The Politics of Polarization

"Attitudes on the efficacy of force and diplomacy, and on the obligations of Americans to fight for their country, are now by far the strongest predictors of whether a person is a Republican or a Democrat."

Okay, so being an R means you support the use of force and should fight for your country.
Being a D means you support diplomacy and don't feel prepared to fight for your country.

The article then goes on to identify a smaller group of "liberals" within D voters:

"Liberals differ not only from other Democrats but from the country as a whole. Not only are they younger, better educated, and more prosperous; they are less likely ever to have been married or to have children in their home. They are more likely to be secular in their orientation, only half as likely as other Americans to have attended religious services weekly, and only one third as likely to have participated in Bible study or prayer groups; 61 percent of liberals oppose displaying the Ten Commandments, versus only 22 percent of all Americans. A remarkable 80 percent of liberals favor gay marriage; less than one third of their fellow Americans agree."

The article then says: ""While social issues and defense dominate today's political terrain, it is in these areas that liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats but from Americans as a whole."

Then we get Huntington's characterisation of these people as "denationalized elites in this and other countries—highly educated people who feel a loyalty more to secular liberal principles than to their own country. Such elites and their nonelite counterparts now constitute a large and, in 2004 at least, dominant segment of one of our political parties."

"Their nonelite counterparts" presumably meaning black D voters.

Barone then defines it as a problem for the Democratic party that these people dominate it, when they're such an atypical cross-section of American public opinion, and have such a different outlook.

The fact he fails to address is that while these people aren't a numerical majority, they are an elite, that is, they are socially ascendant, in some sense the leaders of society. They are, in fact, what makes America great; its prize-winners and inventors, its scientists, the ones making the very weapons that the bellicose masses want to see used. And the real problem is this rift between the worldview you need to be great in the modern world -- a secular, rational worldview -- and the worldview of the majority of Americans. What happens when a society loses faith in, and understanding of, its own elites? What happens when the elites are no longer capable even of communicating with the masses, who are in political league (attitudinally, though not materially) with the richest 1%?

i think much of why rightwingers use this term(aside from certain persuction mindsets) is sarcasm; the "elite" don't deserve to be there.

Even though I suspect you're about to get rhetorically pwned by ethan, I agree with a lot of that momus. I think you need to go more into "greatness". Subsistance has to occur before nobels, right? (maybe not, I don't know).

But here's why that doesn't matter: while this is the easy way to put a face to liberal ideas, I'm still not convinced it's the right face AT ALL.

Shh, not that capital, we don't want that. We want the good hearty American GREEN kind.

In my experience, the term more refers to elites as people who have never done anything practical or have no real world experience--i.e. the elites of academia who spend their whole lives in a fit of mental masturbation while the rest of the country is actually experiencing life as it happens. The wingers I know consider those "elites" pious and ultimately naive, and only (perhaps) slightly undeserving in their elite status. ("He's never held a real job or started a real company or hired anyone or been responsible for a balance sheet blahblahblahblah...")

Jesus christ, this is the most fucking pretentious statement I have ever seen here in a long time. (Sorry, Don.)

"65 percent [of liberals] favor reducing the federal budget to cut the deficit"

I guess a clue comes on the next page: Kerry and Edwards are out of touch with conservative popular opinion because they voted against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq. The fact is that liberals want big state spending on health and education, but not on war. Conservatives want the state to shrink away its social support structures, but not its war chest. So conservatives are happy to see the government expand, as long as this expansion is mostly due to issues of war and security and what they see as national prestige.

Unfortunately, as this Economist article explains, America must correct its current overspending. Its citizens must start saving more, and its government must borrow less from foreign banks, which currently hold more than 50% of US treasury debt, and are keeping the value of the dollar artificially inflated. If current trends continue there will be a sudden "correction", a crash in the value of the dollar which will destabilize the whole world economy. But, as the Economist says, there seems to be little political will in the US to lower deficits; treasury responsibility is seen as a "liberal" policy.

Sorry, how is it pretentious, exactly? I mean, it's massively MISTAKEN but I don't think it's THAT hard to find someone who believes it, on some level...? Ah wait, since we're cross-posting now I realize that you imagine it being said by a mid-level manager of widgets and I imagine it being said by people who fix and/or make things for a living.

xpost

Now, traditionally liberals want the state to spend more, and conservatives want the state to shrink and spend less.

yeah, but momus, this has always been bullshit. the whole "shrink the government" thing has ALWAYS referred to programs that conservatives didn't like(e.g. Dept of Education). They never called for an abolishment for the sections of government that they see as upholding conservative principles(e.g. CIA/NSA/FBI/Dept of Justice/Dept of HS/defense contracts/etc). In other words, lots of support for cops, troops, and feds.

It's only been since reagan that the neocon/grovquist thing happened and they still wanted all these things, yet never really felt like paying them(thus the reduction in funding to first responders/veteran's benefits/the VA/etc).

yeah, who's lead more of a "real life"? Dubya, Kerry, or Clinton?

[To be honest my sense is that -- educationally speaking -- there's a bit of a Republican super-elite. The big liberal chunk seems to be the general base of people who get bachelors degrees from decent institutions. But by the time that thins out toward super-elite law degrees and high-level economics PhDs and so on, you develop whatever class of conservative intellectuals winds up circling around D.C. (Which is the one kind of conservative that semi-"intellectual" liberals at least has some sense of how to talk to and understand.) This is flat-out stereotyping but this whole notion of liberal or conservative "elites" is about stock characters from the beginning; I'm just trying to sort out who those stereotypes start playing.]

them lib'ruls drinking lattes! doesn't matter that there's starbucks and borders/B&N's in every strip mall in america, only them blue state pussy-ass lib'ruls drinkin' them!

I think that conservatives and liberals can disagree about what to spend federal dollars on. But I see no reason why both sides can't agree that hurtling willy-nilly into hock with foreign creditors is not a sustainable policy.

That's called the intelligentsia in plain English. America has often times given the finger to intellectuals and still doesn't trust them like other cultures do. One of the basic principles of liberalism is that it trusts articulate rationality of third parties (i.e. central planning) over the inarticulate knowledge of the masses and that is one reason why it doesn't appear popular in America. Central planning and power given to "experts" are turned down in favor of the stock market and other inarticulate ways of common people spreading resources and knowledge with no "rational" explanation for doing so or why (at least when looked at by third parties).

One reason intelllectuals act so peeved with democracy and with America so much is because we give as much power to the farmer as we do to the intellectual. Their votes are worth the same thing. How can the intellectuals lord over everyone when voting gives as much power to a pastor or a farmer as it does to intellectuals? Don't they know that they are the ones holding all the knowledge?

Thought I highlighted this too.,

Anyway so the desire isn't to seize more power than the farmer -- the frustration is having no purchase to convince the farmer of your rightness, what with having been trained to arrive at that rightness through an intellectual system that's just not the preferred method of thought and decision-making for the country you live in. I have no doubt that conservatives quite often feel exactly the same way.

rasheed OTFM.

Add to that newsrooms, and OTM.

You can't equate voting with power in this way. Come on, people vote once every four years, if that was the sum total of their social and political power it would be a sorry thing indeed. Social power comes from your ability to add value, to acquire and expend cultural capital, to be tied into networks that advantage you, to earn money... all things that the educated and the bourgeois do better than others. In fact, voting Republican could be seen as a passive aggressive revenge, once every four years, by the failures, on the successes. And being a success could be seen as having the minor downside of being politically impotent, and being alienated from the feelings and thoughts and habits of the majority. It's a small price to pay, perhaps.

Lakoff's mentioned this. Talking about how left-leaning folks keep going on about "if only the facts get out, people would change their minds." It's like we deal with a leftover aspect of the Age of Elightenment, this idea that all people are rational beings who act in their self-interest after a careful consideration of obviously value-neutral facts. Problem is that people, especially in groups, ain't exactly controlled by rationality and logic at their core.

Thus people's tendencies to vote by "their values"(i.e. a particular narrative) as opposed to "their pocketbook" or "their own interests".

Bitch of it is that one group figured this out 30+ years ago, and used it to gain power, and the other side(i.e. us) are just now starting the process of catching up.

I have no doubt that conservatives quite often feel exactly the same way.

i wonder if this part, however, is still a holdover from the years that they weren't in (as much) power. it can make things easier if you still function under a persecution complex.

not to pick on you, nabisco ... but my OWN peevish frustration w/ (fellow) liberals is that their "rationality" are often just rationalizations for their own self-interested behavior and that they flatter themselves by thinking that their arguments and appeals are "ostensibly careful" and "logical" and therefore those not persuaded are just dumb-dumbs who are incapable of thinking logically or grasping their supposedly "complicated and logical" thoughts.

(which isn't to say that such liberals are WRONG as far as their policy preferences are concerned. but they aren't aware of their own limitations, if that makes any sense.)

i agree with this. i do think that more self-awareness needs to be around in all sections. yeah, it's hard enough for me to do it, too...

But that's often the case! The whole point with using facts and rational arguments is that they can be tested and proven to be true or false. An example would be someone who votes for a Republican governor because they say he will lower taxes but then that same person won't listen to reason when you explain that they are actually paying more in taxes this year because the Republican governor made some minor income tax decreases but increased local property tax and sales taxes. In that scenario, the person doesn't want to listen to reason because he's buying into the narrative that the Republican is a "tax cutter" and no set of facts and figures can shatter his illusions. I think this is what nabisco means when he says "The main intellectual frustration that I see (and yeah, often for liberals) is some feeling that all the tools of rationality and ostensibly careful logic that lay behind one's positions are, well, completely useless in actually swaying minds" and I think this kind of scenario happens all of the time.

All this is just a long way of saying, people make foolish, irrational, or sentimental decisions all the time. We fail to pay off debts and spend lavishly on clothes or gadgets, we skip going to the doctor even when we have insurance, etc. There's probably no reason to expect voting to deviate too much from that pattern.

You have imagine this being said in the desparately frustrated voice of Wally from "My Dinner With Andre."

I still think the Democrats' biggest problem is that the liberal agenda -- shared responsibility, the social contract -- is a harder sell than the simplied Randisms of modern conservatism ("Being greedy is the most selfless thing you can do!").

donut, I was just relating it because I've heard and hear it A LOT in my circle of winguts. It's not my personal opinion, more a reaction to kingfish's assertion as to the origin of conservative distrust of "elites".

I might add that it's different version of the same sentiment of resentment that non-executives hold toward those in the "ivory towers" of the corporate world.

There is large-scale resentment towards educated people from those who are not--"he's lost touch with the little guy", the nauseating patronage that pols pay to "workers" and "working people"--and I personally think it's a matter of convenience that conservatives have historically directed their ire to academia. Maybe I wasn't clear in my comments, but there is and always will be a suspicion of those who do about those who don't--you think a military vet cordially accepts advice from a civillian? It's that sentiment that I was trying to go after w/r to the context of this discussion.

Gore overplayed his Tennessee heritage. Dukakis overplayed the MassMiracle, and hey, never forget the helmet in the tank photo op.

I'm looking for the statistics my Government teacher quoted - people with only a bachelor's degree are more likely to vote Republican, whereas people with a graduate degree are more likely to vote Democrat.

Gotcha. Haha, well I guess you know what side I fall on those attitudes then.

I was too young to remember if it was that easy before using that polarizing dynamic.. I just remember Reagan always winning by electoral landslides because "duh, he's Reagan! He kicks ass!" -- at least in my very Republican household.

Then again, a lot of changed since then, economically and technologically. So, it's a bit hard to grasp at some consistent concept of polarization when even recent presidential history is relatively chaotic upon which to draw conclusions.

actually, it's not some much that liberals are the only folks, but that all of us have irrationalities to our thinking, which is something we don't always like to admit.

The Democrats definitely understand the concept of personal myth-building but when it comes to building these narratives around specific issues or around the party as a whole, they fall short.

that's what lakoff is on about. that's why howard dean was talking about building a better sense of narrative or framing or branding or whatever. the conservatives dumped $2 billion into this over the last 30-40 years, and it's going to take a while to catch up.

how many law review articles has anyone outside of legal academia ever read?!?

i dunno. wasn't it some legal professor who came up with the RICO laws . Of course, it did take him years for anything to happen with that...

Yes, that's what I was trying to say!

the elites of academia who spend their whole lives in a fit of mental masturbation while the rest of the country is actually experiencing life as it happens

I know, but ignore them. You think that's a good life they have? It's miserable. The academy blows. The elite in this country are business people, cronies with connections. Academia (excepting law school) has very little to do with it.

I dunno, I'm constantly surprised by the rhetorical hostility a lot of ILX has for academia (not you, Eis, I just mean in general); I assume part of it is kind of an in-my-backyard issue, but still. It's not as good of a job option as it once was, but I can't possibly fathom why there'd be anything wrong or head-up-ass about engaging in the intellectual life of a topic or discipline you care about -- and there's something truly bizarre about ILX of all places spinning that line, seeing as plenty of this board amounts to a sort of academe of pop culture. Even the discussion we're having right now is vaguely academic; if we were sociopolitical scholars we could be expensing dinner at a convention and getting paid to talk about this stuff, not slacking off at work.

The Democrats definitely understand the concept of personal myth-building but when it comes to building these narratives around specific issues or around the party as a whole, they fall short.

that's what lakoff is on about. that's why howard dean was talking about building a better sense of narrative or framing or branding or whatever.

Dems are so bad at this (exceptions would be Bill Clinton, and Obama, that's about it). To my mind it's not only that conservatives have a better communications infrastructure (noise machine) and a head start, it's that they are good at speaking a common sense language anyone can understand and get behind on a gut level. Often they are so good at this common sense rhetoric and sloganeering it's easy to go right along and tacitly agree and you have to consciously stop yourself and think quite carefully about why you might not agree.

I think Lakoff is going to cause Dems more problems than he solves because he has this effect of adding an extra level of distance.. If I'm not mistaken here, following Lakoff's "framing" thing, first you decide on what you mean to say. Then, you assume regular people won't understand unless you say it in their sort of language. Then, you have a bunch of DC communications staffers stumbling around in the dark trying to connect the dots to figure out what language these strange, folksy, funny regular people want to hear. Trouble is, if you do it wrong (they usually do) it comes off as not only phoney BS, but insulting, and people really don't like being insulted. (cf "elites," "condescending liberals")

xpost - Nabisco this is veering off topic, but I've seen people get treated like crap by their departments, overworked, underfunded, unappreciated, suffering from serious mental health and/or substance abuse problems, toiling away for years and years with something like a 10% chance of ever landing the tenure-track job they're aiming for. Also encountered plenty of empty posturing and general BS. The system is unsustainable I think, run on the backs of grad students, adjuncts, and part timers struggling to get by.

The short version of this is that I believe in the intellectual life, but in the academy what I found was a lot of intellectuals and very few signs of life.

What I meant was that this:

first you decide on what you mean to say. Then, you assume regular people won't understand unless you say it in their sort of language. Then, you have a bunch of DC communications staffers stumbling around in the dark trying to connect the dots

is what the Republicans have successfully done so it's not impossible. Though I might rephrase it more like this:

first you decide on what you mean to do. Then, you assume regular people won't want you to do it so you figure out a way to pitch it to them in a language they'll buy into. Then, you have a bunch of DC communications staffers repeating your manufactured message ad nauseum.

actually, that's more of a Luntz-style spinning. there's a difference between spin & framing. He wrote about this in a response to Katha Pollitt's article in the Nation over the summer.

from that link:

...Reconceptualizing policy is very different from the superficial messaging work that Pollitt correctly criticizes. Reconceptualizing policy means taking a policy goal currently understood in terms of one set of ideas and re-establishing it in the context of another, completely different set of ideas, with very different implications for this and other policies.

For example, the conservatives successfully reconceptualized taxes. Taxes were understood up to the late 70’s as what you pay to live in a civilized society and get services that most individuals cannot afford. Conservatives reconceptualized taxes as useless burdens, afflictions placed on us by an inefficient, immoral, and bloated government – afflictions requiring "relief." So-called "tax relief" is a short, memorable phrase that evokes the new set of ideas about taxes. But don’t confuse the slogan with the underlying ideas.

In contrast, Frank Luntz's attempt to replace "private accounts" with "personal accounts" in the social security debate failed because there was no new system of ideas being evoked. The moral here is that what matters are the deep ideas, not just the words...

The problem is that many folks, including even some enthusiastic Democrat leaders see it as only going for "the magic words."

part of it is that they really did spent decades trying to figure out how to express policy that very few people would agree with in ways that they didn't notice, or that did seem intuitive. "Clean Skies," "Healthy Forests," "No Child Left Behind." These are all methods at going about enacting neo-con policy(drastically weaking environmental controls, defunding public education, etc) but expressed in ways that make "common sense."

i think another aspect to it is that Democrats still holding to the idea(mentioned upthread) that facts and facts alone should be the end of it, and they shouldn't really need a way to actively frame their stances. I mean, it's obvious, right? But you're going to have trouble when you only say stuff like, "the wage discrepency in america is worse than it's been in 100 years" if you're talking to an audience that believes that rich, successful people are virtuous(thus deserving their wealth) and poor people are lazy and morally weak(thus deserving our scorn and no help at all).

another example, Bush Lied.

It reminds me of something taught in my Technical Communication class; Nothing Is "Obvious." What seems straight-forward and common-sensical to you ain't necessarily so for somebody else.

One of the ways that current bunch got into power is that they agreed what they wanted to say, and went out and said it again and again and again. The mindless repetition of concepts so competely distilled into talking points of two or three phrases that perfectly fit our New Mass Media Age. "family values," "Death tax," "double taxation," "partial-birth abortion." Perfectly fits into a two sentence(or less!) soundbite that gets played on the news. And you repeat it until it's starts to bury itself into the nation mindset(even Joe Leeb talking about "tax relief" on the campaign trail last year, for example, without catching himself).

you also buy radio stations, and fax out these talking points to guys like Rush or Dobson who've been syndicated on 3,500+ stations across the country, and they repeat the points endlessly. For newspapers, you get stuff into the Moonie Times and the WSJ op-ed pages. And in this modern age, you just need Drudge to post something. This is how you reach millions of people on a daily basis. And it does happens every day.

http://www.pipa.org/

The fact is, "liberal" was turned into a dirty world as part of the organized backlash against the social upheavals of the '60s and '70s. Not to mention that money talks, especially in these relatively comfortable times. People have not had cause to seriously distrust the instruments of our Republic for a long time, as they did in the era leading up the Great Depression. Democrats have no coherent message condemning the excesses of corporate capitalism, other than some whining about the more extreme symptoms of our sick economy, so is it a surprise that most people don't give a damn what party's in power?

Of course part of the issue involves the framing of the debate. Recently, Bill Moyers made some incredibly astute comments regarding the methods of appealing to the majority on critical issues:

...millions of these people believe they are here on earth to serve a higher moral power, not a partisan agenda. They overwhelmingly respond to natural disasters like last year's tsunami or the AIDS crisis in Africa by opening their hearts and wallets wide. Alas, although many of them may believe Christians have a moral obligation to protect God's creation, most remain uninformed about the true scope of the environmental crisis and the role of the Republican Party in it. As a result, they typically vote their consciences on social issues rather than environmental ones.

Penguins and the Politics of Denial

I'd also argue that the conservative movement developed serious fissures in the late-90s when it started to become obvious that fiscal sanity was not in fact a hallmark of the Republican leadership. Bush has disillusioned a huge number of fiscal conservatives, and the libertarian elements that perhaps once stuck around in hope may be gone forever. The Miers spectacle is providing a much needed focus on Bush's failings from the Republican side--it's a summation of how ultimately disappointed conservatives are with his leadership as President. The people holding their nose and standing behind Bush while he bungled things can stand it no longer.

I'm not sure if this is a long history of a lack of internal debate--there certainly was a lot of that in the late 70s, Dole on the ticket caused a lot of friction, and had Bush lost in 2000 (haha save your pointless comments that he did lose) I think the intra-party friction would have erupted. And frankly, I don't think the coalitions of conservative voters are nearly as disparate as the ones on the liberal side.

jesus fucking god.

Good points all. I'd trace the "lack of debate" meme to the Reagan ascendancy, but that's a minor difference, and the turmoil within the party in the late 70s was certainly just setting the stage for the perceived "unity" and "discipline" that followed.

I've been hopefully searching for signs of erosion in both party establishments for years now. It just seems to me like a bit of dissolution would be good political hygiene.

Okay, good point, let's start with the Jesus God stuff. How can you compete with the irreligious and materialist Chinese when your schools are slipping one by one into a mindset which is only able to present Darwinian evolution as "one theory amongst many", on a par with the theory that God created everything in seven days?

I also wonder how much this perception was driven by Roe v. Wade (circa '74 or whatever), the catalyst which appears to be the most unifying issue for both parties. One reason I'd like to see that overturned is to localize that issue and give both parties some breathing room; maybe if that issue is taken off the national table, the oligopolies would give way to other electorate options.

In a truly Marxist world (and we still haven't seen one) there would be no division of labour, and everyone involved in production would share the fruits of their labour equally. But in the world as we know it, things don't work that way. Inventors and patent holders, shareholders and owners are rewarded massively. The work is done in China (Taiwan, I suspect) only because the labourers there are rewarded as little as possible. The value to the American economy is increasingly added by non-manual things like conception, design, marketing, advertising, brand-building and so on.

xpost

But, if we're to believe Barone and others, there's a significant correlation between amount of higher education you have and your tendency to vote Democrat. The states which vote Democrat also generate massively more wealth for the US than those voting Republican.

Come on, California alone contains four out of the ten richest cities in the US!

In what topsy-turvy world could better education, nutrition, living standards, infrastructure etc not produce fitter, healthier, happier people better able to go out and generate wealth? I suppose the only disadvantage is that such people's labour costs are high. But since virtually everyone in the world is poorer than them, there's never going to be a shortage of cheap and willing labour to make the products they conceive, market, etc.

xpost: Momus, read the second part of that sentence. I'm joking.

heh. thus the old line that "The greatest enemies of capitalists are successful capitalists"

While I don't share your desire to see that decision overturned, I agree that it has been a particularly poisonous element in national politics for a long time.

i agree with this. Plenty of folks, including guys like Lakoff & Jim Wallis, has made the point that the focus on this particular aspect of it(as opposed to, say, preventing unwanted pregnancies) as been damaging.

xpost

I think that if you hold a significant enough share in a productive asset that you can actually have some influence over how that asset is maximalized in the immediate term, then your incentives are fairly clear. Same goes if you have your hands on a (very) large amount of investment capital. But things get much more tangled as your work your way down the income/ownership chain.

xpost

capitalism as a whole probably has led to either actual or perceived greatness of the US as much as anything else.