US political polarization is getting *very* bad

[Jimmy Higgins]

I don't like the term "consistently" being used. It sounds like the term should be "maniacally". Those on the the "consistently" sides of the spectrum thought compromise meant that their side gets everything they want. That is absurd. What I don't get from the graphs is that somehow the Democrats have become more liberal. Where?! Why are there no liberals in Congress? Meanwhile the Tea Party group has elected people to the Senate. The graph implies a somewhat equal shift from the center. Is that really what is happening?

 

[Blahface]

Polarization of the parties and of political views are related but separate issues. Even if there are the same number of extremes conservatives and liberals today, there would still be party polarization, due largely to the Republican "Southern Strategy" that started in the mid 1960's as a conscious effort by the Republican party to gain seats and power by appealing directly to conservative christian racists (yeah, largely redundant) and their resentment of civil rights movements. Their positioning of themselves and their efforts to paint the Dems as the party of anti-conservative (i.e., egalitarian, pro-women and minority values attracted the most the more extreme conservatives to the Repubs and drove non-racist, non-sexist moderates toward the Dems.

This has made the Repubs the party controlled by extremist white social conservatives, and Dems the party supported more by any person not willing to have racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious intolerance be the driving forces of public policy.

Polarization of beliefs could be a partial consequence of party polarization. As the base voters of the parties became more clearly defined by social issues, the messages of the parties have been crafted to emphasize the importance of those issues. Political rhetoric increasingly focuses upon things related to gender, race,and sexuality as the sole things to be concerned with, whether from a conservative or liberal perspective. Along with that comes an increase in the irrationality of the rhetoric, and abuse of science and statistics towards those ideological ends.

In addition, the polarization of the parties on these social issues means that it has become prudent for many voters to oppose the other party in general, which means opposing any and all members of the opposing party and not wanting them to get any positive credit for anything, because these ultimately support the core agenda of the party as a whole. This will manufacture an increase in the polarization on other issues that otherwise might find more common ground if not for ties to opposing parties.

We could solve this with non-partisan primaries with approval voting and allowing the top two to runoff in the general. It would stop party polarization end parties as we know it today.

 

[Petrel]

Sure, but who wants a fair election?

 

[boneyard bill]

Political Polarization in the American Public | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

US political polarization is getting *very* bad. The graphs are very revealing: the Democratic and Republican peaks are moving apart with much more separation than in the early 1990's. The numbers:
[table="width: 500"]
[tr] [td]Year[/td] [td]Dem[/td] [td]Rep[/td] [/tr]
[tr] [td]1994[/td] [td]70%[/td] [td]64%[/td] [/tr]
[tr] [td]2004[/td] [td]68%[/td] [td]70%[/td] [/tr]
[tr] [td]2014[/td] [td]94%[/td] [td]92%[/td] [/tr]
[/table]

• Dem: fraction of Democrats more liberal than the median Republican
• Rep: fraction of Republicans more liberal than the median Democrat

This is the *average*. Among the less political, the peaks are closer but still becoming more separate in recent years. Among the more political, the peaks are farther apart. Among politicians,

Forty years ago, in the 93rd Congress (1973-74), fully 240 representatives and 29 senators were in between the most liberal Republican and most conservative Democrat in their respective chambers. Twenty years ago (the 103rd Congress from 1993-94) had nine representatives and three senators in between the most liberal Republican and most conservative Democrat in their respective chambers. Today, there is no overlap.

But those with liberal positions were much more likely to describe themselves as moderate than those with conservative positions.

There is also a growing trend to have an unfavorable view of the other party, though with Republicans feeling more strongly about that than Democrats.

Another interesting thing is how people of each party viewed recent Presidents. Not surprisingly, people of each party tended to prefer Presidents of the same party. But what is interesting is how same-party and opposite-party preferences compare.

Variations in approval rather roughly track each other. What increases or decreases the popularity of a President for one party also does so for the other party. So the partisan gap remains roughly constant.

But it's interesting to compare that gap for different Presidents.

For Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, it was about 30%. But for Reagan, it jumped up to 50%, though for Bush I, it went down to 30%. For Clinton and Bush II, it returned to 50%, and for Obama, it reached a whopping 60%.


Where they like to live is revealing.

Where they like to live is revealing.

Both liberals and conservatives like being near extended family, high-quality public schools, and access to the outdoors for hiking, fishing, and camping.

Liberals prefer cities, schools, stores, and restaurants in walking distance even with smaller and closer houses, access to art museums and theaters, and a mix of people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Conservatives prefer small towns and rural areas, larger and more separated houses even if with schools, stores, and restaurants being several miles away, many people sharing their religious faith.

Nobody seems to like suburbs very much.


Liberals like watching MSNBC, while conservatives like watching Fox News.


Liberals would be unhappy if a family member was to marry a Republican, a born-again Christian, a gun owner, or someone who didn't go to college.

Conservatives would be unhappy if a family member was to marry a Democrat, an atheist, someone of a different race, or someone from another country.


Both liberal and conservative partisans want compromises to go in their direction, though liberals profess to prefer politicians willing to compromise. In-between people prefer more equal compromises.


What's going on?

The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America | Social Evolution Forum and Polarized America Page take the long view, noting that US political polarization has gotten as bad as it had been around the turn of the 20th cy.

Cliodynamics, Peter Turchin – The history of inequality, The Road to Disunion | Social Evolution Forum

Pardon me, but I'm a little confused here. They are saying liberals believe certain things and conservatives believe other things. But the context seems to suggest that these are not definitions of liberals and conservatives but rather that those definitions are based on something else. But what is a liberal or a conservative apart from his beliefs? Are these self-identified liberals and conservatives? Or is the author separating people into certain these categories and then labeling them after the fact? If that's the case, then he's just giving us his opinion of what liberals and conservatives believe.

 

[boneyard bill]

Polarization of the parties and of political views are related but separate issues. Even if there are the same number of extremes conservatives and liberals today, there would still be party polarization, due largely to the Republican "Southern Strategy" that started in the mid 1960's as a conscious effort by the Republican party to gain seats and power by appealing directly to conservative christian racists (yeah, largely redundant) and their resentment of civil rights movements. Their positioning of themselves and their efforts to paint the Dems as the party of anti-conservative (i.e., egalitarian, pro-women and minority values attracted the most the more extreme conservatives to the Repubs and drove non-racist, non-sexist moderates toward the Dems.

This has made the Repubs the party controlled by extremist white social conservatives, and Dems the party supported more by any person not willing to have racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious intolerance be the driving forces of public policy.

Polarization of beliefs could be a partial consequence of party polarization. As the base voters of the parties became more clearly defined by social issues, the messages of the parties have been crafted to emphasize the importance of those issues. Political rhetoric increasingly focuses upon things related to gender, race,and sexuality as the sole things to be concerned with, whether from a conservative or liberal perspective. Along with that comes an increase in the irrationality of the rhetoric, and abuse of science and statistics towards those ideological ends.

In addition, the polarization of the parties on these social issues means that it has become prudent for many voters to oppose the other party in general, which means opposing any and all members of the opposing party and not wanting them to get any positive credit for anything, because these ultimately support the core agenda of the party as a whole. This will manufacture an increase in the polarization on other issues that otherwise might find more common ground if not for ties to opposing parties.

This is the typical view that you would expect from someone who watches MSNBC so I have to think that this survey was probably correct on that point if no other. But this stereotype of conservatives leaves liberals utterly clueless on these issues and leaves them scratching their heads when they lose.

It's foolish to watch any mainstream media. When they're not propagandizing they're simply mis-informing due to their own ignorance. Fox News is bad, but MSNBC is far worse. CNN isn't as propagandistic but they are a whole lot stupider.

 

[boneyard bill]

It's not hard to imagine that there was little polarization in 1960 because the two candidates took almost identical positions. If anything, Nixon may have been a tad more liberal than Kennedy. Certainly, his policies were more liberal when he finally achieved the presidency. But Republicans took a right turn in 1964 when Goldwater people gained power in some of the Southern states. After the CRA of '64, those Southern Republicans who wanted to expand the party by appealing to the black vote lost out to those who felt they had a better chance by appealing to Southern whites. But conservatives still could not command a majority of the delegate votes for president. That did not happen until Reagan in 1980, and that was probably due to Roe v. Wade which gave rise to the right to life movement. But even then, the conservative dominance was temporary. But the center of gravity in both parties was also shifting. Sometime during, or shortly after, the Carter Administration Democrats quit calling themselves liberals. It had become a dirty word. I'm not quite sure why, but I would associate it chronologically with the rise of feminism. Like the gay movement today, feminists had far more influence in the Democratic party than their numbers warranted. But the use of the term liberal faded at just about the time that the term "politically correct" became popular. So I would suggest that liberal came to carry the same kind of connotation as political correctness. People would get called as "male chauvinist pigs" for using the term "history" and not balancing it with "herstory" for example. I'm not aware of any Democrat politician these days who calls himself a liberal although it may still be used by people who follow politics but don't seek office. But even now it seems like the term "progressive" is coming back into popular use among liberals. Of course, Republicans use the term "liberal" all the time, but it is always meant as a pejorative.

Republicans took another right turn in 1994 when the took control of Congress by winning a bundle of Southern seats. More important, they won control in many Southern legislatures which gave them control over re-districting. The big issue there was gun control. Reagan had supported the Brady bill and even solid conservatives like John Kasich had voted for it, but after the '94 election it became a litmus test for both parties. Why Obama keeps bringing it up is beyond me. It's a clear loser.

Conservatives thought they had elected one of their own in 2000, but Bush turned out to be a big disappointment. Very early in his first term there were grumblings among conservatives about Bush. If wasn't something the media ever reported on of course, they never get the story right. But on conservative blogs and boards it was very obvious.

2004 was the high-water mark for the old conservatism. They rallied around Bush, but the old conservatism was dead. The neocons had taken over and they proceeded to nominate McCain and Romney. But beneath this is the split between the neo-cons, the libertarians, and the paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan. The Tea Party represents the rise of a new conservatism that mostly unites the libertarians and the paleo-conservatives against the moderates and the neo-cons (who have actually been moderates all along anyway).

So how does this explain the increased polarization since 2004? I really don't have any specific theory to offer for this. The neo-cons and the moderates have become more isolated within the Republican Party. They still control the RNC, and they still represent the big money. But big money doesn't reflect the views of the grass roots.