problems. They are mathematical relationships. Inequality isn’t even remotely the same thing as "unfairness", which we can probably agree on as an actual problem.
I guess my point is that to the extent that unfairness is an issue, if we wish to address it we should start by labeling the issue correctly. Inequality of outcome is not necessarily an indication of unfairness, nor is greater economic inequality intrinsically worse than less inequality.
While I agree in theory, it may not mean much in practice. If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable? If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable? There are no clear answers and the way society finds the "answers" seems to be a very messy process, which i believe we are going through now.
I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair. We do a very poor job of this...the winners of the current configuration aren't "policed" much at all. I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative.
Thanks for the reply!
"If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable?"
Globalization doesn’t require a country to pursue it. Individual and corporate actions are sufficient to achieve global exchange absent country interference. And I really don’t understand what "leaving people behind" means. I decided to retire ten years ago. Was I left behind? Others chose not to move to booming markets (perhaps for good reasons), or chose not to make the transition to booming, higher paid professions. Were they left behind? Or is this just a euphemism for the fact that change creates winners and losers, pretty much by definition?
And I will add that wage inequality in a market is actually acting as the incentive to correct for the lack of transition (to the new job or area). The market is sending an incentive and a signal for people in declining areas and professions to adjust their behavior if possible.
"If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable?"
Not if we agree to play by those rules. If I agree to play by certain rules and we all follow them I would consider the game fair (and presumably desirable), even if the final score is extremely lopsided. I am not arguing against redistribution, I am suggesting that the system can be both fair and desirable even when it leads to inequality of outcome.
"I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair."
I agree we should police bad actors and ensure that the system is as fair as possible. But I do not believe it is logical to look at an unequal outcome and make an assumption that the system is unfair nor even that more equality would be better. Inequality of outcome and fairness are not necessarily correlated. Indeed I could argue that a market based system would be dysfunctional if every course of action led to the same results.
"I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative."
The equality pillar has nothing to do with equality of economic outcome. It refers to equality of process — it is about treating everyone fairly using the same rules.
I agree but I feel like that's a problem with pretty much every issue. With inequality, I think there are some 'inconvenient truths' that obstruct discourse, such as the fact that rising productivity inequality is probably at least one driving force behind it. Of course one can still argue for redistribution from rich to poor even if the gap largely reflects productivity difference, but I think many find it less palatable to demand recompense based on abstract moral valuation of equality than on the basis that one is being shortchanged by fatcats and is merely demanding the rest of one's rightful compensation.
Of course for some big inequality-related issues, like housing and education costs, Klein's point about the nationalization of politics is probably pretty relevant. They're local/state issues and thus can't command as much popular interest as national political issues.
Surprised I haven't heard anyone saying this - what about wealth and income inequality? Given the correspondence, seems as if an explanation would have more power if it related to them both. https://images.app.goo.gl/biMLpT78K9rK1QJr7
High levels of blatant inequality in the 1880s-1910s, pushes polarization until enough solutions get passed, things go down, people are happy, welfare state starts stagnating and retreating, inequality goes up, pushes polarization.
Why would wealth inequality push Polarization? People are unhappy, don't know why, blame the outgroup.
Alternatively, only way to suppress class consciousness is to give people some other identity to care about.
Inequality wasn't falling during the 1920s, though polarization was, and Britain and Australia don't fit the pattern.
This isn’t an exact science. It may be that inequality + a very large diverse society + an “all created equal” national narrative creates problems.
U.S society was fairly large and diverse in the 1920s, although African Americans were restricted from taking part in politics in the south (where most of them lived).
You could substitute "what about the share of foreign born Americans?"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/30/immigrant-share-in-u-s-nears-record-high-but-remains-below-that-of-many-other-countries/
It was high in the second half of the 1800s, reached a peak in 1910, fell to its low in the 1970s, and has trended up ever since.
And that's also probably a contributing or correlated factor. No need to limit causality to one thing when there are probably a host of things that contribute
Alternative: most of the income inequality has been eaten up by other forms of compensation. Not just healthcare benefits, etc. Also regulatory benefits. With the introduction of OSHA, ADA, EEOC, etc., everybody is getting a large boost in non-monetary benefits through the regulatory apparatus rather than through the labor negotiation process.
If there's any discontinuity around that time, it'd be 9/11 and Iraq. I think 9/11 was the original cause, but it took a couple years to show up, because in the short term it was a unifying factor. It wasn't until Iraq happened, and started to go differently to how Bush suggested it would, that it exploded into polarization.
This is a guess, obviously, but it seems to fit well enough.
2000 election was inverse of 1916 election, so 9/11 wasn't important.
I'm not following you.
Maybe this is a consequence of coming of age in the 2000s, but I'm always going to associate political agreement and ability to get stuff done with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the creation of DHS, domestic spying and other civil liberty issues, etc., that came after 9/11. Democrats and Republicans agreed about a whole lot of that! Yes, I see that there are many problems with polarization. But you don't have to reach back very far to find examples where "inability to get stuff done" would have looked a lot better than the alternative.
Does the chart of polarization show the UK becoming less polarised? Because that does not match my impressions. I would say less until the mid 90s and then flat for a bit (maybe not quite - Blair was dominant so the Tories going down weird routes for a bit did not affect much) and then the left reaction against Blair started with Iraq/Bush which started moving bits of Labour apart just as the Tories went centre enough to have a chance to grab back power - the 2008 crash made this worse and then the Tories won and while socially liberal they were harsh cutters of government services, which made polarisation more urgent. The Lib dem implosion as part of the coalition destroyed the middle for a bit, then Brexit/Corbyn/Boris sharpened the cultural aspect until there was very strong polarisation.
So I would expect a U shape with the minimum late 90s early 00s
The UK chart shows ultra-high polarisation during the Thatcher years, calming down a bit during Major, reaching a minimum with Blair, and then increasing until we reach Thatcher levels again with Brexit. That matches my intuitions.
Which suggests that maybe polarisation levels are just strongly influenced by specific issues and personalities. What's really interesting is that the Iraq war was a polarising event in the US but a depolarising event in the UK, because in one country it was supported by a right-wing leader and in the other by a left-wing leader.
Perhaps the best thing for depolarising the US would be for Joe Biden to start a war.
I don't think anyone has mentioned Bush/Gore and 9/11? Those are two events that were huge in the popular consciousness that fit the timeline. Of course you can't draw a line in the sand, can you - just why was the 2000 Presidential race so evenly split - in my memory both Bush and Gore were pretty unremarkable candidates. All I know is that you still can find people bitter over the outcome, which naturally ought to contribute to a "win-at-all-costs" mentality. And then you had 9/11 and everything that followed. Attack on American soil! It was quite a shock to the system after a decade of relative peace and harmony. People were digging in on jingoistic patriotism versus the other side advocating a more measured response and saying, No the US is the true aggressor here. And throughout the Iraq War the justifications became more murky and Bush expanded his power in unpopular ways and you had things like the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Bush was so hated that a faux-documentary was made about his assassination and what would be the aftermath. I don't have a point to all this, perhaps it's too much of a just-so story. But I definitely see some of the origins of the current culture war in those times.
Bill Clinton mastered "triangulation" which serves to increase tensions. This preceeded The 2000 election. It's Moloch all the way down.
I think an interesting subject for further inquiry is why the Democrats have been more successful at fighting off insurgencies that Republicans.
My moderately informed opinion is that institutional Democrats have a lot more institutional support than institutional Republicans.
If someone primaries Mitch McConnell, they will get a lot of favorable coverage (in the primary campaign) even if that person's views were much more abhorrent. If AOC were to attempt to primary Chuck Schumer, it would be seen as a threat to the republic.
When Trump was launching his campaign, everyone thought it was hi-larious how he was taking down the Jeb Bushes and Marco Rubios of the world. I recall a lot of tweets about how Trump maybe really nuts, but what's really nuts is the numbers in Rubio's tax plan!
Meanwhile, the leasing institutionally conservative publication published an "against Trump" cover. But it didn't matter.
Bernie Sanders was always a threat. He was pressured to quite. People were really concerned about "Bernie-bros.", etc. Try talking about Jill Stein in certain quarters.
I think the Democrats are heading down that slope, though. They're doing what the Republicans did, resisting the direct challenges to the people in charge, but bending policy and appointments toward the insurgency to appease them. But eventually the old Democrats will be called some equivalent of DINO for holding on to something (anything) while the current is pulling them leftward.
I think may you have something here, but I want to quibble. AOC got into congress by primarying one of the prominent dem house leaders. I don't think she got much pushback for it, and if she did it didn't matter. The movement that put her in is dedicated to finding and pushing out dems that are too far to the right.
Also, in my state legislative district, the local Democratic party did not endorse their long-time centrist representative in the primary, when he was being challenged by two inexperienced activists on the left and the far left. It was also interesting to see a local news source completely avoid mention of the left challenger, in favor of the far left one. Like literally, their editorial recommendations didn't mention her name or acknowledge that she was in the race. (Fortunately they have a robust online comment section.)
I'm more than a little surprised that population density didn't come up once.
The simplest way to describe the difference between republican and democratic coalitions is population density. Democrats are predominantly an urban coalition, and republicans are more rural / suburban.
When you factor in that most economic growth has taken place in cities, and cities are always where almost all culture is produced, you see a pretty obvious pattern:
- cities are where almost all economic power is concentrated
- cities are where almost all cultural power is concentrated
- cities are dominated by democratic politics
He's got a point that AOC/Bernie have less influence inside party politics - but there are plenty of SJW extremists writing in the New York Times. Sure, QAnon is totally off the rails and there isn't anything like that on the left, but the closest left wing equivalents are tenured sociology professors.
Whenever I leave California to go visit my parents in Ohio, I feel like I understand the sense of despair and anger and frustration that people here feel, towards the place that took a lot of their kids, and responds by calling them racist, bigoted people for not going along with this increasingly radical agenda, which seems coupled to economic policies that are AWESOME if you leave your hometown and move to a big city and learn to do really insanely complicated things for a giant corporation, but otherwise are kinda meh.
It's been difficult for me to escape the conclusion that you can't possibly have a stable political coalition that covers "city dwellers" as more and more of the country movies into cities - unless those city dwellers are united against a common enemy. All around San Francisco in 2014, there was a big tech backlash, with people spraypainting '#DieTechieScum' on the sidewalk. It all went away around the time Michael Brown was killed. I watched how quickly all the big tech companies joined into BLM, and remembered thinking at the time "now we have an enemy that we can all feel good about hating."
If this hypothesis is true - that increasing urbanization drives political polarization - the solution would be... some kind of ... thing.. .which caused lots of people to start leaving big cities all at once. Maybe spreading tech wealth all over the country, and increasing the frequency of interaction between highly trained technological professionals and blue collar workers. Who knows what would cause such a thing?
Why not just have everyone move to cities? Seems easier to me - cities have economies of scale, whereas rural areas have... cows which do not require the rural population we currently have
>> "Why not just have everyone move to cities?"
That is in fact roughly what's happening, at what may be close the maximum rate consistent with aggregated individual choice as opposed to coercive state policy.
The present urban/rural political dynamic is what you see as a result.
I think you're wrong. America has instead gotten more suburban in the more recent decades. Restrictions on building in big cities pushes real estate prices up, and people out. There are many blue suburbs now, but it's not because a smaller portion of the country lives in rural areas (that has stayed steady at a low percentage of the population for a while).
I'm beginning to suspect that a great number of people here live in a bubble. So many people are fleeing San Francisco that rents have actually dropped by hundreds of dollars. Same in NY.
That's only been true since the start of the pandemic. Expect the trend to reverse itself as soon as it's safe to go outside in a city.
Reactions to covid are merely an accelerant. Conditions is San Francisco regarding homelessness, public sanitation, rising crime, and educational shortcomings are factors that won't go away anytime soon. And it looks like companies are finally waking up to the benefits of allowing folks to work at home. There's no going back.
Work from home is just going to accelerate urbanization. So many people that have jobs in suburban office parks would love to live in a city - and particularly people with jobs in a small city that would rather live in a big city.
All the data shows an increase up until last March, at which point the rents dropped drastically.[0] Just like they did in the rest of the country.[1] Perhaps it has multiple causes, but the data doesn't show it.
[0]: https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/san-francisco/
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/These-charts-show-just-how-extreme-the-rent-15848320.php
The move from large cities, which continue to deteriorate in every possible way for various reasons, is happening more rapidly now.
I think you've got that backwards - people are continuing to urbanize.
A similar thing is happening in England with the cities voting more and more for Labour and the towns and rural areas (even in the North) voting Tory.
One theory of the cause of increased partisanship since the 70's that has been growing on me is transparency/sunshine laws. Apparently, pre 1970's congressional/comittee meetings and votes were all done closed door to the point where we don't even know how specific legislators voted on specific legislation. But beginning in the 1970's a wave of legislation calling for increased "accountability" opened up these proceedings to the general public. But, the theory goes, special interest groups, corporations, media interests etc are a LOT better at holding their representatives accountable than the average joe voter. Where previously they were still motivated to enact regulatory capture, but ultimately didn't know if it was working and couldn't easily organize against someone who defected, now they could. And the legislators now knew that they could.
And where previously they could give a good partisan speech but then go behind closed doors and compromise or acknowledge when someone from the other side made a good point, now there was no longer any backstage. The theatre element of politics is on and you can never be seen to not be treating the other side like they're the bad guys and we're the good guys.
Also with the transparency laws, the media gains power because they are the largest influencers of the only group that can possibly counter the special interest groups, the average voters. So the value of influencing the average voter goes up which, of course, increases competition for that influence. And the more the battle for that influence heats up the more you need to band together to win(media consolidation), the more you gain from demonizing the other side, and the more incentivized you are to do it.
The link I posted above has some really compelling research and arguments that link transparency laws to polarization, regulatory capture, government waste, pork, bill size inflation/obfuscation, wealth inequality, increased campaign spending, decreases in crossing the aisle voting, increases in "bang for your buck" for lobbying spending, wage stagnation/inequality and a whole host of other problems. It's a surprisingly robust theory.
It also offers an easy solution. Closed doors and secret ballots.
https://congressionalresearch.org/TransparencyProblem.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HNmsBaVmZs&ab_channel=CRI
Excellent, I was going to mention this as well. TV didn't show up in the Senate until 1974 for example.
This also ties in with (and is accelerated later on) by the "revolt of the public" a la Matting Gurri in the post 2000-era, as the mediating media institutions have fallen away. Basically, I think at least part of the polarization is tied into the loss of faith in elites and institutional decline over the past 50-60 years, combined with a loss of narrative control.
Add in the decline in religiosity generally, one party grabbing most of the remaining religious voters over time after Roe v Wade (1973), some identity politics, and a few other things I'm sure I missed, and here we are.
The Supreme Court has successfully resisted televisation, right?
I also remember frequent starry-eyed optimism that the Internet would revitalize politics for the better around the 2000s.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/22/240237/the-four-ways-that-ex-internet-idealists-explain-where-it-all-went-wrong/
I suspect we'd be better off if people spent less time thinking about vague ideals like "free speech", "democracy", "transparency", etc. etc. and more time just analyzing how a particular policy change would affect incentive structures.
Another link related to the vague ideals point
"10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less"
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites-ebook/dp/B07ZTN8LRJ/
Keeping people polarized seems to be the way political parties gain votes, all over the world. It is just a numbers game. In India, this means a politician running for election in a constituency being of the right caste/religion and promising just the right amount of favors to the right groups. Not too much, because that is a waste of resources.
The only time voters don't care about this is if the politician has an extraordinary personality. Then they vote for him or her even without being promised favors. So it is identity/personality.
It seems like the same thing happens in America these days. Is "Why we are polarized" really any more interesting than this?
Then why was the US less polarized fifty years ago, and why do different countries have different levels of polarization?
I don't know enough about the U.S 50 years ago to consider multiple factors.
Is India less polarized than the U.S? Why? I can attempt to answer that.
The Congress party (left-leaning) ruled India for most of 70 years since independence in 1947. It had towering personalities who were seen as patriotic, upper class and all Indians loved that then.
Now Modi (of the right-wing BJP party) has a personality that appeals to all Hindu castes. He himself is from the lowest possible caste, and was dirt poor growing up. He has managed to unite all the Hindu castes (although maybe some upper castes are sometimes uncomfortable with his party's Hindu-leaning) under the umbrella of saving Hinduism from "outsiders". India was ruled by Muslims from outside for 800 years and the British from outside for 200 years - both of whom converted many Hindus. And the Congress party's ruling dynasty is conspicuously led by an outsider (Sonia Gandhi is from Italy).
Hindus are 82% of the population today. That might be why Christians and Muslims etc, who used to vote for different parties (from each other), now vote as a monolith for the non-BJP party, wherever they are. So it is an 82% - 18% polarization. Is that less polarized than the U.S's 50-50? Yes, I'd say so, in some ways.
Modi has divided the Muslim vote along gender lines by passing "pro-woman" laws that make many Muslim women happy (note that Muslims are allowed their own personal law for marriage, inheritance etc, different from the personal law for others in India). So, he has an advantage even in some majority-Muslim constituencies with the women favoring him.
The non-BJP i.e. the Congress party and the left parties have no clue how to defeat Modi anymore. There is no big national opposition party in India now, to oppose the BJP. So the various regional opposition parties keep getting together with EACH OTHER in different states (India has a multi-party system) and have thus taken over some important states even though the BJP did better than each of them there.
The opposition in India is now reduced to that strategy. It is very hard to justify to voters, because these parties are ideologically different from each other.
They also oppose anything the legislature passes (even if it passed unanimously, even if it was their party's idea originally, like the CAA law, the farm laws now). All they seem to do is protest constantly on the streets and appeal to identity politics (which Modi does not have to do overtly usually). Will this work for them? Who knows. They are out of ideas.
They try to divide Hindus along castes to achieve parity with Modi's party. And Modi's across-caste appeal makes that hard for them.
It all comes down to successful strategy in each constituency - knowing what the caste-mix is there and what favors are worth handing out to which group. It is hard to find politicians of the right caste with great personalities who will get votes regardless of identity.
It is a 50-50 polarization in a 2-party system versus an 82-18 in a multiparty system.
I might have over-simplified things though! And maybe I should not see America using the same abstractions as in India.
I have one hypothesis why America was less polarized 50 years ago. For whatever reason, politicians did not play identity politics then. They do now.
They very much did - the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was all about identity politics, and it had a significant role in politics. Different identity politics than now in some ways, but very much still about identity. For example, read https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/lbj-and-white-backlash-1.html
I think he's wrong that "one party called itself "Democrat", but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North". The primary axis of politics was still a right vs left one focusing on fiscal/economic issues, with the secondary/regional one that southerners differed from northerners on being a smaller axis. Klein's co-founder Matt Yglesias has a more realistic view of how important Dixiecrats were to things central to Democratic politics.
Yeah. Except instead of "more realistic", I'd say "less polarized", in the optical sense. I get the feeling that Klein is seeing things through a set of goggles that only admit one orientation of light. If it doesn't fit his narrative, it doesn't make it past the filter.
I feel like this talk of "polarization", and which party has gotten more "extreme", conflates a few things, and I think the talk of how extreme the two parties are on various popular issues obscures a few things.
This is a point I've made several times before -- the word "extremism" really conflates two different things. One of these things is, well, just object-level positions that are extreme, which is fine and in fact you tend to end up there if you try to be at all coherent. The other is "meta-level extremism" -- resorting to or endorsing violence, threats, etc., and which rather than "extremism" would be better called "illiberalism".
This discussion of polarization is similar -- is there a necessary connection between the parties moving further apart on object-level issues, and them becoming more illiberal in their attempts to get their way? I don't see that there is. It's what people expect, but the two are logically separate, as I see it.
But it's the illiberalism that's really dangerous, not the having of different positions. This is why I think looking at the positions of Democratic and Republican candidates and saying "well, the positions of the Republican candidates would have been fairly ordinary in the 1990s" is misleading. Sure, maybe if you restrict to object-level issues, but if you look at the meta-level issues, about how our democracy should function, not at all! I mean, we recently had the then-president encouraging the storming of the Capitol building, a bit hard to say that would have happened in the 1990s. I think when you look at the meta-level it's clear the Republican party has gone off the rails much more than the Democratic party. (And yes obviously there is a substantial illiberal wing there too, what with the SJers and all, but as mentioned above, they're not in control of the party, nor do they seem to rise to the same level.)
And you could say that well that wouldn't have happened in the 1990s because things were less polarized then, but my point is that these are two separate things; I think it's a mistake to automatically collapse together polarization and illiberalism. Even if they typically go together, that link should be made explicit rather than assumed.
I think the US is more polarised because it has a hard two party system, third parties exist but they have close to zero relevance on the national stage. Other countries like UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, don't – they have what you'd call a soft two party system, in which there are two major parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature, and sometimes the governing party has to rely on the support of a minor party to govern.
I personally think having a Presidential rather than Parliamentary system is part of what gives the US a hard two party system. The Democrats and Republicans have always been quite big tents with weak party discipline. Other English-speaking countries, the major political parties tend to be somewhat smaller tents with stronger party discipline, which I think promotes the major parties being narrower coalitions which leaves more space for third parties to exist. You need stronger discipline when the executive depends on a majority in the legislature to continue to govern. The independence which the executive has in the American model reduces the need for strong party discipline in the legislature branch.
First-past-the-post voting is another contributing factor, although it can't bear all the blame because Canada and the UK have it too. I think the parliamentary system dilutes the negative impact of first-past-the-post. Plus both Canada and the UK have far greater internal cultural diversity than the US does. Many people in Scotland and Wales view themselves as historically distinct nations, and they have aspirations for independence and parties which cater to that aspiration (SNP and Plaid Cymru). Northern Ireland politics still revolves around the conflict between the Unionist and Nationalist communities, which gives Northern Ireland its own completely distinct party system from the rest of the UK. In Canada, you have two distinct language communities (Anglophone and Francophone), and a significant minority of Quebecois still want independence. People say there is a big cultural difference between New York and Alabama, and no doubt there is, but it really pales in comparison to the internal cultural differences within Canada and the UK – despite their differences, people in New York and Alabama both view themselves as members of a common nation with a shared past and a shared future, whereas significant numbers of people in the UK and Canada don't.
But the US was less extreme than other countries for most of the century, and now is only about the same.
The depolarization during the 1920s-1960s was quite unnatural in American history, while the current pattern is natural. The depolarization (and the subsequent repolarization) was caused by the parties adjusting to a switch in the axis that divided the parties.
Party leadership was much more influential and deliberately chose presidential and congressional candidates which were moderate. The introduction of primaries changed this gradually. Now partisanship is strong but parties are weak.
Very much agree that the "hard two-party system" is likely a huge factor in explaining the difference between US dynamics and other countries'. (And also your points regarding Canada and the UK being multinational states in a way that the contemporary US isn't really.)
The caveat is that it's not as if the two-party monopoly in the US invariably contributes to polarization in some fixed structural sense. For a very long time the conventional wisdom was roughly the opposite: that the US two-party system's major virtue was its tendency to tamp down extremism by requiring politicians to appeal to one or the other of two very-big-tent coalitions. (This, obviously, went hand-in-glove with a conventional wisdom about extremism being a bad thing.)
Perhaps the better thesis is that a hard two-party system tends to amplify secular trends toward *both* polarization and anti-polarization. To pick up on Scott's post about attractor states from a few days back, one might say the two-party system steepens the slope along which we roll toward either a polarized or an anti-polarized partisan equilibrium.
We currently have a weak party system with strong partisanship. The proverbial "smoke filled room" involved a strong party system, which wouldn't permit someone like Trump to barge in and take over.
This is a good point: it's the "two" part that's strong, not the "party" in an institutional sense. We have a two-bloc system that's persisted in spite of the dramatic weakening of institutional parties as they would've been understood c. 1970.
I don't think the two-party system is caused by presidentialism, because there are plenty of countries that have a similar constitutional system to the US (Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines), including presidentialism, but which are massively multi-party. This review didn't touch on one of the factors that make US politics really unique compared to any other democracy, whether First World or not, which is open primaries.
If you wanted to vote, or run for office, in the internal election in the Labour Party which picked Corbyn to be their leader, you needed to get a party membership, which costs money. Also the party leadership gets to kick you out if they want to. Same goes for the Liberal Party in Canada, or the Republicans in France, or Likud in Israel, or any other non-US party which holds "primaries" anywhere else in the world. (Also, the order of operations is going backwards: in the US primaries were first introduced in the 1900s and 1910s for very low-level positions which were totally safe for one party or the other. They were then gradually introduced for higher and higher offices and weren't used presidentially until the 1972 election. By contrast, Canada/France/the UK are introducing them for party leadership, but *not* for various lower positions! And you have to pay to vote. This is a very different system from ours, where any schmuck can vote -- even in "closed" primary states you just have to sign up a few months in advance, and not pay a penny -- and you can run even if you're explicitly not a party member, such as Sanders for the Democratic leadership. The leadership cannot expel or disqualify anybody.)
This means that it's almost always easier to run in some party primary if you want to be elected to office, rather than starting a new party. (Also, in both houses of our legislature you explicitly sit in "Republican" or "Democratic" caucuses, which assign you committee positions, even if you are a member of a third party, like Sanders or Joe Lieberman or Jim Buckley. Thus even if you start a regionally successful third-party somewhere one of the parties is likely to assimilate you, since as soon as you get any success you start having to pick whether you want to associate more with Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer.)
I don't think presidentialism as opposed to parliamentarism has very much to do with this. Even beyond our very antiquated 1787 Constitution, much of our small-c constitutional system also developed in the early 20th century when many of our peers were not democracies and so differs wildly from what was developed later.
"I don't think the two-party system is caused by presidentialism, because there are plenty of countries that have a similar constitutional system to the US (Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines), including presidentialism, but which are massively multi-party."
I think it's not merely presidentialism, but the electoral college which causes this two-party system.
Yes! Specifically that the electoral college can only choose a president by majority of the electors, not plurality. Plurality throws the vote into the house, which no one wants. This means voters dare not "throw away" their votes on parties that don't have a plausible chance of getting a majority. The entire federal duopoly flows from this one rule.
"He says that the Republican Party represents the modal American on various characteristics" What does "modal" mean in this sentence?
It is a reference to the statistical concept of "mode", which is the most common value in a dataset.
"Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop" also argues against the "vetocracy" and alludes to assymetrical issues in our political alignment, but with a more keen eye towards the Senate (which leads to dramatic changes in the power of your vote based on state population) as a key driver.
If the Internet as an explanation for increasing polarization is lacking because it raises the question "why only here?" and racial resentment is lacking because it raises the question "why now?", it seems like these issues might answer each other's questions? Is there another country which was primed for race-aligned polarization before the Internet that did not become more polarized?
Racial resentment's in part due to the media starting to push it bigtime post Occupy:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
My intuition is that the change in the media landscape (the Martin Gurri thesis) is a significant factor. Specifically, the change from a small set of gatekeeper voices limiting the overton to an infinite number of voices, reflecting the opinion of all people and creating "common knowledge". We went from a world where in 2008, Barack Obama couldn't publicly support gay marriage to a where where today, if a prominent person did not support gay marriage, they would be ex-communicated. I think it's important to think through the causal mechanism behind how this happened.
One possible theory as to why the changing media landscape did not increase polarization in the rest of the first world - is that the rest of the world follows the news/entertainment complex of the US rather than their own domestic one. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were watched all over the developed world; I suspect this polarized people 'against' American republicans without having a significant impact on how they view their own country.
Another plausible theory is that the changing media landscape only would have increased polarization if the country was ripe for an increase in polarization. Factors like Newt Gingrich and Gerrymandering could have sufficiently changed the situation to allow polarization to take off.
It's counterintuitive that the loss of the small set of gatekeeper voices has resulted in a narrowing of the Overton window instead of a broadening, but that's where we are.
In 2008 Barack Obama "couldn't" publically support gay marriage because he, a Presidential candidate, couldn't afford to lose the votes of the ten percent of most socially conservative Democrats if he still wanted to be President of the United States. But in 2021 I, a nobody, can't publically oppose gay marriage because I would lose my job and all my friends if I did so. The people who would condemn and defriend me for opposing gay marriage include an awful lot of people who would also opposed it as recently as 2008.
This is, honestly, still pretty weird to me.
I am not sure if someone else mentioned this, but isn't the obvious response to your point on technology that the internet is itself not neutral? The experience of many Europeans of politics on the internet tends to be with specifically American politics, whereas Americans will not have the same experience.
Imagine if Americans browsed a Chinese internet with political discussions dominated by discussions about e.g. Xi Jinping's new anti-corruption campaign or whatever instead of about domestic political affairs.
That's actually a good point. Globalisation of communications means that people in other English-speaking countries now spend more time reading about and discussing US politics than politics in their own countries. US politics is big and flashy and distracting and everyone in the world apparently has a strong opinion on it; my own country's politics is a bunch of dull grey-haired men and red-haired women making boring decisions in a predictable manner, and I can't find anyone interesting to talk to about it anyway. US politics has sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Does Klein provide detailed evidence about the Dixiecrat/racist southern Democrat shift to the Republican Party after the GOP in Congress passed for the Civil Rights Act, or does he just repeat the myth and not provide any foundation?
Because while the myth of the "Southern Strategy" is popular among the left who want to believe Republicans are racists, it doesn't actually fit the electoral facts. See https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html, for:
" In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)"
and
"Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t." Is the model of the Southern Strategy theory that poorer southerners weren't racist?
The facts are that the least racist southern states turned Republican first, and the most racist states last. The opposite of what you'd expect if the switch was based on racism. It makes no sense that racists in the south would switch to the less racist party. Remember, the southern Republicans voted in favor of the civil rights act while southern Democrats voted against it. So the theory is that southern racists decided to.... join their ideological enemy in their state and start voting for them instead??? It's not a very coherent story.
Rather, the middle class increased. Small business owners increased. People moved into the south from northern and western Republican strongholds. That's what the data in the book shows how the south turned Republican.
Klein has a nice just-so story, but I'd bet he doesn't have the detailed voter-level data to back it up, because the myth of racists switching wholesale to the GOP post-civil rights act has already been disproven by Johnston and Shafer's work. Anyone still promoting it needs to address their data.
Republicans don't win 90%+ of the vote in Mississippi for no reason. That said, it was clear the South lost and the North won during the twentieth century, much as in the nineteenth. Today's Southerners are yesterday's Northerners, and today's Northerners are yesterday's radicals.
The order of change was wealthy+most extreme segregationists first (cf., 1952 election), hillbillies last (with a slight falloff by the wealthy post-1996).
You mean to say, the 57% to 41% the Republicans just got in Mississippi?
If your theory is correct, as southern states turned Republican, why would the least racist southern states have turned first?
How come in 1976, a dozen years after the Civil Rights Act, Carter won by winning the entire south? (https://www.270towin.com/1976_Election/) Was that because he was appealing to their racism?
Why would the "most extreme segregationists" change to the GOP in 1952 while the Republicans were the party of blacks in the south? Any data to back that up?
If you look at the county results, you can see quite a few rural MS and SC counties switching to Eisenhower: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/1952nationwidecountymapshadedbyvoteshare.svg No doubt this was caused by Strom Thurmond's endorsement of Eisenhower, a natural response to Truman's Democratic Party becoming pro-Black (thus Thurmond's insurgent campaign in 1948). Carter did well among hillbillies, but lost the White vote in four out of five Deep South states. Hillbillies are not to be confused with the most extreme segregationists, who had flipped by 1976. Recall that Mississippi voted more for Nixon than DC for McGovern.
90%+ of the White vote, I meant
It's not a myth. It's a plain fact that can be easily demonstrated in a variety of ways.
- Directly in actual people: The families here in the South who used to be Democrats are now Republicans. Literally the same people. Talk to them. See the voting habits of their communities over time.
- Via political science's favorite statistic: You can observe the changes in the DW-NOMINATE scores of the House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M193ZIOFk0k . During the Civil Rights movement era, the Democratic coalition splits into two distinct clusters. One cluster moves farther right then disappears as the GOP cluster grows.
The authors of the book looked at registration and voting records of actual people in the southern states and how they changed over time. The records prove that it's a myth. The vast majority of racist southern Democrats stayed Democrats until they died. The vast majority of Republicans came from out of state, or from younger and newly middle and upper class folks who weren't racists. That's what the voting records shows, as well as the pattern of how states switched from the D to the R column.
House voting scores are irrelevant. This isn't a myth about whether the south turned Republican, but whether the racist Democratic voters in the south switching to the GOP are the reason why it did. The facts show that they aren't.
But please, go ahead and attempt to refute the cited research in the book. So far, you haven't addressed any of it, not even the summary I gave. Have you even read it? Read the free preview, even?
I can't help but notice you wrote this: "The vast majority of racist southern Democrats stayed Democrats until they died." -- Until they died? 1964 wasn't that long ago. Millions of them are still quite alive. Some of them are serving in office right now here in Texas.
You say that House DW-NOMINATE scores, perhaps the most thoroughly-vetted and objective political science data available on the switch of Dixiecrats to the GOP, is irrelevant. I consider it thorough disproof of the claim you made that I objected to, which was that "the Dixiecrat/racist southern Democrat shift to the Republican Party after the GOP in Congress passed for the Civil Rights Act" is a myth.
Nevertheless, I do think the individual stories are important. For famous cases of individual powerful Dixiecrats who switched publicly to the GOP, here's an expertly compiled rundown: https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1013981449941331969
And for the particular book you cited, I'll initially note that it does not represent the consensus of the field but is only one piece of work within the field. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/ for what I'm thinking, if you haven't read it already.) It's true that I'm not going to buy the book and read it just for the sake of an online comment discussion. That would be silly and all out of proportion. But I did take the time to search for reviews.
This is the only independent professional review that's not behind a paywall: https://prospect.org/article/south-rose-d2/ . A key comment: "The data cited by Shafer and Johnston show that from the 1960s through the 1990s, in races for national office, Republicans ran best among the Southerners most resistant to government action to promote racial equity."
This academic review by Glenn Feldman, professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is accessible for free if you're willing to give JSTOR your information: https://doi.org/10.2307/27649547 . It uses very harsh language regarding the factual errors and omissions in the book. I can't evaluate how appropriate that is. But it also points out a couple things in Shafer & Johnston's methodology that stick out to me as weakening its conclusions. First, it says S&J defined their race measure as segregation exclusively (i.e. no other issues). That measure would be expected to show up more strongly after desegregation enforcement began. Second, it says S&J's analyses made no distinctions between local, regional, & national elections, so would underreport the change in national party allegiance.
And one Amazon reviewer who was impressively uninterested in getting political: "Their multivariant regression logit analyses show that the impact of economic class is equal to or greater than that of race and racial context."
Having done my due diligence: I consider the book refuted on account of its argument being about the causes, not the facts, of the party switch. The Dixiecrats shifted to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act. It's a fact, not a myth.
In your own statements, you've contradicted the myth as Klein tells/uses it. If the transition in the south from Democrat to GOP was made slowly over decades, rather than in the mid-late 1960s/early 70s, then it didn't happen in response to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (where Republicans voted for it more than Democrats, but that supposedly made it's opponents want to join the Republicans).
If your idea of "independent professional" is an LA Times reporter publishing for a site officially "devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective.", then we don't have a shared definition of the word "independent".
The authors of the book are a Canadian professor and a similarly left-wing professor at UW quoted favorably about things like inequality in the NYTs. They have no axe to grind in the debate, at least not in favor of Republicans. So I guess I'll continue to trust their professional research over your twitter anecdotes cherry-picking individuals (If you read above, notice I said "vast majority", not "all") and "independent" progressive policy perspectives.
If the south switched to the GOP because of racist voters switching, how come the least racist states switched first? If the primary cause was the 1964 Act, why did the switch take so long that Carter won with essentially all the southern states in '76?
The myth doesn't match the facts.
I recall watching a C-SPAN lecture a few years ago about Eisenhower. In 1952, both the Democrats and the Republicans wanted Eisenhower to be their candidate. When the Republicans won that tug-of-war, the Dems enlisted Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson ran a half-hearted campaign because he, like apparently every single other American, thought Ike would make a great president. In 1956 Stevenson had gotten a lot grumpier about Republican policy, and ran a more forceful campaign, but of course still lost. I wonder vaguely if the nearness or distance of a devastating war with lots of middle-class and upper-middle-class loss of American life plays a role in our divisiveness.
Scott - you missed the part of the book that implicates social media and explains Klein’s change in attitudes.
I’d have to look it up (listened to the audiobook) but there’s a chapter that details media strategies at Vox where they deliberately try to “activate identities” and find that’s the easiest way to drive clicks. That could mean (examples form memory) benign things like 90s kids and left handed people, or any part of the intersectional collation.
The feedback loop here is- the more you profit off of activating identities, the more incentive you have to taller all of your behaviors to that paradigm—everything you do becomes part of your profit-driven identity activation until you forget how to see things any other way.
If you listen to the audio version of the book (like I did) you get to hear the giddiness in his tone change as he discusses the dashboard software Vox uses to monitor traffic on articles. It’s hard to hear it and not think of him and something of an addict.
My hunch is that gay rights are underrated in the polarization surge of the past two decades.
When I showed up at my elite US college in 2004, the student population definitely leaned Democratic, but there was a live split - I think 4 of the 7 guys in my freshman suite voted for Bush, as did a substantial minority of the other folks in my dorm. For the most part, though, those people were uncomfortable with the Republican party's position on gay rights; I recall a conversation between my roommate (an ambitious and extremely outspoken Republican) and one of our dorm neighbors, the daughter of a well-known Republican official, in which they talked about that as an issue where they disagreed with the party's position but hoped it would change soon. These were two extremely central members of the Republican coalition as it existed in 2004, but the social milieu of college students had moved fast enough that they were dissenting towards the nationwide minority of liberals on one of the central issues of that year's campaign.
The salience of gay rights and the Iraq war during the years I was in college was absolutely devastating to the Republican party's standing within that cohort. If that class was 60-40 for Kerry (I'm just guessing) it was probably 80-20 for Obama, and those two issues were doing almost all of the work. Shit, a few years after that an old friend of mine went to Harvard Business School; I asked him what the political breakdown of the class was and he said it was basically monolithic. At a business school! That would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier.
Think, then, what that meant for institutions that hire college educated workers; if their workforces were moderately Democratic-leaning in the 90s, all of a sudden in the 2010s they'd be massively Democratic-leaning without any real change in the hiring mix. Already liberal institutions, meanwhile, all of a sudden have an audience that's richer (for fundraising purposes) and more culturally similar to their own college educated workforces, and easier to talk to, and that facilitated a lot of them getting lazy about communicating outside their most natural idiom.
There's a whole Fox News centric story to tell on the other side of this, but I don't really understand it very well.
This. I voted for Bush the first time and at the time identified (weakly) as a Republican. I honestly don't remember how I voted in the midterms. But by 2004, there had been a referendum in my state putting an anti-gay marriage amendment in our constitution, and we'd gotten into Iraq. I became a democrat, and, at the time, a very angry one. I haven't voted for anyone with an (R) after their name since, and can't really imagine doing so anytime in the next generation or so.
If the big shift is 2000-2004, I think you can track it to those issues. I will, also, add one more thing. This was the era when the right was dominant in the culture. You had freedom fries, and boycotts of France, and if you're not with us you're against us. The right was winning all the fights and they were very smug about it, and contemptuous of us. I think that this played out in the other direction during the Obama years. When someone is both beating you and gloating about it, it really amps up and locks in that mutual hate you're talking about. My memory is that this really got going during the Iraq war.
Anti-gay-marriage amendments were way too popular in 2004 to explain much of anything (also, they were far more strongly correlated with Trump general election vote than anything previous): https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=26&year=2004&f=0&off=51&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2004&fips=26&f=0&off=0&elect=0
The big shifts were between 1992 and 2000.
I don't think this necessarily conflicts with the story I'm telling. Let me try to state it in a way that captures what you're seeing.
Anti gay marriage amendments were in fact broadly popular in 2004, which is why Rove et al wanted to put them on the ballot. They were, however, very unpopular with a specific demographic - college kids specifically, college educated people more broadly (but mostly college kids, age was big here) that was at that time fairly politically divided.
This resulted in a shift where "college educated" identity became aligned with partisan identity to a much stronger degree, and "fancy college educated" especially so. This shift in the polarization of a particular demographic had outsized impacts because those two demographics punch well above weight institutionally and culturally.
So, with that causal chain, gay marriage 2004 vote correlating more closely with Trump 2020 than Bush 2004 is exactly what you'd predict. Gay marriage drives a demographically small but powerful cohort from split into the D coalition -> mainstream institutions become more liberal, and liberal institutions become more narrowly focused on communicating in the idiom of the college educated -> non-college voters on the "no gay marriage in 2004" side are repelled by these shifts and move from split into the R coalition -> political identity is much more strongly linked to "college educated" cultural identity on both sides. Ike Skelton and Chris Shays out of the house, Katie Porter and Pete Stauber in, etc.
If the Iraq war may have driven college educated away from the republican party but apparently it didn't drive them from the Iraq war itself.
Not to be rude or anything, but more needs to be said to explain why a war weary republican electorate trying to purge it's more ardent interventionists from it's ranks is seen as a dangerous development. Why were the most bellicose members of Trumps cabinet always depicted as the Heroes by the press.
This talk of centrism seems to assumes that public policy is like a temperature gauge that has a default setting plus measurable degrees above and below it, rather than a rack of tools that different factions grab and utilize to inflict harm and/or bestow benefits. The people who use those tools often regret using them later on.
Always worth remembering that although "my side is just so much closer to being right than the other side, which is compromised of intellectual and moral barbarism" sounds very jejune *that doesn't mean it's not right*.
You're right that the US hasn't been able to accomplish much during a period of hyper-polarization, but this is more a symptom of the US's very poorly designed constitution. Americans are taught that their constitution reflects a special genius in its design, but actually it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus. As you note, through sheer fluke, consensus was possible for most of the first few hundred years (except for that civil war...) but now those good times are coming to an end. Hyper-polarization isn't going away, so if I were looking to save America I'd suggest learning to live with it by moving towards a unicameral legislative branch on a parliamentary model (no senate, no presidential veto, reduced supreme court oversight). At present the US might be going the way of the Polish parliament under the liberum veto: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Whose%20Voice%20Whose%20Choice_2.pdf
Unicameral parliamentarianism has two advantages:
1. Things can actually be done.
2. Voters know who to blame when things go wrong- the governing party.
It also has zero chance of happening right now. It's probably more likely than hyper-polarization going away in less than 30 years without a civil war or similar decisive event, though.
>Americans are taught that their constitution reflects a special genius in its design, but actually it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus.
Well if you still believe in a weak central government that will only act when given a strong mandate from its constituent states then that is a special genius. Things have certainly changed since then, but to call it poorly designed is missing the original point.
You say "it's engineered to produce gridlock unless people can come to a consensus".
Is gridlock a bad thing? What is wrong with a govt that does the bare minimum - something that is likely in a system prone to gridlock? This is appealing to me as a libertarian. I think I believe govt generally does more harm than good anyway, and that its "doing" must
therefore be kept to a bare minimum. I'd like it to be only enforcing existing laws, but maybe be more intrusive in the time of pandemic - like mandating testing, contact tracing etc.
The problem with gridlock is that if it blocks the things you don't like then it also blocks the things you do like. Luckily for libertarians, they don't like most things governments do. However, for issues that they do want (like increasing testing and contact tracing), it also slows those issues down.
In addition, gridlock, or at least the systems that cause it, mean that compromises that no one likes are frequent. For one example, a lot of means-tested welfare systems have a cost involved in the means-testing[0], create disincentives[1], create bureaucratic issues for those who really need the welfare[2], and are really just a form of tax that applies at a different time[3], but means-tested welfare is the compromise between "no (or little) welfare" and "yes welfare."
[0]: the bureaucracy involved in running them is expensive
[1]: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-testing-and-its-limits
[2]: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/means-testing-max-sawicky-universal-programs
[3]: There's no fundamental difference between "getting $100 in aid and paying $1100 in taxes" and "paying $1000 in taxes"
Gridlock doesn't mean the government will do less. Gridlock just means that what the government will do is decided spasmodically and is hard to change. The US government is huge and it's long term trend is growth, but it's hard to trim it or manage it in some overall rational way due to gridlock.
Can't help but think the simple solution here is to cut the Gordian knot & do a secession. As Scott has observed, the blue tribe is way less attached to America memes than the red tribe, so let red America stay as the United States & both coasts can split off. Florida can be it's own country, with Donald Trump as king! Then you can go back to Kansas having real contests between Kansas dems and Kansas repubs who actually represent their state - beating back Moloch with good fences.
Or not. That ship may have sailed, and with everything being so interconnected these days it might not be so easy to escape the sufficiently intense competition. Brexit hasn't seemed to spur a wave of localist English politics, the most major development recently (imo) has been the internationalist neoliberal Starmer purging his Labour party of leftists. Maybe going small just means placing yourself under the thumb of a hegemonic China.
I still think some kind of secession movement is likely in coming days. Red tribe anger is spiking & can only simmer for so long before it finds an effective outlet. The blue tribe meanwhile seems to be content to fight fire with oil in the form of a domestic war on terror. There's lots of speculation about a civil war brewing but I view this last year as instructive: despite everyone having guns & being incandescently furious, hardly any combat fatalities happened. My take is that the vast majority have too much to lose to throw away their lives on the barricades. Still mad as hell though, and in this case ignoring your enemy might just make them go away.
"Brexit hasn't seemed to spur a wave of localist English politics, the most major development recently (imo) has been the internationalist neoliberal Starmer purging his Labour party of leftists" You are forgetting about the political impact on Scotland and Northern Ireland. Brexit has put Scottish independence back on the front burner, and many see it as significantly increasing the likelihood of Irish reunification. (Independence is less popular in Wales, but support is growing there too – if Scotland and Northern Ireland successfully leave, Wales may well decide to follow.) Future historians may look back on Brexit as the event which finally destroyed the United Kingdom.
From the Discord:
> Really the most interesting thing is the very end of the post, why is the US facing polarisation in a way that say Australia or Germany is not
> Yeah, that's the only thing in the review that actually made me think. One of my leading hypotheses was that social media has been driving US polarization, and this pretty much disproves that unless you add a ton of epicycles
> On the flipside, in that David Shor interview he linked a study looking at broadband rollout that did find it had significant effects boosting polarization. ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489?seq=1 ) Someone want to post this in Scott's substack comments btw?
I wouldn't say that's quite correct, Australia is facing about the same level of polarization as the US (both are at 45). Not sure what's up with Germany.
And i wouldn't say this disproves the internet -> polarization idea. After all, that is explicitly called out in the "Loss of geography" section. And social media is just a refinement of loss of geography.
"Australia is facing about the same level of polarization as the US (both are at 45)" You have to distinguish political polarisation as measured by some survey versus political polarisation as a lived experience. My personal experience of the two countries is that Australia has a lot less political polarisation than the US does, and I think most people who have experience of both countries would agree with me. If the numbers in some survey are saying otherwise, maybe that survey isn't measuring the right thing.
I second that.
Speaking as an Australian who lived in the US for many years, the idea that Australia and the US have a similar level of political polarisation doesn't pass the sniff test. While the within-country trends make sense, whatever metric they're using doesn't seem sensibly calibrated between countries.
While people in Australia certainly tend to have a party preference, and maybe even a strong dislike for the politicians in the other party, I've rarely seen this extend to a dislike for the _supporters_ of the other party the way it does in the US. An Australian who says "I hate the Labor Party" is referring to the actual politicans, an American who says "I hate the Democrats" seems to be extending his disdain to the entire 50.01% of the country who support them over the Republicans.
Example 1: When I think of all the people I know in the US, I'm sure I can guess with almost 100% precision which way each of them would have voted at the last election. When I think of all the people I know in Australia, for most of them I have no clue. I know my parents' voting patterns (one for each party, they balance each other out) but couldn't reliably tell you those of my brother or my sister, or most of my friends.
Example 2: Things like political yard signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts or hats are virtually unknown in Australia. If someone has a yard sign for a particular candidate, it's probably the candidate.
I don't believe it's a coincidence that Australia is better run than the US either (witness, for instance, our orderly and successful response to the coronavirus).
Not to sidetrack the discussion, but i would heavily contest the idea that denying exit rights to citizens during the pandemic is "successful".
I would call Australia's COVID response successful, but not particularly orderly.
To throw my 2c in: I agree with this generally but my sense is that there is a level of 'cultural contagion' from the US - i.e. more prominent conversations about the legitimacy of Australia Day, racism in sports etc are reflective of similar types of conversations happening in US media imo.
You could question how much momentum this effect has on its own in the Australian political climate - but it is definitely a thing that is happening and probably making Australian political culture a little more polarised over time. As a Victorian the extremely shrill nature of the politics and media coverage around the covid response didn't fill me with confidence that the political system here is some beacon of rationality.
Reading the reasons that Klein touches on, I do get the sense that Aus has perhaps some structurally depolarising features;
- Aus is a lot more ethnically homogenous than America is (whites still 75-80%), and no single minority group has any real weight as a political unit
- 40% of Australians live in 2 cities, and a very high urbanisation rate overall - less geographic separation?
- Aus has lower income inequality and a long run of positive economic growth, few major crises - less general political anger?
- Compulsory voting = less 'antipolitics' sentiment?
Compulsory voting is far more powerful than just that. It kills "get out the vote" stone dead. That means 100% of political campaigning by major parties is aimed at swing voters; anything that won't play to them, doesn't get aired (this tends to result in the parties attacking each other over scandals rather than substantive policy).
We also have the AEC preventing gerrymandering - without gerrymandering, fewer seats are safe (though there are definitely still quite a few) and that emphasises moderate candidates.
To respond to both: i was referring to the data from the survey given in this post. Apologies for not specifying, but you can check the graphs, and both the US and Australia, as of the current year, have the same level of polarization. But if it's the case that this survey is incorrect, as you suggest, than that does nullify the argument that social media has had nothing to do with polarization, since we no longer have data to back it up.
Well, speaking just from personal experience – social media is very popular in both US and Australia, yet just about everyone who has experiences of both countries agrees the US has a lot stronger political polarisation than Australia does. That seems to be evidence against the idea that social media alone can explain the difference. Of course it does have the problem of being based on anecdote rather than hard data, but I think it is an anecdote which the vast majority of people with familiarity with both countries would agree with.
Perhaps. My only experience, living in the US, is social media based reports on Australia, and from those it seems that the US and Australia are about equally polarized. But that's not good data at all, and like you say i'm not quite willing to trust anecdotes for a large scale trend like this. I mean, it's also quite possible social media made both Australia and the US dramatically more polarized, but the effect in Australia is lessened somehow.
The timing of congressional polarization seems more consistent with Roe v. Wade being a driving factor than the CRA, and also with the story conservatives tell about themselves (sincerely, I think). Moreover, during the 50 years after the CRA, white people consistently became less racist while black people got better off and more access to power. 'White identity politics' then became more pronounced during a period when black incomes were actually pretty stagnant compared to the previous half century, so I don't really buy racial resentment being a driving force.
As others have said, religion seems under-discussed as a factor. Maybe secularism finally hitting the US in a big way in recent decades has made conservatism increasingly desperate and pessimistic; other trends have had the same effect. The right these days seems to be driven by deep-seated pessimism and is constantly anticipating its own extinction, or at least that's my impression, and it seems at odds with Klein's.
re: "After Lincoln's death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship."
While Andrew Johnson was that bad, this implies that he was responsible for events but this was bitterly contested the whole time. (You might say the country was polarized.) Republicans in Congress kept Reconstruction going (overriding Johnson's vetos), and then Grant was elected. It really fell apart in Grant's second term and ended when he left office.
Also, this seems to imply that there was ever a time after the Civil War when the South was not a racist and violence-prone place? But the Reconstruction-era governments survived because the U.S. army was still occupying the South, and even so there was plenty of racist violence the whole time.
I recommend Ron Chernow's biography of Grant for a better view of this. (It's been a while so I might not have remembered it all correctly.)
The soft pedaling of the massive wave of racist violence in the South during reconstruction in this review is a disappointment from Scott. We know that he knows better.
I am not sure how you get that from the sentence above. Lincoln died within a month after the Civil War ended, so I'm not claiming there was some actual period of utopia. And I think it's fair to say Reconstruction had some successes early on, fading out after a few decades - for example, there were black representatives in Southern legislatures up until the 1880s or so.
The quote soft pedals how committed to racist militia violence the white South was right after the civil war. It was an active campaign that the North got tired of fighting but it required white people in the south to wake up in the morning, put on their Sunday clothes, and go lynching and burning. Which they did... for a decade.
Also, the phrasing around reconstruction as a "paradise of racial equality and universal love" makes it sound like unserious Kumbaya. It was a goal of having black people be equal citizens and participants in southern society.
I guess the soft pedaling is I feel that you made reconstruction sound more namby pamby fairytale then it was and then also omitted the active role of white southern paramilitaries in defeating it. Instead, it just sort of floats back to being a racist one party state... But no one is really responsible.
Also, the active and successful role of white paramilitary militia violence in the 1870's against what they perceived as unjust elected authority would probably have been informative to the current moment...
I think you might have mistaken a single sentence in a one-paragraph explanation of why the Democratic Party had a Dixiecrat wing, for an in-depth examination of all the problems of Reconstruction.
Risking a repeat of the accusation of reading too much into brevity, I think the phrasing of "Problems of Reconstruction" again makes it seem like "Reconstruction" was the problem... rather than the problem being the ongoing and ultimately successful paramilitary violence and organized terrorism to oppose reconstruction and the newly elected governments in the south.
That's why I feel this review stumbled with the phrasing. We have a sentence which rightfully blames Johnson for giving up on reconstruction, but we don't have one saying, "At the same time, conservatives in the south mounted an ultimately successful campaign of violence and attacks on elected officials culminating in the creation of a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship."
That's not a demand for super in depth commentary on the dixiecrats. I just wanted the review to put the onus for Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats where it should be, i.e. the paramilitary mobs who overthrew elected officials through the latter half of the 19th century.
I truly think that you need to take a step back, and reconsider how closely you're parsing people's phrasing. These aren't political platforms, or research papers, or even informational websites. This isn't a game where you can identify subtle deception by close examination of true-but-incomplete statements. These are blog posts and blog comments. At least in my case, please take my word that I had no such intent, and thus that you are reading something into my comment that was not there to begin with. And please then ask yourself whether this might be the case about Scott's post, as well.
Is the point that the USA is only now coming into the same levels of polarisation as other developed western nations, but is struggling to cope with it an argument that the governmental system (congressional rather than parliamentary) is no longer fit for purpose?
Are you familiar with the Will Wilkinsons thesis that the parties have been shifting along urban/rural party lines? This is an ongoing shift that has been further exasperated by globalization. These two ingredients alone, along with the downstream cultural implications, seem to me to explain the polarization change much more than any race narrative does.
One argument that I've found to be somewhat compelling is that as the federal government plays a larger role in local politics the conversation around national politics grows more polarized. That polarization isn't necessarily new, but that it would have been more focused on local issues in the past. The reason news and political discussion transitioned to national is not necessarily a technological one, but that as the federal government began to have a direct and tangible impact on everyone's daily life the only reasonable response is to care more about what it's up to. I'm not totally sure if this lines up with the polarization graphs, or even how you'd exactly measure the the level of impact the federal government has on daily life, though.
>This does not seem obvious to me. Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left.
When you say "Trump's positions," Are we talking "What Trump stated his positions were on the campaign trail" or "What Trump actually succeeded at implementing as President"? Because the latter might be described as mainstream, but the former definitely can't. Not unless "Ban all Muslims from entering the country," "Make Mexico pay for the construction of a border fence," and "the Democrats can't win an election without massive voter fraud" are mainstream Republican positions.
That last one in particular should carry a *lot* of weight, since you're approaching this from a "how to avoid civil war" perspective. "Candidate is looking into extralegal ways to retain power" is much more worrying in that regard than "Candidate holds extremely left-wing economic stances."
"Ban all Muslims from entering the country,"
That was actually one of his most popular campaign proposals.
Interesting that World War 2 as a great antipolarization event isn't really mentioned either. Obviously the R or D doesn't seem some bad when you're fighting alongside them against Nazis...
And you'd expect the afterglow to match quite some time, especially in a time when all the "non-partisan" experts who won the war where widely trusted to order the economy, govern, etc... Between aging and the shine coming off in the Vietnam era, you would expect that to fade around the 1970-ish inflection point you note.
I also would hypothesise that as faith in the "Best and Brightest" continues slipping away, it's easier to assume those in charge are incompetent. Given human nature, this makes it a lot easier it to look at the other side and blame them for wrecking everything, as opposed to a grudging "they are on the other side but I still respect their competence, expertise, etc" which would work against polarization.
I wonder if there are any good "faith in elites" or "faith in experts and institutions" measures to check this against? Anyone know?
The graphs suggest that polarization started declining as early as WWI, and the period of maximally low polarization started around the Great Depression. I think you could make more of a case that the Cold War helped keep it low for a while.
Fair point. I tried to pull up that polarizedamerica.com study where the graphs come from to see study methodologies but the site doesn't appear to be up anymore?
Does anyone know what the measure of polarization was and how they quantified?
Ok answering my own question on study methodology. A lot is paywalled but the caution I'd point out (and maybe this is grappled with and I missed it) is that the polarization scores look to be based solely on roll call voting records in Congress using this model: "NOMINATE (scaling method) - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method)#:~:text=DW%2DNOMINATE%20scores%20have%20been,in%20the%20liberal%2Dconservative%20scale.
So hard to say more without looking into the exact methods, but some things that jump out using that method:
1)is congressional voting records really a good measure for what we mean by polarization?
2)if extrinsic events lead to a change in the type and number of votes, there will be a lot of noise in that data. Procedural changes, composition of a given Congress, elimination of earmarks, etc are a few things that would make me wonder if voting records is a good proxy, at least not without checking against other measures. For example, if everyone votes to rename a post office is that a "point" towards less polarization?
The nationalization was accelerated under Newt. From post war to early 90s, Republicans did great in national (presidential) elections, and poorly in local congressional elections. Newt's plan to win congress was to nationalize all politics, and institute the Hastert Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastert_Rule), which accelerated polarization.
I felt confused about the cross-country polarization graph, and went and read the paper it's from (https://www.brown.edu/Research/Shapiro/pdfs/cross-polar.pdf). Here are some things I learned, in case they're of interest to others:
The authors don't assume a two-party system; they "extract each respondent’s party identification, and exclude 'leaners' who only choose a party identification in response to a second survey prompt" and then look at the average difference in affect (normalized to a 0-100 scale) between someone's own party and all the other parties they reported feelings about. This is a better method than what I imagined and makes the graph more interesting!
For example, Canada's Conservatives (the right-wing party) had a schism right at the beginning of the trend (1987) and reformed in the middle of it (2000). I would have expected the reformation to increase polarization (since now right-wing people have no alternative parties) but the trend shows a decrease. Their appendix figure showing how many people declare a party affiliation doesn't jump up in 2000, either (which is what I'd expect to see if many pre-2000 right-wing voters were excluded as 'leaners' between parties). So the Reform-PC merger didn't really impact the polarization trend. Neat!
I am still not 100% clear on how they measured "party affiliation", but I now think it's something sensible. I was initially unsure how they could do this; in Canada, about 1/3 of people vote for neither the Liberals or Conservatives (leading, as others have noted above, to a "soft" two-party system) and very few people are officially registered party members. The paper reports the exact surveys they extract affliliation from, and the Canadian Election Study data is online (here's 2015 for example: https://search1.odesi.ca/#/details?uri=%2Fodesi%2FCES-E-2015.xml). I'm still not 100% percent sure which question they used for party affiliation, but my guess is that it's "Which party do you think you will vote for?", which seems pretty sensible to me.
Polarization wouldn't be as big of a problem if it didn't lead to unrepresentative governance and political paralysis. The big culprits here are stuff like partisan gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the Senate - all undemocratic institutions that work to limit partisan accountability at the ballot box for their failings in governance.
This works if you presume that voting and more direct representative government leads to better governance outcomes. If not...
I do think that, but I believe it has value even if you don't believe so. The party that wins a majority should be able to pass legislation and carry out governance, be judged for that, and then be rejected if voters don't like them or what they passed.
I don't see any evidence that less democratically representative governments are more likely to be effective. The "democratically" part is key there, because even authoritarian governments have their constituencies they have to appease to maintain power (such as the military, key bureaucracies, etc).
Suppose that cities held mostly members of the majority demographic group and that rural areas held mostly members of minority demographic groups. Would you still favor popular rule in that case? Or would bias in the Senate, Electoral College, etc. be a plus in that case?
You can pretty easily look at countries with more proportional systems (e.g. Germany, Sweden, New Zealand) and see how their governance looks compared to the USA's. Obviously thats a selct sample. But you can look at things like the Human Development Index and see similar patterns
I want to second Brett here. The problems presented by polarization seem to stem nearly entirely from how bad our legislative system is at translating democratic will to governance (i.e., the senate/electoral college/supreme court make it practically random, and its full of vetos). If our system only "works" so long as the public is not polarized, then that's a bad system. Change it. The law, being an artificial construct, is a fixable problem. People's attitudes and ideologies cannot be reformed so easily.
And it's not even clear, as in our current Joe Manchin case, that political polarization even necessarily makes vetocarcy *worse*. As others have pointed out in these comments, if Manchin was more left-polarized the dems could get more done. The relationship between polarization and vetocracy is more complicated than it appears.
So count me in the "polarization is either neutral or benign enough such that it's not worth moving myself towards the center for de-polarization's sake, and it's the wrong focus of our efforts anyway" group.
This comes up in the book! Klein argues that the US' political system, including the parts you mentioned and also broadly the presidential democracy model, turns polarization into a much more intractable problem. From memory he says that the US is pretty much the only democracy that's done well with our model of governance, in particular one where the legislative and executive branches can be controlled by different parties at the same time. I believe his suggestion for why we've gotten away with that so far has been a) the parties not being well-sorted, as Scott talks about, and b) much of US history consisting of eras where one party dominates over the other.
Polarization still feels pretty squishy to me. The bias of declinism will mess with our instincts here.
But there's a whole book on it from a really smart guy, so playing along... I might go with internal migration patterns.
Urbanization took off in the last half of the century, it self-selects younger people with certain skills who, most importantly, are high on "openness to new experiences" measures, which anti-correlate with certain conservative positions. It clusters them in certain regions. They leave low population areas that swing faster in response to small demographic changes.
(OTOH... are internal migrants really less conservative? And what about Virginia as a case study? Is it any "less polarized" as a state since migrants turned it blue? Probably not. Some gaps and further research needed for this one...)
For a structural cause, poli sci friends of mine have talked a lot about the anti-pork thesis. Not sure the original source, but the claim is that increasing restrictions to prevent "pork" - handouts to congressional districts tacked on to other legislation - actually reduce the ability of parties to deal. It prevents you from peeling off a few moderates who could go home and claim, well, I voted with the other side, but brought home real benefits for constituents. Everybody hates pork in theory, but it actually a useful currency, it provided liquidity to the political system. Without it you just get gridlock and party line voting, because the tangible incentives to break have been cut down tremendously.
Or maybe we're just perceiving more "polarization" because of the pronounced gap between the median voter (50, no college degree), and the median social media user (20s, college)? So both overreact to the thing they can't control, the media / political environment? (I worry this comically understates the diversity of opinions in both politics and social media, so it's not really my favorite explanation.)
If you're still looking for answers, it might be worth contrasting Yglesias with "The Right Nation" from ca. 2000, from writers with different priors than Matt but also I think *trying* to be objective (and likewise failing in parts). The gaps between the two books might say more than either volume alone.
I think there's an important missing piece here, which of course has happened in part in the last year, has been the polarization inside the Republican party. I know two people who used to hang out and complain about the Democrats. Now they hang out and the talk about anything other than politics, since one of them is a big fan of Trump and the other is a Never-Trumper Republican. Liz Cheney, the No.3 House Republican and daughter of former VP Dick Cheney was censured by her state's Republican Party for voting against Trump. It's of course still very much in the air what will happen with the party, but if it doesn't change, then something is going to have to budge.
Just out of curiosity, what on earth does "Percentage of Overlapping Members First Dimension" mean?
I mean, there's this big graph in the article labeled that way, but it seems to have no obvious relation to anything at all. Is this some sort of weird psychological test to see if anyone is paying attention or whether everyone is so polarized that they just immediately jump onto their favorite polarization-related hobby-horse?
Ah, okay, Google finds me the explanation, at
https://voteview.com/articles/party_polarization
The meaning (only presented in the form of source code) is:
overlap = (sum(nominate_dim1[party_code==200] <
max(nominate_dim1[party_code==100],na.rm=T),na.rm=T) +
sum(nominate_dim1[party_code==100] >
min(nominate_dim1[party_code==200],na.rm=T),na.rm=T))/
(sum(!is.na(nominate_dim1[party_code==100]))+
sum(!is.na(nominate_dim1[party_code==200])))
where "party_code" is 100 for Democrats, 200 for Republicans, so:
overlap = (sum(nominate_dim1[Republicans] <
max(nominate_dim1[Democrats],na.rm=T),na.rm=T) +
sum(nominate_dim1[Democrats] >
min(nominate_dim1[Republicans],na.rm=T),na.rm=T))/
(sum(!is.na(nominate_dim1[Democrats]))+
sum(!is.na(nominate_dim1[Republicans])))
The "na.rm" stuff is R for "remove missing values", and similarly for "is.na", so let's strip that out for clarity:
overlap = (sum(nominate_dim1[Republicans] < max(nominate_dim1[Democrats])) +
sum(nominate_dim1[Democrats] > min(nominate_dim1[Republicans])))/
(sum(nominate_dim1[Democrats])+
sum(nominate_dim1[Republicans]))
"dim1" is the "first dimension" in the graph, explained as:
"The primary dimension is the basic issue of the role of the government in the economy, in modern terms liberal-moderate-conservative"
I'll call it "conservatism", since that seems to be the positive direction:
overlap = (sum(conservatism[Republicans] < max(conservatism[Democrats])) +
sum(conservatism[Democrats] > min(conservatism[Republicans])))/
(sum(conservatism[Democrats])+
sum(conservatism[Republicans]))
Okay, so it takes the most conservative Democrat, and adds up the conservatism scores for all the Republicans who are less conservative. It also takes the least conservative Republican, and adds up all the conservatism scores for all the Democrats who are more conservative. It adds those together and divides by the total sum of conservatism scores across both parties -- seemingly a normalization step, but not a well-thought-out one: it could produce division by zero, since these scores go negative. Even aside from that, this is a horrible statistic, since it depends on outliers (the most extreme traitor-to-party on either side).
Even the foundation is shaky: "dim1" (there's also a "dim2") probably comes from principal components analysis, a tool of "exploratory statistics", meaning that even it is merely suggestive, not definitive. (That probably also applies to the other graphs presented in the same style, as being products of the same analysis.)
I feel inclined to make two notes, which aren't really related to each other:
1) The framing about Kansas Republicans and Kansas Democrats seems to miss that prior to a certain point, states tended to be really safe for one party or another -- there was an extremely stable system between the end of Reconstruction and the 1896 realignment, another really stable system (in which there was a Republican majority) until the New Deal, nearly uniform Democratic rule for about half a decade, and then another stable alignment from 1938-1952. When I read about Taft-Hartley and the rancor of the 1946/1948 elections, I don't see this taking place in a period of low polarization; looking at Senate and presidential races from this era, states tended to behave quite predictably (though the set of swing states was larger than it is now). Then Eisenhower comes in, banishes anti-New-Deal sentiment from the party, and you get a period of really intense depolarization -- by 1960 basically every state apart from the Deep South and northern New England is just 50/50 Nixon/Kennedy, like the nation -- and then polarization doesn't pick up again until the 1990s (defined as states preferring specific parties in a consistent way). The 1992 election -- well into your period of repolarization -- was the last one on record in which polling showed most Americans might've voted for more than one candidate (though this was because of Perot's presence), and Senate elections in the 1980s seemed to have patterns that verged on random, as the incumbents elected during the polarizing times of the 1940s had nearly all left by then. By 2004, there was a correlation again between the Senate races and the presidential one.
2) *very culture war content* Is the social justice movement really an identity-politics movement in the same way there are identity politics movements in countries with party list systems? In Israel, there is a party for Russian immigrants, parties for different kinds of Haredim, and so forth, which are strongly supported by those sectors, have negligible support outside of those sectors, and rather than having consistent positions just track public opinion from within those sectors. In the Netherlands, there is an identity politics party for Turkish immigrants (which gets votes almost entirely from Turkish immigrants) and another for hardcore Calvinists (which gets votes almost entirely from hardcore Calvinists).
Social justice doesn't seem to be like this; the minorities it claims to represent don't support referenda proposed by SJWs (like the affirmative action referendum in California), and often prefer candidates who are not very doctrinaire SJWs (like Biden). I'm not sure comparing it to more straightforward foreign identity politics movements is useful.
There were a few significant events that happened between 2000 and 2005...
1. The Republican president and congress decided to start 2 wars, neither of which went well. That mortally wounded the "both parties are the same" lie in a very public and ongoing way.
2. Fox News came into its own as a "conservative" news outlet. On the other hand, RW AM radio (eg Rush) had been a fixture since the eighties, and I don't know how much extra scope Fox provided.
3. The Supreme Court had a number of decisions (eg Bush v Gore) that pushed Democratic activists further away from the Republican party
4. This was the start of the Gay Marriage issue ramping up, which took ~10% of the population and made one of their defining personal attributes polarized.
>Why We're Polarized and the rest of Klein's oeuvre make a strong case that you would try to do something about polarization. Solve that, and a lot of the political pathologies of the past few decades disappear, and the country gets back on track.
But hold off on proposing solutions until you really understand the problem. It also possible that polarization is an effect of other things, and that treating those things would be better than trying to treat polarization directly.
>my own model here is that the social justice movement pioneered a much angrier, more radical, more in-your-face style of identity politics
I would suggest that these "identity politics" weren't very radical at all and that this is a misrepresentation of fairly standard debates. Can you find any evidence that they were "angry" or "in-your-face"?
How about the posters all around my neighborhood saying "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings"? (Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.) They're very well designed and have a relatively high production quality for something intended to be stabled to a telephone post. Ironically, to me the aesthetic seems most similar to actual Nazi posters from pre-WWII Germany.
Firstly, that doesn't seem very angry or "in-your-face" to me, unless the people who put up the posters were yelling at you or something? Posters and visual art are a fairly passive mode of expression.
>Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.
Secondly, I don't see how this reference is "pretty clear". It seems to me like you're inferring something that should not be inferred at all.
Also, can you show me a picture the posters for proof that this seems "similar" to the aesthetic of Nazi posters?
To the first point, there's a certain level of intimidation that comes from having poster like that up, and no one talking about them. Especially combined with seeing antifa running around in the street in masks (pre-covid, even) doing things, I don't know what, but the police were there blocking traffic, and yet it never made it into any of the local papers or blogs, I suspect because they're all left-leaning. These signs are literally calling for people's deaths. But no one dares to speak about them. I don't even want to be seen looking too closely at them.
To the second point, I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live here. Maybe try to imagine what a Mafia neighborhood is like? There are places you don't look closely at, people you get out of the way of and hope they never notice you, and a general sense that if you ever stand out of a crowd, you might get a "visit".
To the third point, that's just my personal aesthetic opinion, it doesn't really matter. And I unfortunately appear to have deleted the pictures I took, and as I said, I'm not too keen on taking more, but maybe I will. But I'll also need to be sure I don't leave any traceable metadata on the photos. If I do put up a link to them, will that cause any change in your opinion?
Overall, I'm very familiar with having people claim to be on " my side" that I don't really want there. That's all this has to be. Don't you accept the possibility that some people, who claim to be on "your side", may have gone too far? I'm not even asking you to disavow extremists on national television, the way Trump was asked in the debates. Just... that's a logical possibility, right?
>These signs are literally calling for people's deaths.
No they aren't. perhaps you should re-read the statement that you yourself quoted. And if this is your "personal aesthetic opinion" which "doesn't matter" then why did you write it? And I don't think that you should feel intimidated just because someone publicly displayed a piece of art that you find disagreeable.
Coming from someone who only just stumbled across this exchange, you're not appearing very charitable, though I acknowledge I may be misreading this entire exchange. I just wanted to let you know about my first impression, in case you care about how your arguments appear to people just reading the conversation.
From what I'm reading the statement you quoted may not be a good use of the word "literally", but the poster *is* making a statement that it's a good thing if certain people die. If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
(Mind, I have not seen these posters and thus also presumably don't live where Moon Moth does, so I don't have an opinion on whether this is the actual situation, but I think this is what one can glean from what Moon Moth wrote and I think it's fair to feel intimidated by such a situation.)
Yes, I may have mis-used the word "literally there." I'm not entirely sure what the right word would be. It's less veiled than saying, "That's a nice family you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to them." Maybe "implicitly" would have been a better word?
> If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
These are some extremely big "ifs" and I see no reason to assume they are true. Neither do I see any reason to make assumptions about what the artist meant to imply.
You feel differently if the poster said "Jew" instead of "Nazi"? How about "Commie" instead of Nazi?
Saying it's a good thing if certain people die is calling for their deaths, although not necessarily advocating murdering them. And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
>And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
I don't know what you mean by "shortage" of Nazis. If there's even one or two the point of the poster still makes sense. There's nothing wrong with niche art and there's no reason to feel threatened by it.
I don't think the second thing follows from the first. No I'm not ok with the poster referring to Jews. I'm ok but probably squicked out with it referring to Commies, and I'm pretty much fine with the Nazi version. I don't think there's a useful general rule here. I think each claim should be evaluated on its own merit.
In general, I think that the tool of generalizing a particular to a general, eg "Every time an outgroup member dies an angel get it's wings" is overused. The particulars are different, and we should be willing to exercise our judgement.
Yes, "literally" was the wrong choice of word. "Implicitly" might be better. The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths. Are you happier with that phrasing? What about the graffiti that says "save a life, kill a cop"? Would you consider that literally calling for people's deaths?
As for my personal aesthetic opinion, I mentioned it because I thought it was ironic and darkly funny. It's literally (correct usage there) the least important part of my comment.
As for intimidation, I used to feel more like you suggest. Then some things happened to me. Now I feel differently. *shrug* It's not safe to talk about in public, so I'll just say that this is one of those situations where it's much better to learn from the misfortunes of others.
>The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths.
Seems like it's simply saying that it's a good thing when a Nazi dies to me. I don't think it's calling for people to die.
If this entire debate revolves around things you "feel", posters that you never show a photo of, and events that you say you can't talk about in public - then I think that's not a very convincing case.
There was an interesting FiveThirtyEight post a few days ago that was relevant to this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-a-biden-blowout-didnt-happen-and-why-a-2024-blowout-is-unlikely-too/
Basically, they pointed out that the elections from 1988-2020 bear a lot in common with the elections from 1876 to 1900, while the elections in between are quite different. 1876 to 1900 and 1988 to 2020 are two periods that are highly polarized, and have extremely close presidential elections (not one margin of 10 points or more), with the popular vote loser winning the electoral college twice each. 1904 to 1984 is a period that is not very polarized, and the majority of presidential elections have a margin of over 10 points (often with landslides for opposite parties not far apart).
I think that these periods can be refined a bit further if we think about the history of US party systems. It's traditional to say that we are now in the Sixth Party System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System, and links to the earlier ones). The first party system was 1796 to 1820 or so, Federalist vs Anti-Federalist. The second party system was 1828 to 1852 or so, Democrats vs Whigs. The third party system was 1860 to 1892 or so, with Reconstruction Republicans against Redeemer Democrats. The fourth party system was about 1896 to 1928, with Progressives in both parties, and a Populist third party. The fifth party system was about 1932 to 1968, with the New Deal system. The sixth party system was about 1972 to 2012, with the Republican Southern Strategy.
It seems that the third system and the sixth system were highly polarized, with very close elections, while the second, fourth, and fifth party systems were very anti-polarized - the two parties chose an obscure point of tariffs as their main differentiation, but otherwise existed only as meaningless electoral coalitions, that intentionally kept race issues out of Congress as long as they could.
Introducing national propositions on issues, like some states now have, and like Switzerland, might reduce polarization by, for example, letting people oppose abortion but vote for Democrats, or raise the minimum wage but vote for Republicans.
How does a discussion about the fall and rise of polarization over the court of the middle of the 20th century not mention the phrase, "New Deal Coalition", even once? It even shows up in your graphs: They all have spikes in the late 20's and they drop sharply in the late 70's. The coalition of ethnic whites(/organized labor/Catholics), liberals, blacks, and Southern whites created an electoral hegemony that, when it could stick together, was able to absolutely dominate the government from 1932 to 1976 (with fading but still present power until the 90's). This meant that the Republicans were thrust into an adapt or die situation, so they adapted by moderating towards acceptance of the New Deal vision of government (and, when they didn't, they died really hard, in 1964). There's a reason the Republicans did not control a unified Congress between 1956 and 1996 (and the short control in the 50's was super fluky and had to do with a super-popular Republican President's coat-tails in Eisenhower -- 1932 is really the correct year).
The New Deal Coalition collapsed for a lot of reasons. The cultural unification of the mass industrialization era declined over the course of the 1950's and 1960's, so by the 1970's it became possible for one party to be consistently tarred as the 'liberal' party. Nixon's 'moderate Republican' image was tied up much more with his stances on the New Deal government and much less with his cultural liberalism, because he pretty much had none. The Republicans could start biting into the ethnic white/Southern white portion of the Coalition which was becoming increasingly upset about the social and cultural change happening in the 1960's and 1970's -- yes, including the Civil Rights Act, busing, and other racial issues, but also including things like views about ostensible Democratic failures on the international stage (while anti-communism and foreign policy hawkishness was something both parties had strong wings in favor of in the post-war era, and Nixon was the one who pulled us out of Vietnam, the Democrats got associated with the anti-war movement in a lot of people's minds) and an increasingly libertine cultural approach (drugs, sex, and rock and roll). Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic President to be able to pull the New Deal Coalition together and he embodied these things so much to so many people that the Coalition collapsed around him in 1980.
There's a lot more to the story (the beginnings of the conservative movement go further back than the late 60's -- the rise of the religious right, too, which WAS a separate thing at first), but the broad picture is there: American politics was very underpolarized in the middle of the century because it had a hegemonic party. When the Conservative movement reached its apotheosis with Reagan, it actually failed to establish a similar hegemony, only barely managing to pull the culture towards themselves during the Clinton years (while Clinton triangulated well after the drubbing liberal Democrats had gotten in 1980, 1984, and 1988, he was not himself a conservative Democrat, although he sometimes played one on TV). What cultural pull the conservatives had managed to establish declined over the whole period and, I think, collapsed in the Bush years. They never managed to create the kind of cultural consensus created by the Great Depression, the war, and the New Deal and they never managed to create the electoral hegemony the Democrats had enjoyed in those years. So the country just kept slipping towards polarization.
Yuval Levin takes on this question in what at least seems to me from your description of Klein's work to be a better way in 'The Fractured Republic', focusing on the sense of cultural consensus and unity that was built up in the early 20th century and the way that it declined in the later 20th century. He doesn't dwell too hard on the details of the New Deal Coalition, either, but I think he does a better job of examining the underlying mechanics. Klein's focus on racism as the motive force of US history isn't insightful, it's just the standard party line for him and his now, cooked up so they can have a free hand to recreate American society in their image. The Dixiecrats and their motion through American politics were an important force, but they were one among many. Levin focuses more on the thesis that consensus, unity, and depolarization are not actually a natural thing, they were an aberration created by the relatively unique conditions of the early 20th century (mass industrialization, the rise of radio and television as highly centralized mediums, the mass impoverishment of the Great Depression and the mass mobilization of the Second World War, etc) and that the breakdown of this unity and consensus over the course of the later 20th century is a natural fragmentation of society. He, like Klein, doesn't necessarily think that polarization can or should be dealt with, but he does think we need to learn how to live and how to work with it. Build institutions that are capable of functioning in a social environment where polarization is common, such as in the late 19th century.
Post: I also have some quibbles about the timing of the Dixiecrat's inception and its role in depolarization. White Southerners were Democrats from the start, as soon as they started regaining the right to vote in the later 1860's and throughout what was left of Reconstruction. These 'Dixiecrats' survived through a century of drastically changing levels of polarization. Even the level of black suffrage changed mostly independently of polarization in this period: black suffrage in the South was substantially gone by 1900 but this is 20-30 years before any of your synthetic polarization indices show decreases. White supremacy had been re-established and became an article of political faith long before it became a stabilizing force in national politics.
Overall, I'm dis-satisfied with the level of actual historical discussion in this discussion of history. Polarization is a complex phenomenon, it takes actually digging into the details to understand it. A few synthetic indices aren't really going to tell you much on their own.
Good summary!
Plenty of democracies are equally polarised, but (i) elections are fair and seen as such, since they are run by an independent election committee, and (ii) the winner can govern, since the prime minister is elected by parliament, so "winning" means winning both the legislature and the executive. The U.S. has (i) a throughly corruptible electoral process, and (ii) a byzantine governing system, which makes it likely that one party controls the executive and the other controls at least half the legislature. As long as politics was local, this peculiar system worked OK. Politicians who brought home the bacon could do whatever they wanted in Washington, and voters didn't know or care. But now, voters are better informed, so that U.S. politics has become nationally polarised - just as it has always been in smaller countries. But unlike these other countries, the U.S. system isn't built for these conditions.
My analysis is based on posts and articles by Matthew Yglesias and David Shor, as well as personal familiarity with the democratic system in several other countries (Israel, the UK, and Australia - the UK is about as polarised as the US, and Israel probably more so).
Does Ezra discuss that the parties united against the Cold War commies, but then came apart when they had no common enemy?
> "Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
I recently realized that many people wouldn't frame the issue this way. I was listening to, of all things, a Malcolm Gladwell podcast about civil rights lawyers in the 1950's, in which he offhandedly summarizes some of their early experiences as "they were losing". *Losing?* I thought. That didn't seem right; they were building support, raising awareness, and getting better results with each successive case. In hindsight they were already well on their way to near-total victory. Then I realized that Gladwell and I had different mental baselines. My baseline was a near-zero rate of change; anything above that baseline was a civil rights "victory" because it shifted the long-term status quo. Gladwell's baseline was a near-infinite rate of change; anything below that was a civil rights "defeat" because it allowed injustice to persist for that much longer.
The "who's changed more" analysis of political polarization depends on a similar discrepancy. In the absence of more sophisticated statistics (e.g. measuring skew in the distribution of political positions), claims about which side "has become more extreme" should be taken as claims about what the correct rate of change is. And such claims can't be separated from object-level political positions.
So for whatever it's worth, I'm not very convinced by this argument against Klein's framing. I disagree substantially with Klein both on how fast political consensus ought to change (slower!) and on whether its change since the 90's has been for the better (no!). Even so, I think it's clear that the correct rate of political change for societies like ours isn't zero, or even very close to zero (say, <5% of the rate that the median Democrat's position has changed). If nothing else, technological changes necessitate some political changes; also the status quo leaves, shall we say, plenty of room for improvement.
Exactly this. It seems to me an unhelpful framing to say "Republicans are closer to where they were 25 years ago, so Democrats are polarizing." It leaves out the existence of objective reality entirely.
Sure; Trump still holds the 1995 Republican position that "the Kyoto Protocol is too strong a measure to adopt to combat climate change". In the meantime, 25 years of climate science has occurred. If the Republicans have not updated their position at all to account for that, and Democrats have, we have to say Democrats are being polarizing?
In 1995, healthcare was 12 percent of GDP. Now it's 18. Republicans want the healthcare system to stay substantially the same. Democrats have suggested changing it. They're driving polarization?
I hate hate hate this framing.
You are taking it for granted that the 25 years have strengthened the argument for doing something drastic about climate change. What I remember is one person after another telling us that if we didn't do something drastic in the next ten years, the game was lost. I don't remember any of them saying, ten years later, "It's too late now — might as well live it up until the world ends."
Some time back I tried the experiment of going through the first few IPCC reports to see what rate of warming someone who read them would expect. For the first report, the actual rate thereafter was below the bottom of the predicted range. For the second report the projected rate of warming was a little high. For the third the actual rate was again below the bottom of the projected range.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
If people were modifying their beliefs to accord with objective reality, what would have happened?
To take an older case ... . Back in the 1960's the equivalent of the current climate campaign was the campaign against population growth. People made a lot or predictions, with the extreme end of the respectable range being Ehrlich's claim in _The Population Bomb_ that there would be unstoppable mass famines in the 1970's, with hundreds of millions of people dying. What happened was the precise opposite — populations continued to increase in poor countries, per capita calorie consumption went up, not down, extreme poverty rates went sharply down. I haven't noticed many people responding with "we were wrong, population isn't a problem after all." Instead, like other failed end of the world cults, the believers just push the predictions a little farther ahead.
My favorite case of leftish disinterest in objective reality is a minor one, the widely believed claim by Ron Suskind that a Bush aide identified the other side as the "reality based Community." The aide was never identified, no evidence was ever offered that the statement had been made, but lots of people who found the description flattering took it for granted that the story was true.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-reality-based-community.html
I don't think there's an issue isn't with the framing. Once you assume that it is 'natural' for the frame of reference to move left (or right) at a certain pace I think you end up with a circular argument. I think it would be more straightforward to simply argue that polarization is not, in fact, a problem, that the left moving further to the left (which is, by the neutral definition of the word, polarizing) is simply justified. And of course that's what most people (including Klein) more or less believe: polarization isn't really the major issue; that people still disagree with them (or the extent to which they disagree with them) is the issue. But polarization has negative connotations, so instead people redefine it rather than questioning whether it (or their side's half of it, at least) is bad.
My own view is that local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life vs national-politics-as-entertainment is the crux of this problem, not polarization. Politics has become a spectacle, where what's at stake is less about policy outcomes and more about symbolic gestures and abstract point-scoring in a reality TV game show. That's why both sides are less willing to compromise -- unlike policy outcomes, symbolic victories are zero-sum. Also, if the fight is about abstractions neither side can ever really win, so the same fights continue indefinitely.
This gets obscured because activists will often organize around policy issues, but often these are just totems in the symbolic fight. How effective has the Woke Left been at actually improving the lives of marginalized people? How effective has Trumpism been at restraining the Woke Left? If the people in either camp really cared about effectiveness, wouldn't they consider changing tactics? I see no signs of it; I see both sides doubling down on symbolic gestures, as if it's an end in itself, as if that's what politics is really all about.
Yes, of course empty symbolism has always been a part of politics. I'm saying it's come to occupy a much larger mind share in the last few decades, and I think this is 100% driven by changing media technologies & the incentives they create: Decontextualizing everything; forcing complex issues into simple, flattering narratives; pushing emotional buttons, etc. etc.
If this is happening at the same time as rising polarization it can look like polarization is driving the dysfunction & gridlock, but I think that's a red herring. The problem isn't that people disagree -- democratic republics are designed to handle that -- the problem is that activists on both sides have lost sight of instrumental goals & grown disconnected from reality.
It is very late and I should not be awake, but I have ADHD and a crazy idea. Please excuse me for a moment as I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist and don't want to stay up even later tracking down sources.
I live in Texas. I grew up here even though I wasn't born here. I am also a Democrat. Yes we exist. The reason I'm a Democrat is also what I believe to be the source of why we got so polarized: Cracked.com.
Hear me out: there was a time that I was rooting for Rand Paul to win an election (can't remember what he was running for but I wanted him to win). This was around the time the Tea Party was picking up steam. I was fresh out of high school, I had burned a bunch of bridges, and was staying with relatives because my dad had kicked me out as soon as I graduated. I had nothing better to do than surf the internet all day everyday for about 6 months straight. I was about as republican as an uninformed Texas-dwelling high school graduate could get. But that all changed when (the fire nation attacked) I found Cracked.com.
At the time, Cracked was at its popularity peak. Millions of clicks on every article. The ones I want to draw particular attention to here though are the regular "true life experience" articles they ran. These were listicles "written" by people actually living through different extreme/unlikely/ horrific experiences: the guy who survived over a year in AlQueda custody, the lady who escaped from a cult, working prostitutes and other sex workers, homeless people, I think they got that guy who cut off his own arm that inspired the movie 127 hours, people who survived natural disasters and military insurrections, members of "weird" religions, people who worked behind the scenes on everything from television shows to politicians to sewage waste treatment plants etc.
Around the same time I was getting exposed to these people with heart wrenching tales of survival and oppression, Cracked's most popular writers were pulling further and further left. David Wong and John Cheese are the main writers I'm thinking of here: Wong was more abstractly political, but Cheese was the real converter.
Read his articles and you'll find stories of growing up in squalor with unhinged people, with a subtle, almost subliminal implication that these horrific people are only like this because they've been born, raised, and inculcated with the values and virtues necessary to survive while living in such a poor (in more ways than one) environment.
All of these taken together paint a picture that is violently against the conservative rhetoric of "individual responsibility", "disregulation", and "American exceptionalism".
Remember, Cracked at this time had readers in the millions everyday, and they were leaning more and more left as time went on. The only reason I don't still go to the site anymore is that they fired a bunch of really good writers which lead to two of my favorite video series getting canceled (After Hours and Some News if you're curious). They were able to get a young Texas republican to change parties in less than a year. Imagine what they did to people who were already on the fence.
Even though I don't still go there though the damage had been done: unless the Democrats do something to totally ruin the progress we've made, I'm a member for life.
Spider Jerusalem once said "Journalism is a gun with a single bullet, but if you aim it just right, you can blow a kneecap off the world". My (conspiracy) theory is that Cracked was in just the right place, at just the right time, to provide exposure therapy on a massive scale to the younger population
Sorry accidently posted without finishing my thought.
So yeah anyway, Cracked made young people want to balk against "the man", which started a chain reaction leading to the eventual polarization of America. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Good night
Why Ireland is not as polarized as the US? Our elections use single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies. The argument that you have to vote for the Xs if you don't want the Ys to win doesn't work here - you can vote for the Zs, the Qs, the Ns... and finally, okay, last option on the ballot goes to the Xs, since they are at least better than the Ys.
The UK has a first-past-the-post system, where there are multiple parties but only two realistic options in most constituencies, and any government will be lead by either the Conservatives or the Labour party, and it is increasingly polarised.
I note the graph above says the UK is becoming _less_ polarised, but the source article says the researchers tried to limit results to the top two parties. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the vote, and were in government, ten years ago, but have lost half their vote since then. The Scottish nationalists have gone from 10% of the Scottish vote to dominating elections completely. And the Brexit referendum has been _extremely_ polarising. So, I would have some questions about the research.
I think you cannot talk about polarisation in different countries without looking at voting systems, for that radically changes incentives.
Here in Germany, we do not have the Winner Takes All system of the US, so the incentives for political parties are totally different. If you have more than two parties representing an non-miniscule part of the population and are not in the situation whetre one party has enough votes to govern alone, demonization of the Others will not work, because you cannot really demonize someone and then form a coalition with them.
This is what happend in Germany, in my impression: We were pretty clearly polarized in the 70s and 80s, with the CDU representing the more affluent, more conservative, more christian, more nativist parts and the SPD representing the poorer, more liberal, more foreigner-friendly parts. The FDP were the enocomically liberals and made a coalition with one of them, contributing the 8-10 % needed to top the 50%. Between 61 and 98, the FDP was part of every government, and the other part was either SPD or CDU.
But then, times changed. The Greens entered the picture in the 80s, Die Linke in the 90s. Votes spilt between 5 parties meant smaller chunks for the big parties, and a need for more diverse coalitions. We had SPD/Green coalitions from 98 to 05, than a coalition of SPD and CDU, the big old enemies.
Why? Because if the CDU had stayed as conservative as it was in the Kohl years, it would have trouble to start a coalition with either SPD, Greens, Die Linke, and their own numbers have been decreasing since 83, when the Greens entered the picture. Merkel moved the party towards the middle, while Gerhard Schröder did the same with the SPD, so much so that it is hard for most to tell their politics apart.
But it is not a uniform trend. The rise of the radical ADF in the 2010s had the CSU (something like part of the CDU, it's complicated) try to move back to the old days of ultra-conservativism, only to then do a 180 and try to be like the Greens now. It's hard to predict a trend now.
That a radical party like the AFD could get 10+ % is a total novum for us, so the radicalization of the internet may well be a real factor driving parts of the electorate towards polarisation. It just isn't the only one.
Genereally, my impression is that the modern times offer more diverse identities, which in a voting system other than Winner Takes All will lead to the creation of more parties. These force the parties to be open to coalitions, which tends to move them towards the mainstream. At least, that is what I thing happened in Germany. In Israel for example, the story is a totally different one, from what I can tell.
The consequence of a coalition system is that polarizing against a party has to be compensated for by getting closer to other parties. If the CDU rejects governance with the AFD, then they have fewer alternatives to governing with the Greens, so they cannot afford to be very polarized with them, compared to when they can threaten to 'trade in' the Greens for the AFD.
I see a trend where there is an increasing polarization between parties that are globalist or populist, which pushes traditionally opposes parties together. For example, in The Netherlands, classical liberals have become much more similar to leftists, with the leader of biggest classical liberal party adopting woke language (like structural racism).
However, the polarization between globalists vs populists is far stronger than the old polarization was between left and right, who were willing to govern with each other.
The graph about polarization in sweden feels like it ends right when it would have gotten interesting. In 2010, the sweden democrats (SD, conservative nationalists) got into parliament, and stayed there. Throughout basically their entire stay they have been met with exclusions (invite every party into the discussion, except SD; open to cooperation with every party, except SD and anyone open to cooperating with them), protests and various accusations and scandals about being nazis. And just last months I've seen news indicating them getting called pigs, misogynists, etc by prominent politicians.
Perhaps other countries aren't decreasing their polarization *now*, it's just we're a decade or two behind the US in terms of the rise of polarization?
Facebook was for sure a thing even in 2010, but I don't recall twitter being mainstream at that point.
The Netherlands had a big populist revolt against the elites starting in 2002. Flanders was much earlier, with a Flemish populist party gaining a lot of votes in 1988, which quickly resulted in the other parties collectively agreeing not to govern with this party.
Scott is there not a certain tension between on the one hand the fact that you vote 'almost straight Democrat' by your own account, and your strong record of opposition to anyone else ever claiming that the Dems are better than the Repubs. Like, if the Dems are really no better why vote for them?
I don't think I've ever said the Republicans are no worse than the Democrats.
I often complain about Democrats exaggerating how bad Republicans are, but that's to be expected - any group will exaggerate the badness of their enemies. If people frequently underestimated how bad Republicans were I would be annoyed at that too, but that's not the sort of error propaganda departments tend to make during a total war.
In fairness, I didn't say you had said it, just that my impression was you tended to come down hard on anyone saying they are better. Perhaps that's wrong.
That graph for polarization in Britain as a function of year is the clearest sine curve I've ever seen and it hurts my heart to see a straight line fitted to it.
That graph of polarization in Britain as a function of year is the clearest sine curve I've ever seen and it hurts my heart that they fitted a straight line to it.
Excellent post that I would not have known I needed to read until I read it. Thank you.
”A Republican writing a similar book might argue that although the Republicans have the advantage of being able to say "We have beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z", the Democrats have the advantage of being able to say "People with beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z are the enemy". And Klein has already shown that negative partisanship is more powerful than positive partisanship! Having a clearly defined set of people to be against can be more unifying than being anyone in particular yourself.“
Nicely summarizes this current political climate. Hate fighting hate? 🤔
American polarization is not exactly the same as regular polarization as America is not ideologically polarized but socially so. The average establishment Dem and the average establishment Republican don't have very much ideological divergence especially when compared to the rest of the Western world where the overton window is considerably larger. American polarization really rests on historical animosity and America's obsession with relatively superficial things like identity politics.
If you think polarization is a bad thing, which seems implied, then, surely, the only thing you can possibly do to reduce it, is to take a step towards the other pole.
I think Roe vs Wade is a big part of the story.
There are huge numbers of single-issue voters who won't vote for a pro-choice (or pro-life for the other side) candidate. Back before RvW, the parties were less polarized on abortion but it's almost at the point where it's impossible to get chosen as a candidate for the Democrats if you are pro-life (and vice versa).
For large swathes of social conservatives, the only reason to vote for a Republican president is because they will nominate another conservative SCOTUS justice who will overturn Roe v Wade.
If your frame for evaluating a candidate is always "do they support abortion rights?" (I am moderating my language here) then all other considerations become rounding error. Other cultural issues (guns, prayer in school, SSM, trans rights) come along for the ride but abortion is the ur-issue that started to drive the parties apart.
It's worth considering this in the light of the constitution's guidance that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Many people on right see the abortion issue as not just a moral issue but as an attack on the Constitution.
If the power to regulate abortion were reserved to the states then the people of Kansas could make different judgments than the people of Hawaii and the politicians of Kansas (and Hawaii) could be held to account for those decisions. As it stands, the nationalization of this decision by RvW gives cover to politicians in Kansas as they make ever more extreme rules that they never have to account for locally because they know they will be struck down by SCOTUS.
I predict that, if RvW is ever overturned, the urgent need to vote for Republican presidents will be taken away and some of the polarization will fade.
There are two reasons I can think of that the Tea Party has been more successful than the AOC wing: money and votes.
My mental model (which may be wrong) of the Tea Party is that they tend to be older and thus tend to vote more and tend to have more disposable income. My model of the AOC wing is that they are younger and thus less likely to vote and less likely to have disposable income.
Politicians want votes to get re-elected. And politicians want campaign contributions because they have expenses to run a campaign, and you can use the rest creatively for your own amusement.
"(W)here nobody could tell you the difference between the two major parties (or, rather, they would wax rhapsodic about the parties' differing positions on a 1920s treaty, and then when you interrupted and said "no, I mean today", they would say "oh, no difference"). This was baffling to me. I would ask Irish people how they chose which party to vote for, and it would usually be something along the lines of "ah, we're a Fianna Fail family, always have been, always will be, someone from Fine Gael killed my great-grandpa during the war. Never bothered to look at either side's position on the issues, but still hope to get around to it one day."
Well, yes 😀 Though both parties which were centre-right (Fine Gael being slightly more to the right, see the Blueshirts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts , our homegrown version of the Blackshirts and Brownshirts and Fianna Fáil having some Old IRA connections being slightly more economically left) moved even more to the centre to compete for the (growing) middle-class vote, where Labour joined them (and left the traditional working-class vote to be scooped up by Sinn Féin) and both went more for the 'business friendly, light-touch regulation' economically while moving socially more liberal.
Before that, the major differences were the economic/class ones - Fine Gael being seen as the party of the "strong farmer" and the incipient professional classes, aspiring to more respectability. Fianna Fáil being slightly more the worker's party, not as left-wing or urban working-class as Labour but the party of, say, the farm labourer as distinct from the farmer (my grandmother, who worshipped Dev, said "he made the farmers pay their workers a decent wage" and my grandfather, being a farm labourer, she always voted straight FF, reared her kids to do likewise, and at least my mother raised us to do the same).
In the 1941 poem by Donagh MacDonagh below, the "teacher, solicitor and bank clerk" would be the archetypal Fine Gael party members and voters:
Dublin made me and no little town
Donagh MacDonagh
Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements
The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats
Devouring the fair-day between them
A public-house to half a hundred men
And the teacher, the solicitor and the bank-clerk
In the hotel bar drinking for ten.
Dublin made me, not the secret poteen still
The raw and hungry hills of the West
The lean road flung over profitless bog
Where only a snipe could nest
Where the sea takes its tithe of every boat.
Bawneen and currach have no allegiance of mine,
Nor the cute self-deceiving talkers of the South
Who look to the East for a sign.
The soft and dreary midlands with their tame canals
Wallow between sea and sea, remote from adventure
And Northward a far and fortified province
Crouches under the lash of arid censure.
I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land
The evil that grows from it and the good,
But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city
Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.
> Fine Gael being slightly more to the right, see the Blueshirts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts, our homegrown version of the Blackshirts and Brownshirts
Ugh, this photo of Eoin O'Duffy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eoin_O%27Duffy_1934.jpg ) *so* screams "fascist leader", even without reading the text...
I think Klein misses something very important, and to conservatives, very obvious about "vetocracy." It ties in so well with his overall point that I can only assume he misses it because at heart he's a Democrat who cares as much about the Democrats winning (getting their, and his, preferred policy) as he does making polarization better.
If the Democrats (or Republicans) want to pass a bad law, and do not want to pass a different law that is a good law, then the Republicans (or Democrats) are better off making sure nothing at all passes instead of what their opponents want. Mitch McConnell is a sometimes hero of the Republicans because he has been able to sit on the Senate and stop the Democrats from putting any of their stupid (to the Republicans) policies into place. For instance, look at the $15 minimum wage discussion now. Democrats are saying $15. Republicans are against $15. If the Democrats asked for ~$9, I bet the Republicans would vote that in, and quickly. But they're not asking for $9 ("good law," compromise), they're asking for $15 ("bad law," no compromise). The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that $15 is too high. And recall, Republicans are more often from rural areas where $15 is a LOT higher than it is in a big city. A few years ago San Francisco's equivalent of $17/hour was Alabama's $11. A $15 minimum wouldn't affect SF very much, but would destroy Alabama's economy. If the Democrats decide to push forward with $15 instead of a compromise, what possible reason would there be for Republicans to pass the law? They should refuse to pass the $15 minimum wage, and defeat it in any way possible.
This isn't purely a Republicans Refuse To Pass Good Laws issue, as there are times Republicans want to pass a law and it's defeated by the Democrats. That said, it is much more likely that Republicans want to keep things as is, rather than changing. It's probably part of the core reason we call them conservatives. That shouldn't be surprising. Democrats more often want to change things, try new things, etc., than Republicans.
I'm not sure this is true - I know we have to say "Republicans are conservative and conservative means no change", but Republicans want lots of things. Lower taxes, more school choice, more tariffs, border walls, immigration enforcement, rollback of various regulations.
It sounds like maybe you're saying something like that a compromise would often look like "Republicans accept Change X in exchange for Democrats agreeing not to try to push Change Y for some number of years", and the Democrats aren't cohesive enough to credibly promise that. I agree that's an interesting dynamic, though I'm not sure how much it matters in real life.
It's hard to speak of an entire segment of society in huge general terms, but I believe that conservatives tend to genuinely prefer less change overall.
I've long had a theory that conservatives like to take a situation/scenario/system and push for improvements within that system. They tend to maximize efficiency and power within a certain environment. They tend to create rigid rules, designed to solve iterative problems within a system. These are genuine changes (new laws to go back to the original discussion), but their focus is intersystem improvement, rather than systemic changes.
The other side (progressives) more often pursues entirely new systems, attempting to break the molds of the current society and find new ways of operating. They want to solve systemic wrongs, and are willing to abandon existing systems in order to try new approaches.
As an example, we can look at the minimum wage discussion. A $9 minimum wage is an incremental change, that would have fairly minimal effects on society. Also, conservatives seem fine leaving the $7.25 in place anyway.
A $15 minimum wage is big enough to be a systemic change, fundamentally altering segments of society. This is often explained as intentional - that there is a desire to alter society through a much higher minimum wage.
Obviously these two approaches are in tension, and we see plenty of evidence of that tension. On the other hand, working together can produce an overall better society. The progressives identify systemic problems and agitate for big change. The conservatives evaluate the effects on the existing system and try to incorporate and adapt the new thinking - or reject it as incompatible.
Progressives end up steering the ship most of the time, while the conservatives act as a kind of gatekeeper or correction device for weeding out bad ideas. In a society where the conservatives are too powerful, the country stagnates and becomes too rigid - society fails to adapt as conditions change around it. In a society where progressives are too powerful, there is often chaos and constantly shifting ideas - society breaks down as core institutions are broken up and conditions don't stay the same long enough to develop new ones.
We may be looking at a short term situation where "the Democrats aren't cohesive enough to credibly promise that" - which is a problem for long term stability. If the Democrats cannot advance acceptable compromises, the Republicans feel the need to push back more than normal. This leads to a downward spiral of relationships and a breakdown of the process.
As a democrat, I feel like one of the big sources of polarization is gun freedom/control. At least it's used as a wedge issue and my impression is that there is a sizeable chunk of the populace that will always vote for the person most in favor of a broad view of the second amendment. Even though I support basic gun control for the same reason I support drivers licenses, I'd really encourage my party to just drop the issue entirely. For two reasons:
1) Though gun violence is problematic, it's exaggerated and any gun control that had the slightest chance of passing would have minimal impact on such a thing. We've made 0 progress in my lifetime, maybe it's time to give up?
2) Can't we trade this for support in another realm? I would gladly take single-payer healthcare in exchange for completely dropping gun control as an issue. Single-payer healthcare is actually fairly popular so this isn't totally an implausible trade if we thought dropping gun control nets a 5pp gain in the polls.
Yet I feel like my party will continue aggressively supporting gun control precisely because it's the opposite of the other party. If someone were looking to deescalate political polarization, gun control would be where I'd start. I'd also be curious if anyone with more contact with pro-gun rights people could comment on how likely any would be to change their voting if gun rights weren't an partisan issue.
I feel similarly about immigration. I see immigration as a net good, but aside from refugees, I don't see that we have a moral imperative to accept any specific percentage of would-be immigrants. I'm a bit baffled that it's become a central issue for Democrats; it seems like something that should be relatively easy to compromise on. The shift may be purely a matter of negative partisanship, though, just as you suggest about gun control.
With immigration, a lot of the wedge issues are immigrants already in the US, and refugees at the boarder.
For those already in the US, kicking them out is seem as pretty shitty, plus it's a very salient issue for many since a lot of the immigrants who would be kicked out are personal friends.
For refugees at the border, it's debatably a moral imperative, plus the controversy is often about the ways they are treated, especially during the Trump administration.
I live in a very pro-gun area and own guns myself.
If Democrats could drop any cultural attacks planks (including gun control), I think it would help ease concerns a lot among average Republicans. I don't know too many single issue gun voters, that they would suddenly think about voting Democrat, but it would help with other compromise positions.
The impression I get is that Democrats have, in fact, given up on gun control in the past few years.
That's far from the perception of gun owners, as far as I can tell.
They gave up about 10-20 years ago, but have decided in the past few years it would be fun to roll that Sisyphean boulder back up the hill to die on while mixing their metaphors.
Is gun control more like this than anything else? Lots of people will always vote for the person who's most pro-life/pro-choice, most pro-police/pro-BLM, etc.
Gun control polarizes more along the urban/rural divide, because the usefulness of guns differs so much between cities and rural areas.
The differences are that:
1) Gun control is relatively non-central to Democratic positions and is mostly taken as an anti-Republican position, compared to other issues like BLM or expanded healthcare.
2) Democrats are unlikely to make non-symbolic progress on this front (and barely make any symbolic-only progress) and it's practically impossible for gun rights to get more loose than they currently are, so there's not much risk from letting it up.
3) Republicans appear to effectively use pro gun-rights as a rallying cry and fund raiser. Democrats have had little success in rallying a pro-gun-control movement with the same vigor, we'd find something else to sneer at Republicans about if that left the public eye.
So I think removing it as a partisan issue has an asymmetric effect where Democrats win more than they lose strategically and suffer no practical losses legislatively.
Compared to pro-life/choice, Democrats have a clear need to keep fighting the fight lest they have material losses. And pro-choice is a more effective get-out-the-vote and such than pro-gun control is (in my uninformed view), relative to the republican side of the equation. I would also guess that gun-rights voters would be low-propensity voters if they didn't have the issue in a way that pro-life voters would not.
The correct answer is the only one Ezra Klein doesn't directly confront: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-why-were-polarized#comment-1256692
Some additional factors to consider:
First is the effects of a series of crises - the Great Depression and WWII, followed by the Cold War. This produced a generation where it was the norm for partisanship to be subsumed by more pressing concerns. I don't think it's a coincidence that the growth in partisanship among the public really took off in the 1990's when the Silent and greatest generation were dying out coinciding with the end of the Cold War. I think younger people (I'm 52) like Klein don't fully understand how the Cold War and the ideological battle against Communism generally influenced American politics more generally by forcing a consensus that bled over into other areas and was led by two generations of people that thought in those terms.
The second factor is the growth in power and authority (perceived and real) of the federal government as compared to state and local government. When issues become nationalized and are adjudicated at the federal level, then that raises the stakes. This also applies to the courts. A good example of this is Roe v. Wade which unintentionally created the binary division over abortion we see today and prevented the healthier kinds of political debates on the topic seen in other countries. Even Justice Ginsberg, in her earlier years, had reservations about Roe:
"Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed, reflected most recently in the Supreme Court’s splintered decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."
And abortion has been one of the major catalysts for ideological sorting today.
>And the Dem presidential nomination went to Joe Biden, a moderate who wouldn't look out of place running for president in 1988 (in fact...).
1988-edition Joe Biden wouldn't recognize 2021-edition Joe Biden, and not just due to some extra wrinkles and less hair. 2021-Biden would not even approach being a 1988-moderate.
Your cheap joke devalues your analysis and glosses over the differences that mark 33 years of changes in the party as reflected by that blank canvas of a politician.
This should not be taken as saying people can't "evolve their views," either; just that doing so requires actual change, and if he has actually changed your joke is moot.
No story about American polarization can really be started without discussing the urban / rural divide. People like Klein always think that big ideas shape history, but they don't. Trends and forces do, and most trends and forces come down to expressions of human behavior and their access to technology. Our least politically polarized time was shortly after the founding, when a town had to literally meet in a church or a barn and hash out their politics, most political decisions didn't extend beyond the decision makers, and most meetings were done in groups under Dunbar's number. The counter argument to this usually starts with federal/anti-federal stuff, but that was the vast minority of political decisions being made. Most where on the town/county level and never made it into the history books because it just was an agreement to use 4 rails on fences instead of 3 because Goodman Yoder's cow kept getting into Mrs. Hancock's flowers.
Now, we extract above-average academic achievers from their home communities (while making academics more reliant on social capital), place them in an environment with a ~4 year churn of the population, move them to be in charge of lots of stuff they don't have skin in the game on, and wonder why we don't have the cultural institutions that keep bad things from happening.
In the mean time, we concentrate the academic underachievers (aka low human capitol) out in the hinterlands (rural or urban) and wonder why depression, crime, and drug use is rampant and why social institutions like churches and mutual-aid groups like unions fail.
Does anyone here know anyone from high school who a smart go getter that turned down college to chose to start a small blue collar business in their rural or ghetto home town and contribute to the human capitol of the community?
I think this is missing a structural explanation: we're polarized because the American system is structurally set up to favor two parties and no more. This is an accidental by-product of the constitutional requirement that the president be the majority choice of the electoral college (if no one wins a majority, the vote is thrown to the house of representatives, which no one wants). This gives ordinary voters strong incentives to choose one of only the two most prominent choices. Parties can therefore only define themselves on one principal axis, and other possible axes are after thoughts, and only two parties can at any given time emerge as a source of plausible nominees for president. Third parties are doomed to irrelevance for presidential elections.
Now, this need not determine which parties seat members of congress, and indeed sometimes third parties do win some seats, but the gravitational pull of the big contest for president drags the rest of the federal contests into alignment with this same two-party system, creating effective federal duopoly.
At the state and local level it's possible to move somewhat further away from this two-party trap, which is why you see many more parties fielding plausible candidates for local positions. But the whole system is still tugged towards duopoly as what seems like an unintended consequence of the electoral majority requirement in the constitution.
Now, the two parties square off and define themselves in opposition to each other. There are no third parties to join in coalitions to help elect candidates, so the kinds of compromise that coalitions can build are impossible. This need not cause polarization, but it seems very likely to be a factor intensifying it.
I should add this mattered a lot less when the president mattered less, but with the rise of the "imperial presidency", this dynamic has become more and more important.
So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
If a policy choice is binary, and the voters are clustered nearly evenly at yes/no, then one party should court one group, and the other party should court the other group by saying "yes" and "no", respectively. They will presumably hope that that view grows in public support, and eventually dominates, and their policy position will be seen retrospectively as the correct binary choice.
We can model this numerically: one party says 0 and the other says 1. They are as far apart as possible. If a policy has a range of possible positions, going from 0 to 1, and the voters are evenly spread out, then staking out the barely distinguishable positions around the middle [.5 - epsilon, .5 + epsilon] should be in a sense optimal, as you suggest.
If a policy has two primary ends to it -- you lean more towards yes or more towards no -- but possible smearing of positions towards the middle -- build up, phase out, spend a modest amount toward it, or cut spending a modest amount -- then the two parties should get pulled both towards these extremes by their fundamental posture and then maybe back toward the middle by their practical decision; maybe they would end up at 1/3 and 2/3.
You might think a candidate could always win by staking out the middle position, but if the issue is one that will eventually face a verdict of history (this war was wrong, say) the party will never distinguish itself by choosing correctly, and runs the risk of looking worse than another party that heads for the center but makes a few wise choices closer to the extreme on positions that are carefully chosen and turn out to be "right".
Take any issue you like and you can probably see how even a binary choice allows for this smearing between making a choice of position and a practical extent of support for it. Pro-war / anti-war? How pro-war are you? How anti-war are you? No wars, ever? Cut the federal budge / raise spending? By how much? How fast?
So I would describe this as the tension between making a decision about which side of an issue you fundamentally are on, in the hopes of getting it right by the verdict of history, which pulls you al the way toward one extreme end, and making a pragmatic determination as to how far to go in practical terms, which probably pulls you back toward the middle, maybe landing at 1/3 and 2/3.
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Let me answer by taking the example of Iraq: I am in my early 50s so I have a somewhat longer view of US wars than Iraq. When I was a child the Vietnam war was a recent memory, and indeed it was still being wound down in my early school years.
I would describe the period from the mid 1970s through early 1980s -- roughly a decade -- as one in which the new consensus view was that the US had allowed itself to be drawn into wars too often during the prior 25 years. The war machine had taken us all for a ride. The consensus position was probably not strongly distinguishable for Democrats and Republicans.
Then Reagan staked out a new position, easily distinguishable from the consensus, by fairly extraordinary covert involvement in wars in Latin America, and big actions like the mining of the harbors in Nicaragua and the invasion of Grenada. This of course generated intense opposition.
Then Bush the elder presided during the first gulf war.
It is my sense that Reagan and Bush as republican presidents little by little broke a post-Vietnam war consensus against the US using its military might openly in wars that were clearly not acts of national self-defense against imminent threat. The position that it was ok for the US to do so became, for a time, a republican-owned position. You can still see this polarization in the January 1991 congressional resolution to support the first gulf war.
However, many democrats defected to the republican side, either by being convinced of the rightness or the issue or because they believed the public wanted the war.
The pattern repeated with the AUMF for the invasion of Iraq:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002
Republicans in both the house and senate took a position of close to 1 for the war, whereas in the house democrats took a position close to 0.4, and in the Senate they took a position close to 0.6 (just from the tally of Democratic members' votes on the AUMF).
Democrats were dragged "up" closer to the Republican position on the issue, and ended up on net being close to the middle. Republicans were overwhelmingly for the war, so of course the vote passed.
I think it's reasonable to believe that Democrats moved toward the Republican position out of the belief by about half of them that the war would come to be seen as the "right" thing. If the war had been won decisively and easily and American's had been greeted as liberators as promised, and the Democrats had stayed at a default position of 0, they would have looked like foolish pacifists to the general public. By moving, as a party, to the middle, they staked out safer ground.
The judgment of history I'm referring to is this kind of near-term result, so perhaps that's not the right term for it. I'm talking about what the voters will think a few years down the line. I do think parties expect to be judged by these kinds of decisions.
I left out a point, namely that the Republicans in this case gambled on an extreme, because going to war is a binary decision, but you could frame the issues facing the country in the 1980s and on for 20 years as "should the US aggressively use its military might to topple or resist foreign powers that look or sound somewhat threatening toward the US, without being an undeniable imminent threat?"
In that view a 1 would be "very often" and a 0 would be "almost never". The brief consensus in the late 1970s looked a lot more like 0 than 1.
Reagan dragged us way closer to 1 but not all the way there (consider all the wars we didn't fight). The Democrats were split and on net were somewhere closer to 0 without being all the way there.
Both of these in my view represent something like hedged bets that the best answer was closer to 1 or 0 without being willing to go all the way there.
I think the reason for not staking out the extreme position and for not going to the exact middle is to have clearly distinguishable positions in opposition while also gambling that one side or the other will eventually be proven right in the eyes of the public. When it looks like one side might lose such a contest, you act expect that side to move toward the other one, and if this continues eventually you get consensus, and the issue ceases to be a point of distinction between the parties.
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
Thank you, I appreciate your questions. They have helped me clarify my own thinking; I may have meandered a bit, but I think I can now state this a bit more clearly:
Some issues are perennial. On these kinds of issues, public opinion might be like a pendulum swing, or it might be fairly stable. In either case, we might expect the parties not to stake out extreme positions, and in fact these issues might not be seen as partisan issues at all. But such issues are barely issues. Neither party can make much political advantage out of those kinds of things.
Other controversies have a beginning, middle and end. Think of large conflicts in American history: should slavery be abolished? Should the USA try to gain territory from coast to coast? Should full civil rights be granted to all adults, regardless of race and gender?
These kinds of controversies do eventually reach some kind of resolution. Moreover, there is often some kind of medium-term public judgment that one side was right and the other wrong. Until that point, in the middle phase of such a controversy, public opinion may swing all over the place.
At the start of such a controversy, there might be a fragile equilibrium with neither party taking a strong position, defaulting to tacitly supporting the status quo. This is the kind of situation I described in the late 1970s with regard to military adventurism.
In that kind of situation, I expect that often, either because one party sees a chance to take a stand for what they believe will later be judged the right or winning side of the controversy, or because circumstances force a decision, one or the other party will stake out a position far from the center, which they hope will eventually win. If the other party then joins them at this position, the controversy instantly ends: there is a new consensus at this new position.
But if the other party picks the other side of the fight, their desire to be proven correct will drive them not to the middle, in some attempt to be the voice of moderation with the greatest appeal to all voters, but to be the counterweight, hoping that the other side of the issue will be judged correct once events unfold.
New controversies yield new occasions for such polarization constantly. These controversies eventually end with one side or the other winning: slavery is abolished, the US did indeed conquer and incorporate territory all the way to the west coast, universal adult suffrage was passed, prohibition was ended as a disaster, etc. But new issues take the place of old ones.
What we don't see is one issue after another where both parties take barely distinguishable positions from each other, almost never sharply disagreeing. Or to the extent that happens, it's a complete non-event, because there's no need to talk about it, campaign on it, etc.
I think the driver for this is the desire to choose a side on a controversy that partisans believe can and should win.
Increasing globalization in the 1970s and the rise of the internet/IT in the late 1990s and early 2000s have slowed income growth among people without some level of post-high school education. I think a more useful dichotomy is between people who are doing well relative to the median vs people who aren't. This also seems to correlate better in time. Your review makes it seem like Klein focuses a lot on racial dichotomy (white vs not white), and while I think this is a factor, I don't think it's the primary one.
The colors of the links on substack are lighter than the standard link color. For me, that causes them to blend into the background and makes reading harder. Any chance we could get the color to be a bit darker/more saturated? (There are some web accessibility standards which provide a good guide on which colors should be used on a white background)
Have you tried ACX tweaks[1]?
Or the Stylebot[2] to make it look like the old SSC if that's too much?
1. https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks/blob/master/README.md
2. https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/
Regarding the reason why the coalitional makeup of the Democrats would make them more structurally resistant to ideological polarization than the Republicans - I haven't read the book, but I have listened to Ezra Klein talk about this on podcasts, and the point he made there made a lot of sense to me. It goes basically as follows -
The Democratic party cannot become as ideologically polarized as the Republican party, because the racial coalition aspect also translates into having a lot of conservatives. There are a very large number of black, hispanic, and other non-white voters who are conservatives by inclination, but stick to the Democratic party because they (rightly or wrongly) see the Republicans as the Racism Party.
If you're a black conservative, your choice is between the Democrats, who may be more left-wing than you like, and the Republicans, who are basically still seen as the party of the Dixiecrats. Again, whether or not the reader agrees with this idea, it is clearly one accepted by the great majority of black voters in the US. And we see similar patterns across many other groups who make up the Democratic coalition.
But this means that as a result, the Democratic voter base is not merely more racially diverse, but also ideologically more diverse. You need to make enough room in the party not to completely drive out voters like this, and thus the reason the Democratic party has remained more centrist overall than the Republican party, which doesn't have any equivalent group of liberal voters who are "forced" into the party.
Even if this theory is true, it only suggests that Democrats can't get too radical on issues *other than race*.
Could there be a tradeoff between polarization and corruption?
In Paraguay when you ask someone how they choose which person to vote for they often answer that they'll vote for so-and-so because they promised some inane, selfish, short-term material benefit.
People here vote for the person who promises them a public sector job (a position that will open up after the candidate wins and fires all the supporters of the other party), or the one that will help them cut the line to get free healthcare for their parents in the overloaded public healthcare system, or even just the one who throws the best parties.
This has many disadvantages that the United States doesn't have and cannot afford to have. For example it leads to a public sector that is full of lazy incompetent bootlickers. But it does have an advantage: when the population is poor and concrete material conditions are at stake in every election, there is little room for abstract ideological considerations.
Some concrete examples of what I mean:
1) I know some pro-choice feminists who voted for a literal Catholic priest for president, just because his concrete proposal to spend more money on hospitals in rural areas was more important for most women than an abstract agreement on the moral question of abortion.
2) Said Catholic priest won an election by allying himself with free market liberals and literal communists. Nobody here thought this was weird at all. After all, the point of elections is to win and appoint your supporters to well-paid positions, not to advance some meaningless ideological agenda.
3) I know someone who has, in different elections, voted for a corrupt fascist party, a corrupt technocratic neoliberal party, a social democrat party, a Trump-style populist party and a corrupt agrarian socialist party. I know this because they voted for the same party every time, and that party changes ideology depending on who is their most charismatic member at the time.
"Every so often, people ask what an effective altruism of politics would look like".
That actually sounds really interesting! Can anyone point to any ideas or discussions around this?
Given the recent themes in your blog about about journalism, I'm surprised you didn't discuss that material at all. What did you think of it?
I tends towards these explanations that aren't mine, but I feel are heavily under-discussed:
1. Two party system: not like the UK with 2 big parties, but really the US seems unique in only having 2 real options for leadership and president. This may have worked temporarily, but it seems obvious to me that human nature will turn this situation in two warring sides each considering the other to be the ultimate enemy. Most other democracies have smaller parties with enough power to keep the big ones from going too extreme.
2. End of the cold war: the out group used to be a scary foreign country that threatened to overtake and destroy America. Such an external threat simply doesn't exist anymore. It seems natural to me that everyone needs an outgroup and now that wars between superpowers is a thing of the past, people will find their outgroup in local politics.
Really eager to hear criticism of these explanations!
Good points. I'd also add specific wedge issues to your list. A number of them all seem to play into the shifting US secular-religious landscape: the role of women in society and how it relates to the protestant family unit (workplace, abortion), gay rights, diversity, and most recently, trans rights.
When you say "most other democracies", do you primarily mean the continental European countries, most of which were substantially constitutionally recomposed in the aftermath of the second world war?
The difficulty here is that you are trying to compare the constitutional stability of systems, when the US constitution is 230 years old and has survived a civil war and two world wars mostly intact, the UK constitution has been staggering on for so long that nobody can really put a start date on it, but many point to the original insurrection against King John that led to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. The UK has also survived many cycles of violence, civil war and social upheaval without being recomposed. These are then being compared to a bunch of constitutions that have only existed since the last major violent event finished in 1945. The French are famously onto their fifth republic since 1789, the same year that the US constitution was ratified.
The test of a constitution is really whether it survives a period of polarization like the present and regains stability or whether it collapses into civil war or revolution. Having a "good weather" constitution may feel great when the sun is shining, but in the long run, a country's success will depend more on whether it can get through the storms without sinking. Many country-level constitutions in Europe are substantially untested in this regard, and the EU level is a horrific mess of contradictions that seems pretty unsustainable.
A British-style parliament (like the US and most of the Commonwealth and former British Empire) typical leads to a two-party system. Continental Europe typically has multi-party systems with rainbow coalitions in charge. Several of these are currently experiencing pretty serious instability themselves. France, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Poland are all seeing the rise of some pretty extreme characters in their politics. More than 10% of seats in Germany's Bundestag are taken by a party, which (if you believe the German liberal press) are basically neo-fascists.
I'll reserve judgment on which system is better until I see which survive the next 20 years or so.
Well, this really misses the point.
The very notion of representative democracy and a free country relies on a system that is widely trusted to be structurally fair. Things like the peaceful transfer of power rely on extremely large majorities believing that it is better to be a loser under a fair system, than to be a winner in an unfair system, where you have only won because you successfully deposed the other side in a coup. In the US at the moment:
* Nobody believes that the US system is structurally fair
* Nobody apparently seems to believe that a structurally fair system is even possible
* Nobody is even trying to construct or promote a system on the basis of its structural fairness
In the absence of faith in the system, what you end up with is everybody voting and acting for personal gain. This includes trying to reconstruct the system in ways that favor you. This manifests as the kind of extremely political polarization that we're currently living through.
It was not always thus: the American Dream was the shining vision of the systemic economic fairness of the United States. MLK's vision of a colorblind society was a vision of a structurally fair social system.
The notion that this is about the Republicans swinging right while the Democrats stay where they are is frankly laughable. If anything, the Republican leadership clings hopelessly to the notion that the American system is structurally sound, even as the economic unfairness of globalization has totally discredited that notion with their voting base, hence Trump. The Democrats meanwhile have turned social and legal unfairness into their calling cards, spent four years discrediting the 2016 election result and whipped up a mob who want to burn the whole thing down and replace it with ... what, exactly? This is not particularly clear, but my guess would be some kind of system where "fairness" is given out as political patronage. This is normally the case when a system is substantially designed by angry left-wing protest groups who want it to favor minority interests. It is hard to find historical examples where this has been attempted without significant downside!
I can't really see any of this getting better any time soon. Redesigning political systems is like trying to change the wings of an airplane while it is flying. Doing it in the current environment is like trying to change the wings while flying through a storm.
I have to question your thesis that "nobody believes that the US system is structurally fair" - at least as compared with alternating coups. From where I sit, the radicals on both sides believe the system is just about that unfair, and tilted in favor of their opponents. But no one else agrees; Joe and Jane Random aren't rioting, let alone plotting or participating in an insurrection.
At a guess, most reflective Americans believe that the system isn't perfectly fair - but much much better than any system that comes from the barrel of a gun. And the non-reflective repeat whatever slogans their leaders produce, in much the way they cheer for their local sports team, and to little more effect. Or they are sick and tired of the never ending cycle of supposed end-of-the-world crises, and discount the hyperbolic rhetoric semi-instinctively, in the same way they discount other sales tactics. (The human mind is well optimized for social skills, especially those involving attempted cheating.) Or both.
Some may want the system changed in various ways - e.g. replacing the electoral college with direct voting for president. But that's in the line of making a more or less OK thing better. (Except for those mostly young radicals who want perfection - nothing else will do - and believe it's attainable.)
Meanwhile, the pundit class declares doom and gloom - because that generates more clicks, more publicity, and thus greater earnings for them. Believing what they say - especially the level of emergency they declare - is strictly optional - but OTOH, humans are also great at finding reasons to honestly believe whatever it benefits them to claim.
I am pretty convinced that the recent, perceptually sharp, increase in polarization is due in large part to the abolition of congressional earmarks.
There are lots of articles about this — here's one to start:
https://www.democratic-erosion.com/2020/11/16/pork-barrel-spending-how-an-anti-corruption-measure-heightens-polarization-and-threatens-american-democracy/
"While pork-barrel spending, in many cases, can undoubtedly undermine voter confidence in government by making them associate government with corruption, its role as a possible curative for hyperpolarization seems to make it a net positive practice for preserving American democracy.
Since many scholars argue that the number one goal of all politicians is to win re-election, removing incentives that assist that goal would consequently reduce the chances of politicians being willing to compromise.
Therefore, when pork-barrel/earmark spending, a type of spending designed specifically for incumbents to boast of their legislative achievements on behalf of their constituents, is removed, politicians must turn to other methods to win and maintain the favor of their constituents to protect them from both primary and general election challenges.
Since politicians can no longer appeal to their constituents’ material interests, they are driven to appeal to their social and ideological interests."
"Ezra Klein is great." This opening salvo felt like a thesis. I was hoping in the course of reading to adjust my opinion of Ezra upwards. But instead I feel most deflated... Ezra Klein's "Why we can't Build Anymore" a quick article of his outperforms his full length book. The concluding sentence felt like praise, but was it?
My folk understanding of this was that it was an outgrowth of the McGovern-Fraser commission making party nominations much more small-d democratic. This lead to candidates more directly chosen by primary voters, leading to greater ideological sorting of politicians, leading to greater ideological sorting of voters, leading to more extreme candidates winning primaries, etc. This seems to dovetail with stuff like Cory Gardner losing his reelection campaign by 10 points after completely failing to hew to the center: he was terrified that doing so would get him primaried. The timing doesn't seem like a perfect fit for this story, but it's not terrible, and because this story is one about a snowballing feedback effect it has the virtue (vice, really) of not committing to a tightly constrained timeline.
Have there been any studies on comparing how effective are different ways of lowering polarization? Or how cost-effective?
Thankfully we Irish have figured out both parties are identical, and replaced the main competion with a random batch of murderers.
An interesting question in polarization: how many times does the average punter play a game of Three Card Monte before deciding that the game is rigged against them and checking out.
Similarly, how many times can a person be on the losing side of an election before deciding that democracy is rigged against them and becoming an insurrectionist/revolutionary?
It is entirely possible that any form of stable centrism is invariably unstable, since it typically leads to a stable group being excluded from decision making and therefore steady attrition in democratic participation. Once you get to the point where you have a similar number of people who have lost faith in the system as are voting for the winner, you're almost invariably going to have something happening like the Capitol insurrection.
Maybe a lack of political swings with most candidates looking basically the same should be a major red flag of a system about to go off the rails.
The trouble with this story is that neither party has had control of the government for a long stretch of time at once - nobody has consistently been on the losing side of the elections. The people at the Capitol Insurrection were just coming off of 4 years of their preferred president in office. So apparently the answer to "how many times can you be on the losing side of an election before becoming a revolutionary?" is "once is all it takes."
It doesn't work as a story about polarization between the parties. It might work as a story about people who don't feel represented by either/any party, if those people become something other than a small and mostly denigrated minority.
But it needs something added about the scale of the losses. The various levels of government in the US give me a lot of things. It doesn't do any of them perfectly, but I'm better off with peace, relative safety, relative security of property, enforceable contracts, etc. etc.. I'd much rather be here than in Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc.
This is true even though it pretty consistently does things I dislike, which I can't find any viable party interested in preventing it from doing.
It was still true when the consensus of all parties was that my sexual preferences and gender identity were pathological. It's still true even though some citizens believe my religion prevents me from having any ethics or morals whatsoever.
It stops being true somewhere between when my sexuality, gender and/or religion significantly impair my chances of earning a decent living, and when the state targets me for violence or incarceration because of them.
Whether I then emigrate, radicalize, or join in a rebellion then depends on what I think of my/our chances, and what I have to lose. The same presumably also applies to participants in the Capitol Insurrection.
It looks to my like part of the polarization in US politics is due to the "radicalization" option. People who don't want business as usual try to push the party nearest to their preference to actively support that preference.
Sometimes, they succeed.
@beleester
A common complaint is that the two parties are the same in certain aspects, so if you a different preferences, you lose no matter which party wins.
> they don't seem to become much more polarized until 2000-something
The chart showing the the snapshots of public's ideological distribution in 1994, 2004, and 2015 leaves out such an interesting chunk of time. There's an animated version on this page, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/ . Watching that, I see a significant shift right among Republicans from 2004-2012 (while Democrats basically stay put), and then both both parties shooting apart from 2012 forward.
I wonder what was happening in each of those periods?
In 2011, congressional earmarks were abolished — see my comment just above.
My observation, and Scott hints at it, is that this short essay from the NYT identifies the most important cause of polarization https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?_r=0 The reason seems pretty obvious: the current national obsession with identify politics within US large corporations and cultural institutions naturally forces people to follow one of their most basic instincts, which is to take sides with their side.
> Along with the nationalization of politics came a nationalization of news. In the old days, you either read the city paper or watched your one local news channel. Since these papers/channels had both Democratic and Republican readers, they would try pretty hard to avoid offending either group, and had some incentive towards objective journalism.
As far as I can tell, in many other countries, most of the media have always been national, with much of it having various partisan alignments. The American situation where, for a long time, the mainstream media at least tried to be neutral, was somewhat unusual.
This could explain that other countries have long been as polarized as the US is now: their media have always been national and partisan, like the US media are now. I'm not claiming that this is actually the explanation: I have no idea if it is, or if the political polarization charts are even meaningful (especially when compared between different countries).
Always felt that a lot of polarization could be traced back to efforts to get more people involved in politics. Back when I was growing up, a sizeable proportion of the population were ambivalent. A constant refrain (which I was dubious about) was "how do we get more people involved in politics?".
Of course the way you do this is simple. You make it entertaining, and you make it angry. This approach has been so successful that it's hard to read about sport without mostly consuming politics. You could argue that the politics is now secondary, as America's politics serves as the globe's entertainment.
There's a name for the effect where the title followed by the author's name spells out something funny. It's called 'The Man Who Melted Jack Dann'.
http://nielsenhayden.com/jackdann.html
Regarding vetocracy and infrastructure: "American litigiousness developed specifically in the 1970s – it’s exactly how what the authors of the paper call citizen voice is enforced. In contrast, on this side of the Channel, and to some extent even generally on this side of the Pond, laws are enforced by regulators, tripartite labor-business-government meetings, ombudsmen, or street protests. French riotousness is legendary, but its ability to systematically change infrastructure is limited, since rioting imposes a real cost on the activist, namely the risk of arrest and backlash; in contrast, it is impossible to retaliate against people who launch frivolous lawsuits."
From https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/15/costs-are-rising-us-highway-edition/
The "citizen voice" part is later expanded in an article of its own ("surplus extraction").
I'm confused about the claim that low levels of polarization are abnormal. Here's a toy model which explains my confusion. Let's say we have a two-party system which differs only on one dimension (e.g. liberal-conservative). Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that.
This doesn't seem to be the case with Republicans and Democrats. So where does the model go wrong? Well, one way it can break down is if the electorate is polarized and people too far from the center become disaffected and stop voting for "their" parties. My sense was that something like this happened in the 1960s through 1970s - voters were polarized on civil rights before the parties tackled the issue, and 60s counterculture was another (related) source of grassroots divisions. (I got this picture mostly from Bill Schneider's "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable." Schneider also claims that it's the fact that the US is a particularly religious country that has caused polarization to keep increasing past the 60s - the conservative backlash to the 60s counterculture has been much stronger.)
I don't really see how party polarization could ever happen *before* mass polarization. I mean, if we tweak the toy model to reflect the fact that parties aren't one-dimensional, there's another route for polarization: party platforms might move to extremes on issues that most people don't care about either way, and some of the base cares about a lot. Then the public will take its cue from the party and polarize as a result. Something like this probably happened on some issues (gay rights maybe?), but given that the US parties have been getting increasingly unidimensional [https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm "a single dimension accounts for about 93 percent of roll call voting choices in the 114th House and Senate "], this just doesn't seem to be most of the story.
So I guess given the lack of data on mass polarization before the 90s, I would expect that normal people *were* issue-polarized before 2000... though maybe not as affectively polarized?
Does my reasoning check out? I'd love to see holes poked in the toy model.
A major problem with your toy model is that getting people to actually vote is at least as important as converting them to your party. We don't have clientelism to convince people that voting is worth their time, so fear is often used instead. That requires sufficient separation from the other party.
That makes sense, except my understanding is that turnout doesn't actually affect outcomes in presidential elections very much. See e.g. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1246805891493629953 But maybe congressional elections are the right place to look instead.
Whether or not outcomes are effected is a completely different question to whether turnout increased. If there is increased mutual hatred and increased mutual turnout, then the impact on turnout can be substantial, but the impact on the outcome low to none, because both parties draw more voters.
Oh, I see, by "getting people to actually vote is at least as important as converting them to your party" you meant that the parties are engaged in a turnout arms race, and leaving the arms race would result in the other party winning. Got it, thanks.
Exactly.
One big factor this ignores is that while it might be rational for the party *as a whole* to move towards the middle, individual candidates are selected by a smaller electorate of party members, not the general population. Which means that for any individual candidate its rational to appeal to their own base, and in particular the elements most likely to vote in primaries, who tend to be more extreme. You see that in particular right now with moderate GOP congressmembers worried about primary challenges supported by trump
This also concurrs with it being mostly a US phenomenon. It seems that party establishments in most other countries have a lot more power to make their candidates toe a centerist line.
Curent polarization is no mystery. Starting in 2000 Democrats explicitly embraced the strategy set out in "The Emerging Democratic Majority," which was basically to exploit immigration to create a dominant non-white majority.
Then, starting around 2012 (as documented by Jonathan Haight), American Universities basically lost their minds and starting pumping the "woke" ideology that everything that ails society is "whiteness" and "white privilege" and the invisible force of "systemic racism."
Because the MSM is downstream from the university monoculture, they became lockstep propaganda outfits dedicated to propagating the new religion. The essence of wokism is not debate or compromise but morally demonizing your opponents as immoral "racists," "Misogynists," "homophobes," etc. The more you do this, the more morally superior you are to your fellow un-woke Americans, whom you should look down on and despise. The NYT, CNN, NPR, are now dumpster fires of hate directed at Trump voters, Republicans and White people generally.
In short, politics has been transformed from concrete debates about policy -- taxes, spending, healthcare -- to a never ending moral outrage. It is this aspect of moral condemnation that makes the subjects "resentful." For what it's worth, the Democrats initiated this, Republicans and Trumpists are just reacting.
Oh yeah, and Klein is one of the bad people at the front leading this process with the execrable Vox. So it's no surprise that he can't get it. He's a victim of his own propaganda. He can't see anything but virtuous leftists and their bigoted opposition.
In other words, Klein can't diagnose the problem because he is the problem.
Democrats and Republicans weren't exactly the same in the early 20th century. Traditionally Democrats were the party of unions, and labor rights whereas Republicans were the party of business interests. That has been fairly constant, however, as of 2016 Republicans seem to be making inroads with union workers, even as they continue to oppose and dismantle labor laws.
My comment is re: republicans representing "modal" American. I believe that is entirely wrong, as the Trump coalition brought together arm-in-arm Orthodox Jews with Holocaust fans, hispanics with people who thought they are rapists, women with incels, asian immigrants with those who hate immigrants, etc, etc. It's almost beautiful, kinda. The glue that held them all together was a mutual sense of "hey man, on the maga train whatever you want to believe, we won't judge". So whether it's QAnon, falun gong, religious devotion, anti religious devotion, hoping to finish the Holocaust and eliminate the zionists, hoping to empower the zionists, refugees from totalitarian states wanting to make a totalitarian state because it's anti totalitarian (the kind they don't like)... None of this matters, it's just a big tent of broadly anti-liberal individuals and groups.
A final point: the craziest thing on the 2020 campaign was this: Trump ads in Spanish with people waving Mexican and cuban flags. And broadly winning them.
It makes sense for US and Canada to be more affected by trends towards national media, since these are much bigger countries. I'm not sure when Sweden started having national television, but I'm guessing it happened at the same time we got television.
I feel like I've spent most of my adult life surrounded by people claiming we're experiencing increasing polarization and not believing it. I guess that's in part because I tend to take a very long view of history and we live in a country that has historically experienced tremendous internal violence, whereas my own lifetime has been steadily increasing internal peace, marked largely by the decrease in crime since the 90s. That has nothing to do with political polarization, but I remember going to school in a place where we weren't allowed to wear red or blue because kids were getting shot in the streets by whoever was wearing the other color, and whatever hysteria comes from the fact that every now and again kids in the suburbs shoot up their schools, the actual danger of being a person in America is so historically low that whining about government gridlock just makes me sigh. If we can't get optimal tax or housing policy and healthcare costs too much, I guess that sucks, but it's a heck of a lot better than my memories of the news every single night talking about some little girl getting shot in gang crossfire trying to buy ice cream from the ice cream man. That seems like cognitive bias on first glance, but actual statistics bear out that life has gotten much better in the past 30 years by any reasonable measure and that is even more the case globally. Much of Africa and South Asia was very nearly an unlivable hellhole in the lifetimes of people still alive and that is largely not the case any more.
But I've probably been convinced at this point. Even your own comment section has a good 5% or so of people who seem like they wouldn't be out of place on any of the boards I frequent for sports fans, insisting that the other team is everything wrong with the sport, seemingly forgetting that free agency is a thing and the guys they love today they hated just a few years ago. Things have gone tribal, in spite of the fact that I don't buy that Americans really have distinct enough social groups to warrant calling them tribes. I've lived in seven states, born in California, currently in Texas, lived in rural Kentucky and absolute bum fuck Appalachia in North Carolina, and I just don't see it. Talk to people for five minutes and they're the same damn people. But when all they know of each other is the news and the Internet, they seem so easily convinced they're on opposite sides of a grandiose struggle for the soul of the future that will determine whether our great nation stands or falls. That hasn't been true since 1870.
The reasons seem obvious as just-so stories. The news, politicians, addiction-based ad tech companies posing as public squares all have tremendous incentive to incite outrage. But why now and why here more than comparable countries? Do we simply interact with each other less? Is it car culture and unwalkable suburbs? We just aren't physically near enough to actually talk to people as might be more encouraged by the basic literal structure of European cities? Weaker national identities thanks to not having nationality inherently tied in with ethnicity and religion as in many European countries? No near-peer external existential threat after the fall of the Soviet Union forcing us to look internally for the enemy? Or is it really just regression to the mean after a near century of cooperation created by the historical accidents of Dixiecrats and the New Deal Coalition that are now gone? Is comparing the entire United States to any single European country just a flawed comparison? What does the comparison look like if we consider polarization between different parts of Europe? England doesn't seem thrilled with the continent. Germany doesn't seem to be getting along swimmingly with Greece. Russia just invaded Ukraine a few years ago. Is polarization specifically along political party lines really different or are we just turning to the only distinction we can plausibly conceive of with people who can make enough of a local impact for us to care?
I think there's a potential reason why the internet and social media might have played a larger role in polarizing the US, and it's that the US is just more important than, say, Germany. US politics has become a sort of global focal point for political debate. Nobody cares which German party you support, but if you, even as a non American, support the Republicans you can be ostracized by your peers, kicked from discord servers, cancelled on Twitter, etc.
I'm not sure which direction the causality flows, but I'm pretty confident that the internet has been uniquely accelerating of polarization in the US.
Could this be because German parties fall within Germany's Overton Window, and the Republicans do not?
I used Germany as an example, but I don't think the specifics of Germany's politics are relevant. I think I could have picked literally any other country with the possible exception of China and most people would see their politics as less important than the US.
And I could have made the same speculation about any other country. I'm thinking Germans find Republicans unacceptable, worse than any German party, because German parties have to make themselves acceptable to Germans and the Republicans do not.
But the same argument applies to Democrats, does it not? Why would Germans not find both unacceptable?
I think people just see the US as extra important - especially in the online sphere where nearly all major companies are located in the US or China, so rather than fighting political battles in the own countries where even large differences between parties are seemingly less important, they fight US political battles because they seem more important. The media spectacle around US elections could also be somewhat at fault - US elections are much more visible globally than my own Canadian elections.
It could apply to Democrats. But the Democrats happen to be within Germany's Overton Window, even though they don't need to be.
Rereading your comment, I realize I misunderstood it at first. I thought you were saying that *Germans* will ostracise you for supporting Republicans, but don't care which German party you support.
Ah yes, I should have been clearer. I think Germans might in fact ostracize you for which German party you support, but *everyone* might ostracize you over which US party you support.
Even as a Canadian, which has moderately high polarization, US politics just seem much more important, and that's felt true since I became politically conscious ~12 years ago
No mention of 1972 Roe v Wade??? Semi-socialist sympathizing Christians which were long time family Democrats, but believe abortion is wrong - such folk have been essentially exiled from the Dems. And now make up a huge part of the Reps, along with their desires for more (good!) gov't against the older smaller gov't Reps.
Dem control of colleges has also created an elite that is NOT allowed to denigrate others, but it's OK, even encouraged, to denigrate and demonize Republicans.
And Democrats have always loved to Hate the evil ones - so they falsely claim Reps are evil, whenever there is mere policy disagreement.
Racism is now the focus because accusations, including false accusations, can be so damaging to any career; and Dems have little problem in lying about Reps (look at Dan Rather's lies about Bush).
Reps being hated by Dems, especially elitist Dems acting "superior", cause a hate-based reaction.
The "Political Correctness" that has been gaining strength is now more like PC-nazis.
Reps also love to hate - commies or mostly other external enemies.
It's in response to internal Dem hate that is increasing Rep counter-hate.
Often because the Dems claim that Reps hating Muslim terrorists is "racist", and therefore it's OK for Dems to hate Reps - so Reps hate such Dems because they don't agree it racist to hate Islamofascists, and Dem support for such terrorists is anti-American, and Reps love America and hate those Americans who don't.
As late as 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in favor of legal abortion access. I think it's much more likely that the modern focus abortion as a single-issue trump card among social conservatives is an effect of polarization, not a cause.
That is, first other movements (especially the fight against desegregation) unified social conservatives within the Republican Party over the course of the 1970s & 1980s, and only after social conservatives were overwhelmingly in one party but had lost the battle on their original issue, abortion was turned into the next battleground. There hadn't been enough agreement among social conservatives to unify on that issue until polarization created that unity.
Viewing it as a Canadian, I’d say it went something like this. Bush v Gore was widely perceived then and since as being a partisan decision. 9/11 was kind of mixed, but featured lots of infringements of civil rights and things like that. Then there was the Iraq War, which featured lots of “with us or against us” rhetoric, then turned out to have been based on misinformation.
Getting all flustered about Bush was, IMO, legitimate. But then nobody calmed the hell down, in part because it'd been eight years of normalizing people being angry and extreme about these things. And it's just kept building from there.
"He refers to data 'showing Congressional Republicans have moved further left than Democrats have moved right', which I think is a typo (isn't the usual argument that Republicans have moved further right than Democrats have moved left?)"
I listened to the audiobook not long ago, and I believe there this section says "showing Congressional Democrats have moved further left than Republicans have moved right," acknowledging a point you make later in your post. It's a bit challenging to verify that in an audiobook--can anyone else corroborate?
Long time lurker, almost never commentator here. I"m surprised you were confused by why polarization started to get worse among the general public in the US around 2005-ish. The answer is social media.
.... and that's why I don't comment. Looking through comments now lots of people have said the same thing but in a much clearer and intelligent way than me. :)
My working theory for what changed around 2000-2004 in US politics is that, prior to that time, we did not identify things as "red states" or "blue states":
> In the days following the 2000 election, whose outcome was unclear for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular use in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Contemporary_use)
This identification gave rise to a bunch of effects, including feeling like a member of the outgroup if you were "blue" aligned in a "red" state and vice versa (where previously those identities may not have mattered as much in day-to-day life) and also color-coded maps of the US that lent themselves to mistaking land area for political representation (which also activated identities of aggrievement or assailment, depending).
There is an interesting question here about Ireland, because it has a much more polarised politics now. The conventional mainstream media story is "sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and the Global Financial Crisis". I think this misses at least one other big factor (peace in Northern Ireland that has enabled Sinn Féin to legitimise themselves).
The two traditional parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) have both declined in numbers and eventually got forced into forming a coalition with each other - while Sinn Féin now operates as a somewhat left-wing opposition party to the merged neoliberal government.
This poses an alternative way that American politics could have polarised, which is the rise of a third party that would have pushed two neoliberal parties together.
But, well, honestly, I would say that Klein is answering the wrong question. The right question is: given that the US is polarised, how do you design a political system that doesn't completely fall apart. The unique thing about the USA is that it's a political system that enforces a strong form of Duverger's Law (ie pushes to two parties very hard) and also requires cross-party working for effective governance. Other countries are either two-party (Australia, UK) but have a political system that puts one party in power and means they never need votes from the other, or require cross-party co-operation in building a coalition, but are multi-party, and therefore the co-operating parties are still not all parties (Ireland where there's a FF/FG government and an SF opposition, Germany, Netherlands, etc).
[Note that Sinn Féin originates from taking a third position on the 1920s treaty, but that position was so unpopular (it was "restart the war with Britain") that they essentially ceased to exist until 1969 when they were revived by, uh, restarting the war with Brtain (in Northern Ireland) - this means that they are not associated with the treaty/civil war by most Irish people, unlike FF and FG]
I think it's likely that American polarization has structural roots. The U.S. is an unusual country in its combination of first past the post voting and strong presidentialism. Most of the world's most successful democracies (going by ratings from Freedom House or from the EIU Democracy Index) have proportional representation and parliamentary systems. In those systems, the head of state is usually a monarch or an indirectly elected figurehead president, and the head of government (prime minister) is also elected by the parliament. The upper chamber, if it exists, is also usually elected indirectly, and usually is much less powerful than the lower chamber. All this indirect election may seem less democratic superficially, but it arguably has much more democratic outcomes.
In the U.S., very little can be accomplished legislatively unless one party holds the presidency, the House, and 60% of the Senate seats OR there is significant bipartisan cooperation. Once enough polarization has happened that bipartisan cooperation is unworkable, the incentive structure encourages hyper-partisanship, because the only viable path to achieving any political goal in such a system is total domination.
Many structural reforms of varying levels of viability would alter the incentive structure, and would probably make polarization decrease: abolishing the filibuster in the Senate (more parliamentarism), any form of proportional representation in the House such as Lee Drutman's plan to emulate the Irish system that Ezra Klein mentions in the book (less FPTP), reducing the power of the president and/or of the Senate (more parliamentarism), alternative voting systems like approval voting or range voting or ranked choice voting (less FPTP), or alternative executive structures such as delegating some executive powers to the House or replacing the Presidency with a Swiss-style executive council (more parliamentarism).
Why is Canada not polarized? I think it has to do with its level of parliamentarism. Canada has FPTP voting, but, like the Finns in their proportional democracy, Canadians vote only for their district's parliamentary representative rather than directly electing the Most Powerful Person in the Land Who Represents the Soul of the Nation. That's less polarizing. After they vote, a governing majority or coalition forms, which has the power to legislate and get things done instead of just screaming at each other all the time. That's also less polarizing. Seemingly as a result, Canada's main political parties are moderate, political discourse is more about ideas than in the U.S., and voters are less sorted ideologically. Some voters who identity as liberals vote for the Conservative party and some voters who identify as conservatives vote for the Green party. See this paper, which shows this in surprising charts:
https://www.environicsinstitute.org/projects/project-details/political-polarization-in-canada-and-the-u.s
I think reducing polarization via structural reforms is an important cause area for rationalists and effective altruists to focus on. Polarization, or at least its U.S. manifestation, is extremely wasteful of resources (think of the hundreds of millions spent on Senate campaigns this year). It makes political discourse become about demographics and geography and whether people like you feel like they're winning or losing, instead of being about policy and ideas and how to actually make the world a better place. It makes it really hard to get anything done even if it's really important (like stopping climate change). And – I can't back this up with data – but it seems like it's got to be damaging to public health by causing everyone to feel constantly anxious (which, in turn, distracts people from thinking about things that really matter – things like Kelsey Piper's latest Vox article on the history of smallpox eradication and its implications for today). Oh yeah, and it might destroy liberal democracy, leading to autocratic government (which is what usually happened when Latin American countries tried to copy the U.S. system).
As to why polarization is happening so much NOW, I don't know the answer, but I suspect it might have something to do with rising income inequality. See this article (which also discusses some of Peter Turchin's ideas):
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/political-violence-inequality-us-election
I answered it here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-why-were-polarized#comment-1256692
It feels important to say that whatever the case was for the Republican party being different from the Democratic party before the 2020 election, the case now is overwhelming.
Heaps of top Republicans parroted Trump's baseless lies about election fraud. Trump and his faithful encouraged and organized a mob to interrupt the election's certification. Perhaps most concerning to me, 147 members of congress voted not to certify the election results. It's hard to keep track of all the other attempts to obstruct the electoral process along the way, but suffice it to say this wasn't nearly the half of it.
This is all a million miles from the Bernie or AOC contingents, and it's not the least bit fringe: just about the entire Republican party is involved, including almost every one of its biggest names. Let's not let this one go unremembered. Whatever the republican party was in the recent past, a faction of anti-democratic opportunists have since taken the reins, and their influence looks to have fully metastasized.
(In case this sounds like the sort of thing only a leftist partisan could believe, here's a conservative-born publication with hundreds of articles making the same point: https://thebulwark.com/)
So, you recognize that "polarization" can be based on past conflicts or death. You know we had a Civil War in the US over slavery. You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, having supported FDR for an unprecedented four terms as President when he ran on repealing Prohibition, expanding the role of government in helping people, and allying with Communists if need be to protect American ideals. Yet you badmouth the idea that they're just racist or following race-based tribalism.
Plainly, the Fox News Channel, which is a propaganda organization created by Roger Ailes when he left "America's Talking", deliberately made race-based tribalism respectable again. Everyone on the Left who had elderly relatives not on the hard Left reports them going far-right when the cancer known as Fox News got up and running. My late grandfather told me we should put gays in concentration camps, and that was one of the milder changes people have reported.
I also recall your own graph showing that support for immigrants was growing, among Democrats and Republicans, before the pestilent rot called the FNC began. At that point support tanked among Democrats, and stagnated for Republicans. Then, when Democrats realized the FNC narrative was a pile of poisonous lies, support went up to where it might have been naturally. Republicans stayed in the gutter.
I see people still pushing falsehoods about how this happened, so let's be very clear. Roger Ailes was an operative in the Nixon administration who proposed they create GOP TV, in order to counter the media's bias against treasonous criminals. Later, he ran the network that became MSNBC. It was called America's Talking, and it had a talk show hosted by Roger Ailes, as well as a segment purporting to showcase failures of government. That wasn't enough propaganda for Ailes, which is why he left to realize his long-standing dream of founding GOP TV. None of this is secret.
You also rather oddly say that nothing was happening re:race from 2000-2005. Ignoring the whole Iraq War, and everything on Fox News, you also either fail to grasp why Michael Bloomberg had zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination for President, or you choose to ignore the way he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFivw-dB4gA&ab_channel=TheDailyShowwithTrevorNoah">outright lied</a> about facts he later confessed to, on the record.
"You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act"
They did not; it was decades later. I remember, as a child in Georgia in the 1980s, that the South was still solidly Democratic. (I was from a left-leaning household, and was proud of my region for supporting the correct party. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the Dixiecrats were different.)
Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. Bill Clinton was from Arkansas. Al Gore was from Tennessee.
Funny you should mention Al Gore, as he was the first Democratic candidate for President to run after the Fox News Channel really got started. Did you read the rest of my comment?
I read the whole thing. I responded to the part that was wrong. The South's defection to the GOP was not "right after" the Civil Rights Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election#/media/File:1964nationwidecountymapshadedbyvoteshare.svg
I think it's unfair to not mention the (IMO accurate) view that the senate is biased in terms of political representation in the context of the DC and PR statehood arguments. The democratic party picked Biden over Bernie et al in part because it needs to win more than 50% of the vote to win elections. The Republican party has become a lot Trumpier over the past 4 years due to not suffering a penalty for nominating a candidate that lost by 2 million votes. (I know I'm equivocation between the EC and senate here but I think similar arguments hold). I think "reduce electoral bias in favor of Republicans" is a highly plausible antipolarization mechanism and you don't give it a fair reading here.
If I'm following the logic, wouldn't DC or PR statehood reduce polarization on the Republican side, but increase it on the Democrat side? Are you confident that the result is reduced polarization on net?
Probably not. I understand why it would be counterintuitive, but I think it gets at the reality that a lot of people support Democrats as a party is because of the GOP's tendency toward "f off if you would been out of place in a 50s television show" policies, not because they're actually liberal. DC and Puerto Rico are, of course, majority non-white and support Democrats for basically that reason, but minorities tend to not actually be leftists. Black voters are why Biden is president right now rather than Bernie Sanders.
Maybe not, though. California became more or less permanently Democrat after Prop 187 alienated Mexican-American voters in the 90s, but it's just been the white San Francisco crazy types that ended up taking control of the party and not really doing all that much for the working poor or minorities. It's unfortunate that the GOP pushes so many people to the other side just by being dicks and doesn't force the other side to actually implement any worthwhile policies.
The primitive brain Is wired to place more importance on avoiding poisonous berries... primitive people shared danger knowledge in order to survive... The nightly news taps into this primitive fear response.. captivating audiences = ratings = add revenue. Political parties tap into fear and hate captivating, polarizing = growing your base.... the attention economy exploits the primitive brain...whaddyagonnadooo?!
Mostly agree, but I would point out that any kind of propaganda will capitalize on fear of the enemy. Think communist, fascist, American anti-communist propaganda. This begs the question, are current mainstream media fear narratives motivated by a race for ratings or just plain ideological reasons... I one favour the latter.
I wrote about Ezra's failure on this and nailed it 7 years ago. He promptly blocked me:
https://medium.com/@morganwarstler/vox-com-uses-anti-federalism-to-make-americans-hate-each-other-327187201683
tl;dr
Game theory + US system (game rules) = the more power DC gains, the more polarized we become.
The US political system requires "MOVE!" Choose one of 50 sovereign flavors. Americans are the genetic elite of moving. This is the game the founders invented. States compete in a political free market for common currency and labor.
The only hack to the supremacy of the US system people who hate their homeplace so much, they do not MOVE! someplace else, they move to DC and make all states the same, and try to manage the polarization.
Ezra knows this theory and refuses to confront it directly.
https://medium.com/@morganwarstler/vox-com-uses-anti-federalism-to-make-americans-hate-each-other-327187201683
The 1965 Civil Rights thesis feeds Klein thesis that the evil Southerners are evil. But my counter arguments would be to look at the 1965 immigration act.
There was also a delay to immigration that can be objectively measured. There is a handy video on YouTube tracking the source of immigrants to the US. By 1975 the Mexican bar explodes and shrinks the Italian bar to less than 25 percent of the screen by 1980 and keeps climbing.
Was curious and found a video matching that description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlJg2h2NrTM
A few important events seem to be ignored. First, the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas the Cold War used to animate politics before that, now other issues are allowed to come to the fore and determine political discourse. This I think ties into a previous event that was happening behind the scenes: the reorientation of Western leftists from classical Marxism(or the softer democratic socialism in the West) to a more socially minded ideology(cultural Marxism; race, sex, critical theory, Frankfurt School). With the threat of the Soviet Union gone, this new ideology proceeded to wholly envelop the left.
As a non-American, my main concern is that trends arise in the US because of factors within the nation itself, but because it's the world's most powerful and influential country it then goes on to export its problems to countries that wouldn't have them otherwise. (This is mostly the fault of the countries themselves - they look up to America just as much now as they did in the days before bashing it became cool.)
The most toxic, outgroup-demonising, hatred-fomenting examples of American polarisation may be the result of a long buildup of historical processes, driftwood downstream of any number of paradigm shifts that happened decades ago. But when all that hyperaggressive language gets plucked out of that context and dumped into the middle of other national conversations that haven't had all that buildup, it does untold damage. Countries are being divided along all kinds of weird lines now, and I saw the consequences of that playing out in real time during my last years in college (2014-6). Everything in the discourse became worse almost overnight.
We become what we eat, see , hear etc
You walk into a restaurant... it’s an all you can eat buffet ... the catch is that the buffet consists of fruity pebbles, Pork rinds, cocaine, snake tits, and hot sauce.... this is what the media buffet has to offer us.... try to have a healthy state of mind after consuming this....
"One explanation for why Trump did so well among Republicans, despite his apparent forsaking of many Republican sacred cows on the campaign trail, was that he credibly promised to accomplish the one thing most Republicans want from their political leaders - not being a Democrat."
Kind of ironic considering that he used to be a registered Democrat in the past.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because the better the electoral calculus is for the Democrats, the more the Republicans will have to change their strategy, and maybe their new strategy won't involve them being evil racists, and then the Democrats won't have to be so justly and correctly polarized against them (am I being unfair? check page 257 and see for yourself).
Come on, Scott. Yes. Yes, this is obviously an unfair mischaracterization. Let me reference Bryan Caplan's excellent piece on how he self-polices his work: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/how_i_self-poli.html . Specifically, see his Rule #6 and try to imagine saying what you wrote to Klein directly. "Rule #6: If someone says you mischaracterized their work, you almost certainly did. Experts are often wrong, but at minimum they know what they meant."
From Klein's book, the central point on page 257 comes after a discussion of how "There's a broad range of ways to make voting easier ... The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls", and reads:
"It's possible that a more democratic America would be a more Democratic America, but it's also possible that a Republican Party that had to compete for more kinds of voters would reform itself to win that competition. As I noted before, the most popular governors in the country are moderate Republicans leading blue states, so there's no reason to believe the party lacks popular appeal when its incentives are aligned."
You should fix the unfair mischaracterization in your review.
Surely the rapid and radical change in America's demographics and the accompanying emphasis on diversity over unity is the primary cause of the polarization.
I agree with Scott that political polarisation is one of the biggest problems we have, and I am very happy to see him address it.
I too wonder a lot about the causes for polarisation, and for me social media is one of the biggest contenders.
If social media indeed played a big role, it would probably be good to know this and try to affect it.
Alas, Scott seems to be impressed by the graphs showing that polarisation decreased in some countries, for me most notably in Germany, although they too have social media.
So my two cents is:
Germany having become less polarised seems very, very unlikely to me.
If it is indeed true, then there has to be a very interesting difference in perceived and actual polarisation.
Or it is just eastern germany that is polarised.
But I am just sceptical of the overall claim. My perception is that there is a stark, growing polarisation, very similar to that in the US. (although not as pronounced yet)
I actually suspect that we inherit US american ideology to a significant degree.
That's all, sorry for bad english
In the U.K. I was struck by the experience of polarisation over Brexit. I have plenty of friends and colleagues who vote Labour or Conservative, and when 2016 came around, I realised I didn’t have a single friend who voted for Brexit. The divide better matched the natural divisions in the country and the argument felt much tenser than party politics. Since the parties were not perfectly partisan aligned on the issue (ie some Labour brexiteers and some Tory remainers ) there was a kind of vector pressure to move towards perfect alignment as a natural state for the big parties.
But then it ended. First, everybody god bored of it. Brexit is quite a meaty set of policy discussions, and the external negotiation is very tiring to watch. There’s a lot of arcane details and subjects nobody wants to touch, like Ireland. Both parties have their own reason for wanting to move on from talking about it. Second, coronavirus. Now the right wing party in power is uncomfortable with, but nonetheless taking, measures which reduce personal freedom and increase government spending. And polarisation is lower, at least on policy.
Forgive me if someone else posted this already, but I think that what this analysis misses is that the migration of Southern Dixiecrats into the Republican party didn't just happen overnight when Nixon won the 1968 election, but rather was a process that completed in the early 2000s. I grew up in Georgia and I remember my Governor from 1991-1999 was the conservative Democrat, Zell Miller, who went on to serve a term as a Democratic Senator from 1998-2004. One (barely) living former Democratic president is Jimmy Carter, a Georgia Democrat.
This extends throughout the South. In Tennessee, both senators were Democrats until 1994. Keep in mind Al Gore was a TN Senator. His replacement lost the special election in 94, when the other TN Senate seat also flipped red. In Alabama, there was a Democratic Senator until 94. Richard Shelby (who is by the way still serving as a Republican senator from Alabama today) was first elected as a Democrat in 86, and switched party affiliations in 94. Mississippi was a bit earlier, where their Senate seats flipped Republican in 88. Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, which isn't the South but is cultural similar and is now solidly Republican. I could go through every Southern state but it's clear that the process of Dixiecrat conversion to Republicans was a process that mostly finished in the mid-90s, with some holdouts to the early 2000s.
So I think the timeline actually lines up quite nicely in favor of the "Dixiecrats becoming Republicans led to current US polarization" argument. For a long time, even while the South was getting redder, there was still a political and cultural holdout in favor of the Democratic Party. This prevented the Democratic Party from being able to abandon conservativism entirely. In fact, until Obama the Democratic Party's driving impulse was to embrace conservatism in order to prevent the loss of the Dixiecrats. The two Democratic Presidents before Obama were a former Georgia Governor and a former Arkansas Governor (and plenty has been said about Clinton's triangulation). (Plus the Democratic President before Carter was LBJ, a former Senator from Texas, so this trend extends back even further.)
This also prevented Republicans from consolidating the White Christian evangelical vote, because Democrats in the South were still competing for (and winning) these voters. It wasn't until the sorting completed in the 90s-00s that the true mass sort/polarization could take place. The Democratic Party became free to abandon conservatism. It was the first time since maybe ever that the Democratic Party was competitive nationally without any semblance of Dixiecrat or conservative Democrat influence. The Republican Party was free to consolidate the conservative (and White evangelical) vote for the first time without having to compete with (historically better aligned) Democrats for those same voters.
TLDR: I think that the shift of Dixiecrats into Republicans perfectly matches and precedes the populace's polarization trends that Scott shows in this review.
The last paragraph is why I have become much more politically active since I retired. I’ve always been a donor to charities, but no amount of donations will fix the problems that require collection cross nation action.
This seems to be missing one thing which is asking how strongly are people attached to their views and how strongly they despise of the competing ones, rather than focusing solely on what those views are and how many people hold them. If we defined polarization along these lines, I'm sure it grew bigger in all of those other countries as well in recent years.
This seems to be missing one thing which is asking how strongly are people attached to their views and how strongly they despise of the competing ones, rather than focusing solely on what those views are and how many people hold them. If we defined polarization along these lines, I'm sure it grew bigger in all of those other countries as well in recent years.
I think there is an underestimation of how US dominated the Media/Technology political discourse is overseas vs it's impact on polarizing US politics internally. Overseas my news and social media feeds are still heavily US centric. Locally we are seeing a slow emulation of US style political races in recent years, as if everyone here has been watching how ridiculous US politics can be and thought it'd be great to reproduce, but direct polarizing of local politics has been slower since people aren't even talking that much about local races in the first place.
I have seen an increase in local Identity based movements though. Considering the amount of cultural exporting the US has done historically it may just be that other English speaking countries need time to catch up?
Everything Klein writes is true, but there is another level we have to go to to understand our divisions. Truism: Change happens. It never stops happening. it happens in all area of society. We all know this, but somehow we don't make it part of the equation that helps us understand who we are and why we do what we do.
Our divide is so simple. One side embraces change. Likes our growing diversity. Likes our changing attitudes about global warming, women's rights, gay rights, occupations.
The other side wants to stop all of it in its tracks. Trump's people see their way of life slipping away. They see everything they define themselves by under threat. Their religion, their places in the social hierarchy are being undermined by a gaggle of people of color. Their occupations are threatened by technology. Their relations with women are changing. The father, the husband, are losing their places as top dogs in the family and society.
This is nothing new. Whenever big change happens, big resistance fights back. Some passively, some violently. Eventually the more dogged resisters die out and the less dogged make an accommodation with change.
The silver lining in all the dark Trumpian clouds is that the size of the resistance is directly proportional to the change we see happening all around us. If we look at the situation through that lens we can focus on and appreciate all the good things that are changing in all the areas touched on above.
It is called the human drama, folks. Enjoy it like you would enjoy any movie or play or novel. In the end, the good guys always win, but there is plenty of angst in the process for those who won't see it that way. Enough preaching. thanks for the Opportunity.
I think the reason for the polarization is nationalization of every issue. When every issue is decided locally, then national races aren’t as important. When every issue is nationalized, then you have some loony democrat who thinks milk comes from the store making local policy in Kansas, and some Alabama gun-toting racist who has never even met a Jew, making policy for New York City. Nobody is happy, and hating and fearing the other party matters more.
I have always felt that the end of the Cold War was a momentous factor in the polarization of the two parties. People seem to need an enemy and without a common enemy to bind us (The Soviet Union) that need must be filled elsewhere. To me the post 1989 graphs seem to bear that out.
Two quick points. First, media polarization is driving a great deal of the broader polarization. Media generally has been left-leaning, but in the 70s, conservatives (rightly or wrongly; I don't really know enough to have an opinion here) felt like they were being driven out, so they formed their own world. The problem is that their world was _solely about being conservative_. Over the decades, this trend naturally became more extreme, because right-wing media were selling feelings and politics, while the mainstream media were selling primarily fact-based news seasoned, to varying degrees, with opinion.
If anyone is interested, I'd highly recommend _Network Propaganda_ (https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001/oso-9780190923624). You can get the PDF from OUP for free at that link, although I'd strongly recommend the paperback given how many charts there are (it's also a well-printed book, with think paper, vivid colors, etc.---worth the cost). It's very wonky but still manages to be an easy read; it's incredibly well-researched and balanced. Also, just in case: don't read the New Yorker review of it; I've never read a more misleading review; it's absolute garbage. The authors openly and repeatedly disclaim the entire thesis of that review, viz. that Republican voters like being lied to. That is the opposite of the authors' view, so skip that journalistic turd (which is a shame, because I generally respect New Yorker and am not sure what happened there).
Second, drawing equivalence between, let's call it "Sanderism" on the left and the Tea Party is very misleading. The Tea Partiers lavishly costumed themselves in the language of traditional libertarian conservatism, and many mainline Republicans believed it. This is _really important_ to understand what happened. We look back on the Tea Party now and see a lot of racists and cranks. At the time, much of the mainstream media did as well. Elite Republicans and conservative intellectuals did NOT see those elements; they saw citizens motivated by concerns about liberty and self-determination who were being suffocated by an oppressive bureaucratic state.
Elite Republicans looked at the Tea Party and saw a less articulate, less sophisticated, but in some ways more authentic version of the conservative/libertarian views they themselves espoused. Their reasoning was no less effective for being highly motivated. Republicans were delighted to hitch themselves to the Tea Party, being willfully blind to what it really was. By the time it became clear that the libertarian stuff was very much a disposable derivative of the true core---white identity politics---the movement had grown too big to jettison.
Sanderism is different. The guy is a literal Communist and has been his entire adult life. He lived on a commune. He honeymooned in the USSR in 1988, well after the Walter Durantys of the world had been exposed, and the world knew that tens of millions of people had been shot and starved by that murderous regime. He was spewing hagiographies of Maduro in 2019 for heaven's sake! Sanderism, AOC-ism, etc. never had much camouflage to it; it started as Communism and ended as Communism. Democrats never found themselves in the position of having belatedly to learn how insane their new constituency was, because there was never any attempt to hide it. As a consequence, they didn't fan the flames, and they didn't deliberately elevate Socialist politicians.
This is an excellent and thought provoking article, as usual. The one thing I wanted to respond to is this:
"And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because the better the electoral calculus is for the Democrats, the more the Republicans will have to change their strategy, and maybe their new strategy won't involve them being evil racists, and then the Democrats won't have to be so justly and correctly polarized against them (am I being unfair? check page 257 and see for yourself)."
This would have been a good time to surface Klein's prioritization of "pro-democracy" policies. The problem is *not* that Republicans are evil racists. The problem is that the overall electoral maps are tilted towards Republicans, which means that their median policy positions are significantly to the right of the population. The well worn example trotted out to support this is that the 2000 and 2016 elections went to Republicans despite them losing the popular vote. You can also see it in the recent Senate vote to acquit President Trump, in which only 57% of Senators voted to convict, but those Senators truly represented 75% of the population.
Today's GOP is a minority party, representing a minority of voters and yet they routinely find themselves in the political majority. *This* is the problem. In order for Republican politicians to win their primaries, they must appeal to a more right-leaning median voter than Democrats, whose coalitions are less ideologically compressed. It is the Senate that distorts the national political conversation more than anything else, in that the Senate is the least democratically-aligned (meaning majority rules) institution at the national level.
Strongly recommend pairing this with Ygelsias' take on polarization and the leftward drift of Democratic politics over the last 15 years: https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-asymmetrical-polarization-real
Good analysis, I'll have to think on it a bit. My off the cuff reaction to the 2000-2005 time frame for increased polarization is 9/11, the subsequent illegitimate Iraq war, and the rise of Atheism. All of these influences led to harsh criticisms of Islam, which led to considerable discussion and accusations of Islamaphobia (from my recollection), and this maybe seeded the fertile ground for polarization along further racial issues, ie. if fighting Islamaphobia played well in elections or in media, Democrats would double down, as would Republicans for being anti-Islam.
I think it needs to be mentioned that First Past the Post voting rewards partisanship / polarization. This voting requires that a political party needs 50.1% of the votes to win.
A party that can turn its supporters into partisans, will then carry more word of mouth advertising power into each election cycle. Each partisan will be more convincing. Each partisan will not weigh the choice of candidates, but will vote down ballot by party line. Non-partisans will split their ticket.
Therefore, if Party A is filled with non-partisans that agree 70% of the time, and split their ticket accordingly compared to Party B that is filled with die hard partisans that always vote for their party, I expect the statistical advantage for down ballot wins, for winning enough of the swing voters, and voter motivation is going to favor Party B.
I'd be very curious to know what study the graphs about international polarisation are from. Most countries in the first world don't have a two party system and I wonder how that is affecting whatever measure was used. It also seems to me that it the path to polarisation might be quicker when there is only one enemy to point at.
It's easy and convenient (particularly for liberals) to link changes in partisanship with a backlash to the Civil Rights Act. But this linkage completely ignores how the South compared to the rest of the US before WWII, both economically and politically. Basically the South was an relatively poor agrarian society pre WWII that voted 90%+ Democrat in state and national elections. Republicans didn't bother to even run candidates for many elections. Other regions of the country were more industrialized and had a more even partisan split.
Post WWII, the South's economy began to catch up and the South's partisan split began to resemble the rest of the country. This is evident in Senate and House races in the 50's, well before the Civil Rights Act. There is no doubt that backlash to Civil Rights played a part in the partisan re-alignment, but IMO economic trends played a much larger role.
The last paragraph of the review talks about how the most effective altruism of politics might be addressing polarization. I've independently come to the same conclusion and would like to recommend four nonprofits that I think are good for this. Most of these are political reforms aimed at electing candidates that better represent a districts values but I secretly hope that if the political center had more power then thought and rhetoric might follow.
Open Primaries advocates that everyone be allowed to vote in primary elections, not just Democrats and Republicans on the general theory that these elections are super important so it would be nice to enfranchise folks and on the more specific theory that it will make the candidates less extreme. They also sometimes talk about nonpartisan primaries where you could conceivably nominate a moderate candidate that neither major party's base particularly liked.
The Center for Election Science advocates for approval voting where you get to vote for as many candidates as you want instead of just one. This way if you're mostly motivated by hating the bad party then you can vote for the good party and also the moderate and again we could conceivably elect a moderate that nobody really hated.
FairVote advocates for ranked choice voting and multi member districts. RCV is almost as good as approval voting and multi member districts are super interesting. In a 10 member district if 10% of the population is libertarian then you get to send 1 libertarian candidate to congress. Of course you're not going to have a majority but a seat at the table is pretty good and if neither major party ends up with a majority then minor parties are really going to get to have an impact on policy.
Finally Braver Angels simply tries to get people from opposite parties to talk with and try to understand each other. Seems like this pretty directly makes people have less animosity towards the other side.
(New reader, and first time commenter, so apols for any etiquette fails)
For anyone interested, I remember reading a blog that once alluded to some form of data regarding party polarization drift over time.
Their context/analysis is in an answer to a question here:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2019/Pres/Maps/Mar02.html#item-3
And they link to the data source here:
https://voteview.com/about
"This does not seem obvious to me. Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
But you yourself have acknowledged that Hillary's policy positions are more rational than Trump's, and furthermore, that Hillary has comparatively modest expectations for what her policies can achieve while Trump is far more of a utopian. So if Democrats have been able to move towards relatively rational policy positions despite them violating what was once party doctrine, whereas Republicans have kept doubling down on the same bad ideas they've been pushing for decades and insisting if they just stick with what hasn't worked in the past it will somehow bring about utopia, doesn't that mean Ezra is correct that partisan polarization is worse on the Republican side?
You say you don't know why we became more polarized in the early 2000's. Plenty of research studies point to the rise of Fox News as that cause. When cities got Fox News, those cities became more polarized.