From Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein, 2020) pp11-3
“Partisan” is a pejorative in American life. The statement “Americans have become much more partisan since 1972” isn’t neutral. It reads as an indictment. An insult. Partisanship is bad. It’s unthinking, angry, even un-American.
Partisans are the ones George Washington warned us of in his farewell address. They:
put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
Nasty stuff.
Washington’s address prefigured much of what was to come in American politics. As the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote in the New Republic, it was a “highly partisan appeal delivered as an attack on partisanship and on the low demagogues who fomented it.”,5 Washington delivered the speech, cowritten by Alexander Hamilton, as America was splitting into a two-party system —the Federalists, led by John Adams and Hamilton, and the Democratic Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Washington was, in effect, a Federalist, and in warning against the development of factions, he was warning against those who had arisen to challenge his chosen successors. As Wilentz wrote, “Washington’s address never explicitly mentioned Jefferson or his supporters, but its unvarnished attack on organized political opposition was plainly directed against them.”
If Washington’s intervention was partisan, his instincts were thoroughly American. This has been the balance Americans have struck ever since: a system defined by political parties whose existence we decry. We mistrust ideologues and partisans. We venerate centrists, moderates, independents. In a telling experiment, Samara Klara and Yanna Krupnikov cued subjects to think about political disagreements and then handed them photographs of strangers, some of whom were identified as independents and others of whom were said to be partisans. The independents were rated as more attractive, “even when, by objective standards, the partisans were actually more attractive.” In another test of the theory, Klar and Krupnikov found that Americans are nearly 60 percent more likely to call themselves “independents” when they’re told they need to make a good impression on a stranger. Being independent isn’t about whom you vote for. It’s about your personal brand.
Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people— you and me-reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes.
What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.
Since 1994, the Pew Research Center has conducted massive surveys of American political opinion, and the findings are stark. In 1994, for instance, 39 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans said discrimination was the main reason many black people couldn’t “get ahead” in society. By 2017, the number of Democrats who agreed with that statement had jumped to 64 percent, while the number of Republicans who agreed with it was just 14 percent.
Similarly, in 1994, 32 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed that immigrants strengthened the country. By 2017, that had jumped to 84 percent of Democrats but only 42 percent of Republicans.
In 1994, 63 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats agreed that poor people had it easy because they could get government help without doing anything in return. By 2017, the number of Republicans who agreed with that statement had risen slightly, to 65 percent, but the number of Democrats who agreed with it had tumbled to 18 percent.
“The bottom line is this,” concludes the report: “Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.”
It’s worth being clear about what this means: if you’re a Democrat, the Republican Party of 2017 poses a much sharper threat to your vision of a good society than the Republican Party of 1994 did. It includes fewer people who agree with you, and it has united around an agenda much further away from yours. The same is true, of course, for Republicans peering at the modern Democratic Party.
This isn’t just a quirky finding of the pollsters. It’s visible in even the most cursory look at the parties’ governing agendas-indeed, it’s arguably been caused by the sharp divergence in the parties’ agendas.*
* This speaks to perhaps the biggest chicken-or-the-egg question in the polarization literature: Are political elites polarizing and the public is simply following along? Is the public polarizing and political elites are responding? My synthesis, which will become clearer over the course of the book, is that everyone engaged in American politics is subject to the broader forces of polarization. The more engaged you are, the more polarized you become. So yes, political elites are polarizing more and faster than the public at large, but as the public tunes in, it becomes more polarized, too. And since politicians are most responsive to the part of the public that is most polarized, we’re all living in a hyper-polarized system and being faced with polarizing choices, whatever our personal level of polarization.
Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes, for instance. That would be unthinkable in today’s Republican Party, …
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