THE AGE OF POLITICAL SEGREGATION
You don't know me, but you don't like me.
— Homer Joy, "Streets of Bakersfield"
How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't
know one Bush supporter?
— Arthur Miller
In the spring before the 2004 election, I heard from LaHonda Jo Morgan. Jo
Morgan lived in Wauconda, Washington, a one-building town (combination
grocery, café, and post office) about 150 miles northwest of Spokane. She
was convinced that Wauconda remained on the map "simply because
mapmakers don't like to leave a lot of empty space on their products." Jo
Morgan was writing about segregation — political segregation. She had seen
an article I had written about the tendency of places to become politically like-
minded, either increasingly Republican or Democratic. She noticed that the
article came from Austin, her hometown. So she recounted that through fifty
years of marriage, she had lived in a number of places across the United
States and elsewhere in the world. And then she described a change she
had noticed taking place in Wauconda:
This is a predominantly conservative area with most residents tied
to ranching, mining and apple orchards. A few years back I began to feel
somewhat disconnected in my church community, but I chalked that up to
the struggle between pre– and post–Vatican II concerns. Since the strife of
the 2000 election, I became increasingly uncomfortable in conversations in a
variety of situations. Perhaps I had more flexible views because of having
been exposed to different cultures. In fact, I felt like a second-class citizen,
not entitled to have opinions. I even wondered if I [was] becoming paranoid
since being widowed.
Of course, now I understand. Increasing divisiveness arising from
political partisanship is giving rise to the same sort of treatment I observed
growing up in racially segregated Texas, only now it is directed at people who
think differently from the majority population of an area. Sort of scary, isn't it?
Jo Morgan was right about Wauconda changing. In 1976,
Okanogan County inWashington had split fifty-fifty in the nearly fifty-fifty race
between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. That made sense. Americans in
1976 were more likely to live close to somebody who voted differently from
themselves than at any time since the end of World War II. And then, like the
rest of the country, Jo Morgan's community changed. Okanogan County
went for Clinton in 1992 and then veered Republican, strongly so, in the next
three elections. In 2000, 68 percent of Okanogan County voted for George W.
Bush. No wonder Jo Morgan felt lonely.
Bonfire of the Yard Signs
But "scary"? I kept a file of the more outrageous examples of political anger
in 2004. They ranged from the psychotic to the merely sad. There was the
Sarasota, Florida, man who swerved his Cadillac toward Representative
Katherine Harris as she campaigned on a street corner. (Harris had been the
Republican secretary of state in Florida during the presidential vote recount in
2000.) "I was exercising my political expression," Barry Seltzer told police.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported just a week before the election
that "when an 18-year-old couldn't convince his girlfriend that GeorgeW. Bush
was the right choice for president, he became enraged, put a screwdriver to
her throat and threatened to kill her." The man told her that if she didn't
change her vote, she wouldn't "live to see the next election." Two old friends
arguing about the war in Iraq at an Eastern Kentucky flea market both pulled
their guns when they got tired of talking. Douglas Moore, age sixty-five, killed
Harold Wayne Smith because, a witness said, "Doug was just quicker."
The destruction of campaign yard signs and the vandalism of
campaign headquarters was epidemic in 2004. The Lafayette, Louisiana,
Democratic Party headquarters was struck twice; in the second assault,
miscreants wrote "4 + GWB" on the building's front windows in a mixture of
motor oil and ashes collected from burned John Kerry signs. The most
pathetic display of partisan havoc started at the Owens Crossroads United
Methodist Church near Huntsville, Alabama. The youth minister at the church
sent children on a "scavenger hunt" shortly before the election. On the list of
items to be retrieved were John Kerry campaign signs. Once the kids toted
the placards back to the church, the minister piled them in the parking lot
and set the signs on fire. The scavengers did the best they could, but in
Republican Huntsville they found only eight signs, barely enough for kindling.
Had the same hunt taken place in, say, Seattle, the kids could have rounded
up enough fuel to signal the space shuttle.
Living as a political minority is often uncomfortable and at times
frightening. In 2000, more than eight out of ten voters in the Texas Hill
Country's Gillespie County cast ballots for Bush. Two years later, Democrats
prepared a float for the Fourth of July parade in the county seat of
Fredericksburg. "We got it all decorated," county party chairman George
Keller recalled, "but nobody wanted to ride." Nobody wanted to risk the
stigma of being identified as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican
area. "Thank goodness we got rained out," Keller said of the orphaned float.
Gerald Daugherty used to live in the hip and shady section of
Austin known as Clarksville. When he became active in a campaign against
a proposal to build a light rail system in town, Daugherty put no light rail
bumper stickers on his car and on his wife's Mercedes. That apparently
didn't go over too well in Democratic and pro-rail Clarksville.
Somebody "keyed" the Mercedes at the local grocery and for good measure
punched out the car's turn signal lights. Was Daugherty sure the damage
had been politically motivated? Not really. But then one morning he found his
car coated with eggs. "There must have been two dozen eggs all over my
car," he remembered. "Splattered. And then deliberately rubbed on the 'No
Rail' bumper stickers. You knew where that was coming from." So Daugherty
sold his house in a precinct that gave George W. Bush only 20 percent of the
vote against Al Gore. He bought a place in a precinct where two out of three
people voted Republican in the same election. Two years later, Daugherty
became the only Republican elected to the county governing body. His move
out of Clarksville, he admits, was a political exodus. He left a place where
he "stuck out like a sore thumb" and moved to a neighborhood that was more
ideologically congenial. He reasoned, "You really do recognize when you
aren't in step with the community you live in."
People don't check voting records before deciding where to live.
Why would anyone bother? In a time of political segregation, it's simple
enough to tell a place's politics just by looking. Before the 2006 midterm
elections, marketing firms held focus groups and fielded polls, scouring the
countryside to find the giveaway to a person's political inclination. Using the
most sophisticated techniques of market profiling, these firms compiled a
rather unsurprising list of attributes.
Democrats want to live by their own rules. They hang out with
friends at parks or other public places. They think that religion and politics
shouldn't mix. Democrats watch Sunday morning news shows and late-night
television. They listen to morning radio, read weekly newsmagazines, watch
network television, read music and lifestyle publications, and are inclined to
belong to a DVD rental service. Democrats are more likely than Republicans
to own cats.
Republicans go to church. They spend more time with family, get
their news from Fox News or the radio, and own guns. Republicans read
sports and home magazines, attend Bible study, frequently visit relatives,
and talk about politics with people at church. They believe that people should
take more responsibility for their lives, and they think that overwhelming force
is the best way to defeat terrorists. Republicans are more likely than
Democrats to own dogs.
None of this is particularly shocking. We've all learned by now
that Republicans watch Fox News and Democrats are less likely to attend
church. Okay, the DVD rental clue is a surprise, and Democrats in my part of
town own plenty of dogs, but basically we all know these differences. What is
new is that some of us appear to be acting on this knowledge. An Episcopal
priest told me he had moved from the reliably Republican Louisville,
Kentucky, suburbs to an older city neighborhood so that he could be within
walking distance of produce stands, restaurants, and coffee shops — and to
be among other Democrats. A journalism professor at the University of North
Carolina told me that when he retired, he moved to a more urban part of
Chapel Hill to escape Republican neighbors. A new resident of a Dallas exurb
told a New York Times reporter that she stayed away from liberal Austin
when considering a move from Wisconsin, choosing the Dallas suburb of
Frisco instead. "Politically, I feel a lot more at home here," she explained.
People don't need to check voting records to know the political flavor of a
community. They can smell it.
Picking a Party, Choosing a Life
To explain how people choose which political party to join, Donald Green, a
Yale political scientist, described two social events. Imagine that you are
walking down a hall, Green said. Through one door is a cocktail party filled
with Democrats. Through another is a party of Republicans. You look in at
both, and then you ask yourself some questions: "Which one is filled with
people that you most closely identify with? Not necessarily the people who
would agree were you to talk policy with them. Which group most closely
reflects your own sense of group self-conception? Which ones would you like
to have your sons and daughters marry?" You don't compare party platforms.
You size up the groups, and you get a vibe. And then you pick a door and
join a party. Party attachments are uniquely strong in the United States.
People rarely change their affiliation once they decide they are Democrats or
Republicans. No wonder. Parties represent ways of life. How do you know
which party to join? Well, Green says, it feels right. The party is filled with
your kind of people.(Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, working in the 1940s, saw
the same kind of policy-free connection between parties and people. In his
book Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), Lazarsfeld wrote: "The
preference for one party rather than another must be highly similar to the
preference for one kind of literature or music rather than another, and the
choice of the same political party every four years may be parallel to the
choice of the same old standards of conduct in new social situations. In
short, it appears that a sense of fitness is a more striking feature of political
preference than reason and calculation" (p. 311).)
How do you know which neighborhood to live in? The same way:
because it feels right. It looks like the kind of place with boys and girls you'd
like your children to marry. You just know when a place is filled with your
kind. That's where you mentally draw a little smiley face of approval, just as
my wife did as we moved from Kentucky to Austin in 1999.
Texas voted in 2005 on whether to make marriage between people
of the same sex unconstitutional. Statewide, the anti–gay marriage
amendment passed with ease. More than seven out of ten Texans voted for
it. In my section of South Austin, however, the precincts voted more than
nine to one against the measure. The difference between my neighborhood
and Texas as a whole amounted to more than 60 percentage points. It's not
coincidence that in our narrow slice of Austin, a metropolitan area of more
than 1.4 million people filling five counties, the liberal writer Molly Ivins lived
just five blocks from the liberal writer Jim Hightower — and at one time we
lived five blocks from both of them.
During the same years that Americans were slowly sorting
themselves into more ideologically homogeneous communities, elected
officials polarized nationally. To measure partisan polarization among
members of Congress, political scientists Howard Rosenthal, Nolan McCarty,
and Keith Poole track votes of individual members, who are then placed on
an ideological scale from liberal to conservative. In the 1970s, the scatter plot
of the 435 members of the House of Representatives was decidedly mixed.
Democrats tended toward the left and Republicans drifted right, but there was
a lot of mingling. Members from the two parties overlapped on many issues.
When the scholars fast-forward through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,
however, the votes of the 435 representatives begin to split left and right and
then coalesce. The scatter plot forms two swarms on either side of the
graph's moderate middle. By 2002, Democratic members of Congress were
buzzing together on the left, quite apart from a tight hive of Republicans on
the right. In the mid-1970s, moderates filled 37 percent of the seats in the
House of Representatives. By 2005, only 8 percent of the House could be
found in the moderate middle.
Members from the two parties used to mingle, trade votes, and
swap confidences and allegiances. (In 1965, half the Republicans in the
Senate voted for President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare bill.) That kind of
congressional compromise and cross-pollination is now rare. More common
is discord. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank and David Broder reported
in early 2004 that "partisans on both sides say the tone of political discourse
is as bad as ever — if not worse." Former Oklahoma congressman Mickey
Edwards said that on a visit to Washington, D.C., he stopped at the
barbershop in the Rayburn House Office Building. "And the barber told me, he
said, 'It's so different, it's so different. People don't like each other; they don't
talk to each other,'" Edwards recalled. "Now, when the barber in the Rayburn
Building sees this, it's very, very real."
The Myth of Polarization
Some very smart people have questioned whether the American public is
polarized to begin with, whether there really are vast and defining differences
among Americans. Some argued that, viewed over the centuries, the
increase in geographic segregation since the mid-1970s has been minor, a
subtle fluctuation — and compared to the Civil War period, that is certainly
the case. At the same time, Stanford University political scientist Morris
Fiorina proposed in the mid-2000s that Americans were not particularly
polarized in their politics: "Americans are closely divided, but we are not
deeply divided, and we are closely divided because many of us are
ambivalent and uncertain, and consequently reluctant to make firm
commitments to parties, politicians, or policies. We divide evenly in elections
or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center while the
parties and candidates hang out on the extremes."
Fiorina argued that the fractious politics Americans were
experiencing were wholly a result of polarized political leadership and
extreme issue activists. Elected officials might be polarized, the professor
wrote, but people were not. Journalists miss what's really happening in the
country, he contended, because "few of the journalists who cover national
politics spend much of their time hanging out at big box stores, supermarket
chains, or auto parts stores talking to normal people . . . When they do leave
the politicized salons ofWashington, New York and Los Angeles, they do so
mainly to cover important political events which are largely attended by
members of the political class . . . The political class that journalists talk to
and observe is polarized, but the people who comprise it are not typical."
Fiorina announced that his book was needed to debunk what he
described as the "new consensus" that Americans were deeply divided. In the
meantime, however, Fiorina's view became the new truism. Jonathan Rauch
wrote in the Atlantic that when scholars went to look for the red and blue
division, "they couldn't find it." Joe Klein in Time blamed the "Anger-Industrial
Complex" for ginning up a division that didn't exist in real life. Columnist
Robert Kuttner scolded a "lazy press corps" for overplaying the red and blue
division when "the reality is quite different." Fiorina's argument was even
picked up in 2005 by the yellow pages of conventional wisdom, Reader's
Digest.
The abortion question was a favorite of those who contended that
the middle was wide and the fringe narrow. Both Klein and Kuttner used
abortion as such an example. Likewise, E. J. Dionne wrote in the Atlantic
that "60 to 70 percent of us fall at some middle point" on most issues. Dionne
wrote that only 37 percent of the people interviewed in a 2004 Election Day
exit poll said that abortion should be "always" legal or "always" illegal. Indeed,
if we accepted the notion that a person who believed that abortion should be
legal for victims of rape but illegal for victims of incest qualified as a
moderate, then we would find nearly twothirds of the population in
the "middle" on this issue. (Dionne saw a much larger division in June 2007
after reviewing a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The Pew poll
revealed that Republicans and Democrats had entirely different concerns and
opinions about foreign and domestic policy. The Washington Post columnist
wrote: "Our two political parties and their candidates are living in parallel
universes. It's as if the candidates were running for president in two separate
countries" (June 1, 2007, p. A15).) But a late 2005 poll from Cook/RT
Strategies posed the abortion question in a slightly different way. Instead of
asking if abortions should "always" be illegal or legal, Cook asked if people
were "strongly pro-life" or "strongly prochoice." In response to that question,
the "middle" — those who were only "somewhat" committed to a position —
shriveled to 25 percent. Those who felt "strongly" about this issue totaled 70
percent of the population, split just about evenly between the two poles.
This kind of ideological allegiance has grown over time, as
successful politicians know. Bill Bellamy has been an Oregon state
representative and was a Jefferson County commissioner in the small town of
Madras when we talked in 2005. Madras is on the dusty side of Mount Hood,
where the Cascades flatten into fields that circle around irrigation rigs. In
Bellamy's real estate office parking lot, a cowboy pulled in with a blue heeler
barking and twirling on the toolbox just behind the back window of his pickup.
In Portland, trailer hitches are bright chrome and virginal. Here a trailer hitch
ball has seen some action. "In 1976, when I first ran and they would ask me
my position on abortion, out of one hundred people, it was really important to
only ten of them," Bellamy said. "By 1988, when I ran for the [state] senate,
out of that one hundred people, for probably sixty of them it was very
important."
Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz argued that
Morris Fiorina "systematically understates the significance" of divisions over
abortion, gay marriage, and other cultural markers. Abramowitz collected
national polling data to show that differences among Americans were deep
and growing deeper, increasing between 1972 and 2004, just the period when
the country was segregating geographically. People who identified
themselves as Democrats thought differently about issues than those who
considered themselves Republicans. And those differences — on issues
such as abortion, living standards, and health insurance — were growing
larger. People's evaluation of George W. Bush in 2004 were more divided
along party lines than at any time since the National Election Studies started
asking questions about presidential approval in 1972.
The sharp divisions among Americans appeared again in the
results of the 2006 midterm elections. Voters split most dramatically on the
war in Iraq: 85 percent of Democratic House voters said the invasion had
been a mistake, compared to only 18 percent of Republican voters. But those
divisions extended to most other issues. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats
were strongly pro-choice, compared to 21 percent of Republicans. Only 16
percent of Democrats supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage, a
position favored by 80 percent of Republicans. Nine out of ten Democrats, but
less than three out of ten Republicans, felt in November 2006 that
government should take some action to reduce global warming. Plotted on a
graph of how they felt about the issues of the day in November 2006,
American voters didn't form a nice, high-peaked bell, with most people
clustered toward the happy ideological center. Instead, there was a deep,
sharp V, with voters pushed hard left and right. How many voters wavered
between the two parties as true independents in 2006? About 10 percent.
The Origins of Division: Gerrymandering or Conspiracy?
Typically, two reasons are given to explain our polarized politics. The most
popular is gerrymandering: through years of redistricting, politicians have
packed their districts to produce overwhelming majorities, creating such
partisan uniformity that there is no reason or call to compromise. We elect
extremists, especially for Congress, the argument goes, because politicians
have drawn their districts to be extreme. And when legislators come out of
these partisan districts — districts where the two parties don't compete —
they push the entire country into a choice between the far left and the far
right. Voters polarize not because everyday Republicans are all that different
from everyday Democrats, but because political leaders are ideologues.
The second explanation — one favored by Democrats — holds
that conservative activists built an interlocking structure of propaganda and
money that moved the Republican Party, and the nation, to the right. The aim
of the New Right after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 was to exacerbate divisions
in the country and then exploit them.
Gerrymandering is a convenient — and popular (The Washington
Post editorial page has assured us that "American elections are growing ever
less competitive while squeezing out moderates from both parties and
polarizing politics. This is in part because politicians get to choose their
voters, rather than the reverse, and so they draw districts that are reliably
Republican or Democratic. The system corrodes democracy" (November 15,
2005). Juliet Eilperin, who wrote Fight Club Politics, a fine book on Congress,
claimed in the Washington Post that by "segregating voters according to
party loyalty, redistricting has insulated incumbents of both parties and
dulled competition" (November 13, 2005). Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The New
Yorker about the "difficulty of unseating incumbents, especially in
congressional districts that, over the years, have been gerrymandered into
single-party redoubts" (May 29, 2006). Elizabeth Drew, in the New York
Review of Books, wrote that one reason for the ideological intransigence in
Congress is the redistricting of the House, "in which both parties collude, and
which has put more and more House seats out of contention" (February 12,
2004). And this is what I wrote in the Austin American-Statesman on October
24, 2004, before I fully understood the Big Sort: "State legislatures have
drawn representative districts that are increasingly one-sided. Because so
many districts are dominated by a single party, primary elections determine
who will sit in most legislatures, and primaries are usually won by the most
ideologically strident candidate." After not one California congressional or
state legislative district changed parties in 2004, Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger proposed an end to legislative redistricting, asking, "What
kind of democracy is that?" (San Diego Union-Tribune, January 12, 2005).) —
explanation because it does conform to an objective reality. Every ten years,
legislators do, in fact, redraw districts, and an ever-increasing number of
those districts are becoming more ideologically lopsided. Gerrymandering
also has science behind it. Legislators use "powerful computers," which
make the process nefariously exact. In addition, the gerrymandering thesis
has "bad guys" — better than bad guys, really; it has politicians. Elected
officials, not moderate-loving voters, have caused the problem and deserve
the blame.
It's certainly true that congressional districts have grown largely
uncontested. Even in the middle of an unpopular war, 90 percent of
incumbent members of Congress were reelected in 2006, and although the
number of competitive races increased, only 66 out of 435 House races were
at all close. And it's true that House districts, on average, have grown
overwhelmingly either Democratic or Republican since the 1970s. By 2004,
nearly half the members of Congress came from districts that had
unassailable majorities. The question, however, is whether the increase in
ideologically pure districts was caused by redistricting.
There are several arguments against the gerrymandering thesis.
The first is that political parties aren't in the business of building
supermajorities for incumbents. Parties exist to maximize their number of
representatives. This imperative causes parties to spread votes around,
creating more districts with, say, 10- to 15-point majorities and fewer with
lopsided constituencies. Studies of redistricting have found that,
indeed, "partisan redistricting often has the effect of reducing the safety of
incumbents." (This is exactly what former House majority leader Tom DeLay
did in the infamous 2003 redistricting escapade in Texas. Confident of
reelection, DeLay reduced the Republican majority in his district to bolster
the fortunes of a neighbor. Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker ("The Great
Election Grab," December 8, 2003) predicted that this redistricting decision
could cost DeLay his seat, but we'll never know whether he was right. DeLay
decided not to seek reelection in 2006. A Democrat won that seat, but only
by 10 percentage points.) The results of the 2006 midterm elections provided
some evidence that Republicans lost races not because they had been
making seats safer, but because they had spread their majorities a wee bit
thin. In Pennsylvania, Democrats targeted districts where Republican
margins had been shaved through redistricting and narrowly picked up three
seats. "If Republicans had been a little less aggressive (in redistricting), they
could have won several of those seats," Nathaniel Persily, a redistricting
specialist at the University of Pennsylvania told the Wall Street Journal. "If
they gave the Democrats one more seat, they could have shored up by
several percentage points the other seats."
It doesn't appear that redistricting caused much, if any, of the
increase in homogeneous districts. After all, if gerrymandering created
landslide districts, you'd expect to see an increase in noncompetitive
districts immediately after redistricting. Legislatures would draw new districts
after the census and, bing-bang, there would be fewer competitive districts.
That didn't happen. After each of the last three redistricting cycles (1980,
1990, and 2000), there were no immediate jumps in lopsided districts. When
Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz examined the effects of
redistricting in 2000, he found that the number of supersafe House seats
(those with presidential vote margins of more than 20 percent) had increased
by two, from 201 to 203. That's hardly a sign of much horseplay. Abramowitz
found similar small effects after redistricting in the 1980s and 1990s. (After
redistricting in 1980, in fact, the number of noncompetitive districts slightly
decreased.) If legislative gerrymandering had caused the lopsided House, its
effects certainly had been subtle, or perhaps one should say "prescient." For
the districts hadn't grown more partisan at the time of redistricting,
Abramowitz found. They had grown more partisan later, in the years between
redistricting, when the districts' boundaries remained unchanged. From the
first post-redistricting election in 1992 until 2000, the number of ideologically
lopsided districts jumped from 156 to 201, but not a single district changed
shape in those years. (Redistricting may not have had much to do with why
incumbents did so well in the 1990s, but money certainly did. Even in
districts where Democrats and Republicans lived in near equality,
incumbents had a big advantage in fundraising. Abramowitz found that from
the early 1990s to 2002, median spending by incumbents in competitive
districts increased from $596,000 to $910,000. Median spending by
challengers in those same districts fell from $229,000 to $198,000.)
Vanderbilt University's Bruce Oppenheimer looked at this
phenomenon in another way. There are seven states with only one member of
Congress. Five are red (Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming), and
two are blue (Delaware and Vermont). But none have had their legislative
boundaries gerrymandered. Oppenheimer cobbled these seven districts into a
single, hypothetical "state." He compared this sevendistrict "state-of-states"
with twenty-six actual states with a similar number of districts in three very
close presidential elections: 1960, 1976, and 2000. Oppenheimer checked to
see which had become more lopsided, the made-up state-of-states with the
static borders or the real states where politicians and their infernal computers
had gerrymandered to their hearts' content.
Between 1960 and 2000, no real-life state saw partisan vote
margins in its congressional districts increase more than in Oppenheimer's
hypothetical state-of-states. Manipulative politicians in the twenty-six states
had four chances to make their congressional districts less competitive, but
even so the districts didn't match the lopsidedness that appeared naturally in
the state-of-states. (In 1960, twenty-four of twenty-six real-life states had less
competitive districts than Oppenheimer's state-of-states. By 2000, however,
only four of the twenty-six similar-size states (Alabama, Maryland, Indiana,
and Massachusetts) had less competitive districts on average than
Oppenheimer's state-of-states. "These data raise doubts about the ability of
redistricting schemes to explain the decline in the underlying party
competitiveness of congressional districts," Oppenheimer wrote. (Others have
come to similar conclusions. Keiko Ono at the University of Oklahoma found
that there was little evidence that gerrymandering was responsible for the
increase in noncompetitive districts. Ono wrote that there was a trend toward
more like-minded districts, but it was part of a "longer, secular decline in the
underlying competitiveness of House districts since the mid 1980s"
("Electoral Origins of Partisan Polarization in Congress: Debunking the
Myth," Extensions: A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and
Studies Center [Fall 2005]).)
If not gerrymandering, then how about conspiracy? Democrats
have argued that the elections of 2000 and 2004 — and the concurrent
polarization of the nation's politics — were the culmination of a forty-year
effort by Republicans. The story goes like this: In the wake of the Barry
Goldwater defeat in 1964, Republicans devised a grand scheme. They built a
tightly wound, highly coordinated movement from the top down. Corporations
and foundations paid for think tanks and advocacy groups, which supplied the
movement with ideas and leaders. The right created its own media — talk
radio, Christian television networks, and conservative- minded college
newspapers — in this centrally managed, machinelike plot to split the
country ideologically and then establish a permanent majority. The result of
this multigenerational effort lay in the Republicans' congressional victory in
1994 and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Certainly, the conservatives wanted to take over. Winning, after
all, is one goal in politics. But a conspiracy? One piece of evidence used to
support the existence of this far-sighted plan is a 1971 memo written by
Lewis Powell, the soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court justice. Powell,
writing to a friend with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned of an "attack"
on the "free enterprise system." In the early years of the George W. Bush
administration, liberals unearthed this obscure manuscript and gave it nearly
mythic significance. Former Democratic senator Bill Bradley described
Powell's note (in what surely is an oxymoron) as a "landmark memo." The
right had used the memo, Bradley wrote, as a "blueprint" to construct
a "pyramid" of foundations, think tanks, and advocacy groups, all designed to
support an interchangeable Republican leader. Pick — or mix! — your
metaphor of all-embracing power. Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham
described the "Republican propaganda mill" as "tentacles of rage." He
transformed Powell's memo into a "manifesto" that held for the political right
the "hope of their salvation." According to Lapham, Powell's "heavy word of
warning fell upon the legions of reaction with the force of Holy Scripture."
(Lapham quoted Powell's warning: "Survival of what we call the free enterprise
system lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and
implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in
the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political
power available only through united action and national organizations.")
Skipping several generations, the bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos
Moulitsas Zuniga wrote in 2006 that the Powell memo "eventually helped fuel
nascent efforts to create the most sophisticated, well-funded political
propaganda machine in world history," Joseph Goebbels notwithstanding.
The belief on the left is that the machine (or mill or pyramid or
giant squid) built of foundations, radio programs, and organizations powered
the Republican comeback. The right-wing mechanism paid for scholars'
sharp pencils and book contracts. Young leaders were fledged through
summer camps, internships, and jobs with Republican congressional
representatives until they could become self-supporting members of the
movement. The right established a shadow society that built, grew, and
eventually took over in the name of religion and free enterprise. And the entire
operation was funded by the businesses that had suffered at the hands of
Democratic government.
Mark Schmitt, the former director of policy at the liberal Open
Society Institute, called this phenomenon the "legend of the Powell memo."
He found few historians of the conservative movement who even mention the
memo. For example, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's chronicle
The Right Nation gives the Powell memo exactly three sentences. (In
explaining why beer maker Joseph Coors put up $250,000 in seed money for
the Heritage Foundation in 1973, Micklethwait and Wooldridge wrote: "Coors
was prodded into action in 1971 by a 5,000-word memorandum from Lewis
Powell, an old-style Southern Democratic attorney (and later Nixon appointee
to the Supreme Court). Powell argued that capitalism was under broad attack
from some of its most pampered products — the liberal intelligentsia. He
accused the business class not just of appeasing its critics, but also of
financing their anticapitalist activities, and urged them to stand up more
vigorously for their interests" (pp. 77–78).) Moreover, Schmitt wrote, Powell
was "far out of touch" with what would become the New Right. The memo
was given an iconic status by liberals searching for some explanation of their
minority standing in national politics. (Conspiracy was a more appealing
theory than a simple lack of popular support.) Best of all, this explanation
was duplicable: the left could write its own Powell memo and create its own
matrix of foundations, think tanks, and leadership programs. (James
Piereson, executive director of the conservative, and now defunct, Olin
Foundation, observed that the left had a "near-obsessive interest in
conservative philanthropies." [Piereson argued in the Wall Street Journal that
the left's interest in the "supposedly nefarious strategies and tactics" used by
foundations on the right ignores the ideas and policies that came out of the
effort. A "particularly sinister role is ascribed to those conservative
philanthropies that have helped fund thinkers, magazines and research
institutions — on the assumption that no one would advance such self-
evidently meretricious ideas unless paid to do so."]) Schmitt contended that
the "reality of the right is that there was no plan, just a lot of people writing
their own memos and starting their own organizations — some succeeding,
some failing, false starts, mergers, lots of money well spent, and lots of
money wasted." There is some truth to the conspiracy stories. Republicans
schemed and conservatives talked of creating a "shadow society"; they set
up alternative foundations, research groups, and media outlets. Of course,
Democrats schemed, too, and the left had its own support in the foundation
world. But conservatives better understood the changes taking place in the
country, and that is why, for a time, Republicans were more successful
politically. Republicans didn't create a movement. They recognized the
cultural shifts taking place across the country — the Big Sort — and then
channeled what was happening into politics, to their advantage.
What both gerrymandering and the forty-year conservative
conspiracy arguments miss is that politics is a two-way street. It flows both
from the top down and from the bottom up. Most explanations for our current
partisanship — gerrymandering and conspiracy are two good examples —
are top-down only. They assume that public opinion follows the lead of
presidents, politicians, and Capitol Hill journalists. In this worldview, elites (be
they elected officials, media barons, or a cabal of well-funded Republicans)
use the power of money or position to push society in a particular direction.
Voters are largely powerless in this process. They just choose one of the
alternatives that legislative manipulation, media bias, and party propaganda
provide.
But politics is bottom-up as well. Society changes and politicians
follow. The Big Sort is the story of real differences in the way people think, in
what they value, in how they worship, and finally in where they live. The
divisions in Congress aren't simply the consequence of manipulations by left-
wing interest groups or the outcome of plots hatched in a bunker deep under
the Heritage Foundation. The divisions are the reflection of how — and
where — people have come to reside.
A less conspiratorial explanation for why national politics has
grown more partisan over the past thirty years can be found in the studies of
congressional redistricting. Alan Abramowitz and Bruce Oppenheimer looked
at the evidence of increasing geographic polarization we first presented in the
Austin American-Statesman in 2002 and 2004, and they came to the same
conclusion: people have been sorting. Abramowitz: "Americans are
increasingly living in communities and neighborhoods whose residents share
their values and they are increasingly voting for candidates who reflect those
values." Oppenheimer: "A final theory that I offer to explain the decline in
partisan competitiveness at the congressional district level rests on the
increased mobility of Americans and the corresponding growth in the freedom
to select where they will reside."
The Politics of Place: What's the Matter with Ohio?
The overwhelming attention given to political celebrity — and political
conspiracy — in our time has obscured the politics of place. If people simply
respond to the faults, successes, and foibles of political elites, then it really
doesn't matter that people are taking up residence in increasingly
homogeneous neighborhoods. But politically like-minded regions practice a
different kind of politics than do places with a greater mix of allegiances. Our
politics are affected by our neighbors. Following is one example.
In the early 1960s, political scientist John Fenton wondered why
working-class voters in Ohio supported Republicans, a political act that was
against their economic interests. Fenton explained this phenomenon by
looking at the shape of the state's neighborhoods. Upper-class voters lived in
tightly knit, geographically compact communities. Physical proximity made it
easier for them to maintain political cohesion, to move and vote in an
ideological herd. In Ohio's large number of midsize cities, however, there was
no corresponding critical mass of workers. Working-class voters were
dispersed. "In Ohio you had a fairly even distribution of these working-class
voters across the state," explained the University of Maryland's James
Gimpel. "And because they lived among farmers and clerks and ditch
diggers, they were not as inclined to vote so monolithically." In nearby
Michigan, Gimpel said, working-class voters lived close to one another, and
their geographic proximity powered their ideological and political intensity. In
Ohio, however, workers were spread out, and the effect of this diffusion,
Fenton wrote more than forty years ago, was "profound . . . The postman did
not talk the same language as his accountant neighbor, and the accountant
was in a different world from the skilled workman at Timken Roller Bearing
who lived across the street. Thus, conversation between them usually took
the form of monosyllabic grunts about the weather . . . The disunity of unions
and the Democratic party in Ohio was a faithful reflection of the social
disorganization of their members."
Thomas Frank recently bemoaned the failure of Great Plains
residents to vote in their economic interests and asked, "What's the Matter
with Kansas?" Frank's answer was that manipulative Republicans who offered
intelligent design rather than a living wage had duped working-class voters in
his home state. In addition, thin-blooded liberals who had gotten above their
populist raisings had abandoned Democratic principles. When John Fenton
asked a similar question more than forty years ago — What's the matter with
Ohio? — he arrived at an explanation that didn't depend on either gullibility or
duplicity. Fenton found that the way people lived — and the communities
they lived in — shaped their political lives.
Unlike Ohio of the early 1960s, political divisions today are as
much a result of values and lifestyle as they are of income and occupation.
And with those divisions has come a pervasive and growing separation.
Americans segregate themselves into their own political worlds, blocking out
discordant voices and surrounding themselves with reassuring news and
companions. For example, it's not surprising that supporters are more likely
to watch a president's speech, whereas opponents tend to change the
channel. But the spread between viewers and channel changers has been
expanding. The Gallup organization found that during the Clinton
administration, the television audience for the yearly State of the Union
address was on average 9 percentage points more Democratic than
Republican. Under George W. Bush, however, the audience from 2001 to
2005 averaged 21 percentage points more Republican than Democratic. In
1995, the viewing audience for Clinton's State of the Union address was
evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. By the
time Bush addressed the nation in 2005, 52 percent of the audience was
Republican, 25 percent was Democratic, and 22 percent was independent.
More and more, Americans watch and read the news that fits their political
proclivities and ignore the other side. And should the choice between Fox
News (on the right) and National Public Radio (on the left) seem impersonal,
discriminating liberals can bob about the Caribbean on a cruise with writers
from the Nation, while conservatives can board a different ship for a trip
hosted by William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.
The United States of "Those People"
Is the United States polarized? Maybe that's the wrong term. What's
happening runs deeper than quantifiable differences in a grocery list of values.
Despite the undeniable sameness of places across America — is a
PetSmart in a Democratic county different from a PetSmart in a Republican
county? — communities vary widely in how residents think, look, and live.
And many of those differences are increasing. There are even increasing
differences in the way we speak. (Linguist William Labov of the University of
Pennsylvania, one of the authors of The Atlas of North American English, told
National Public Radio in February 2006 that "the regional dialects of this
country are getting more and more different. So that people in Buffalo, St.
Louis and Los Angeles are now speaking much more differently from each
other than they ever did" (Interview, All Things Considered, National Public
Radio, February 16, 2006, http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?
storyId=5220090).) Over the past thirty years, communities have been busy
creating new and different societies, almost in the way isolated islands foster
distinct forms of life, but without a plan or an understanding of the
consequences.
The first half of the twentieth century was an experiment in
economic specialization, as craft production gave way to assembly lines;
cabinetmakers became lathe operators or door assemblers. The second half
of the century brought social specialization, the displacement of mass
culture by media, organizations, and associations that were both more
segmented and more homogeneous. We now worship in churches among
like-minded parishioners, or we change churches, maybe even
denominations, to find such persons. We join volunteer groups with like-
minded companions. We read and watch news that confirms our existing
opinions. Politics, markets, economies, culture, and religion have all moved
along the same trajectory, from fragmentation in the nineteenth century to
conglomeration in the twentieth century to segmentation today. Just as
counties have grown more distant from one another politically, regional
economies are also separating — some booming and vibrant, others weak
and dissipating. Mainline religious denominations gained parishioners through
the first half of the twentieth century, the age of mass markets, but lost
members beginning in the mid-1960s to independent churches designed for
homogeneous communities. Media, advertising, city economies — they've all
segmented, specialized, and segregated.
In the mid-1970s, when counties were becoming politically
integrated, most other measures of public life showed low levels of political
separatism. The differences that we take for granted today were muted. For
instance, how often a person went to church didn't mark him or her as a
Democrat or a Republican. Women voted slightly more Republican than
Democratic. The Democratic vote was slightly more rural than the
Republican. Less than half the population saw important differences between
the parties. The proportion of people describing themselves as true
independent voters reached post–World War II highs. Fewer than half of
Republicans described themselves as conservative. People often split their
vote between Republicans and Democrats. Votes in the U.S. Congress were
more bipartisan than at any time since World War II.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the movement toward political mixing
slammed to a halt and headed in the opposite direction. Women became
more allied with the Democratic Party. (Pollster Anna Greenberg reports that
the gender gap, which grew to a 16-percentage point Democratic advantage
in the 1996 and 2000 elections, shrank to only 3 percentage points in 2004
("Mind the Gender Gap: Why Democrats Are Losing Women at an Alarming
Rate," American Prospect, December 2004, p. 28).) Rural areas and frequent
churchgoers became more Republican. The percentage of independents and
ticket splitters declined. People grew more ideological. Democrats were
increasingly liberal; Republicans were increasingly conservative. Voters saw
greater differences between the parties. Congressional Quarterly reported
that 2005 was the most partisan year in Congress in the half century that the
venerable publication had been keeping count.
The tale we've been told and have come to tell ourselves is that
society cracked in 1968 as a result of protests, assassinations, and the
melee in the streets of Chicago. Informed by the Big Sort, we can now see
1968 more as a consequence of gradual change than as a cause of the
changes that followed. Old political, social, religious, and cultural
relationships had begun to crumble years earlier. American culture had
slowly shifted as people simultaneously grew richer and lost faith in the old
institutions that had helped create that wealth: the Democratic Party, the
Elks, the daily newspaper, the federal government, the institution of marriage,
the Presbyterian Church. Party membership, newspaper circulation, trust in
government, and the number of people in the pews of mainline churches all
declined at the same time.
The old systems of order — around land, family, class, tradition,
and religious denomination — gave way. They were replaced over the next
thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our
own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-
minded sources of news and entertainment. As we will see later in this book,
like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in
their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result,
we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what's
right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the
newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we
hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.
Politicians and parties have exploited this social evolution, and in
doing so, they have exacerbated partisanship and division. Elites have
always been more partisan, more extreme, and more ideological than regular
voters. But today moderates on all sides are rebuffed, and those who seek
consensus or compromise are squeezed out. Paul Maslin, Democratic
presidential hopeful Howard Dean's pollster in 2004, explained it this way:
If I had to say one true statement about the entire process you are
describing, I think that at the national or state level, it's making life
increasingly difficult for people who are trying to thread the needle, to find the
swing voter. In a way Karl Rove and Howard Dean and [Dean campaign
manager] Joe Trippi were all right here. It's probably one of the things that's
driving our politics into a more polarized situation. While the swing vote and
the classic vote in the middle still matter, you are much more willing to say
now that you ignore at your peril your own base. Because as everything
spreads apart, the base becomes more important because they are
demographically more together. You don't have a whole bunch of 51-49
communities out there. You have more and more 60-40, 65-35, 70-30 places.
Well, you better damn well be sure you maximize your 70-30 votes, whether
it's inner-city African Americans or liberal, educated Democrats or whether
it's suburban, conservative Republicans or small-town, main-street, or
Evangelical Republicans. We have to maximize our base, and they have to
maximize their base. Ergo, polarization.
The country may be more diverse than ever coast to coast. But
look around: our own streets are filled with people who live alike, think alike,
and vote alike. This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We have
built a country where everyone can choose the neighborhood (and church and
news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we
are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of
like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't
know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of "those people" who live
just a few miles away.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Big Sort by Bill Bishop Copyright © 2008 by Bill Bishop. Excerpted by permission.
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