OT: The Myth of Political Polarization

[Buccaneer]

Sorry for yet another political topic, esp. on a Friday evening (I've been out of town). I thought this recent column by Robert Samuelson, columnist for Wash Post and Newsweek was interesting.

http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/samu0629.htm

The Myth of Red and Blue Robert Samuelson WASHINGTON -- Let me raise a red flag about the "red and the blue states," which is the reigning theory of American politics. All those blue states (heavily urban and mainly on the East and West coasts) voted for Al Gore. The red states (more rural, Southern and Western) voted for George Bush. Presto, the map defines us. We're a country geographically "polarized" by values and lifestyles. This is a masterful explanation for the increasing nastiness of politics, with only one big drawback. It's wrong. No one denies that the nastiness is real. It stems partly from the presidential campaign, the doubt over Iraq and the intense personal contempt felt by many for President Bush. But the nastiness preceded these causes and will survive them. Why? If the country were more polarized, you'd expect to find it in the polls. You don't. After scouring surveys, sociologist Paul DiMaggio of Princeton concluded that "the public actually has become more unified in attitudes toward race, gender and crime since the 1970s." Of course, strong disagreements (on abortion, for instance) remain. But these disguise large areas of consensus; 80 percent or more of Americans regularly support environmental regulation. What's even more absurd is the idea that regions have -- after jet travel, interstate highways, air conditioning, TV and mass migration -- become more different. Texas and New York have more in common now than in 1960. Perhaps party programs have diverged? Not so. On many issues, the parties broadly agree. In practice, both favor bigger government and lower taxes (and disregard the contradiction). President Bush pushed through the Medicare drug benefit, the largest new entitlement since 1965. John Kerry supports most of Bush's tax cuts -- except those for taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000. Both parties favor environmentalism, precisely because support is widespread. Both parties ignore the looming budget costs of retiring baby boomers. To be sure, differences exist, but they often involve critical details, not grand philosophy. The red and blue states make a pretty graphic. But in 19 states, the victor in the 2000 presidential election won with about 51 percent of the vote or less; small shifts would have reversed the outcomes. Then the graphic and its message -- geographic polarization -- would be ruined. What's actually happened is that politics, and not the country, has become more polarized. By politics, I mean elected officials, party activists, advocates, highly engaged voters, and TV talking heads and pundits. In his search for polarization, DiMaggio examined many subgroups by age, race, sex and education. Only one group exhibited more polarization: people who identified as "strong" Republicans or Democrats. That's about 30 percent of adults. Similarly, members of Congress are more polarized: Democrats are more liberal, Republicans are more conservative and "moderates" are scarcer. This polarization has many causes. Republican advances in the South pulled the party from its moderate Northeastern tradition. In the 1950s, 37 percent of House Republicans came from the Northeast; now that's 17 percent. For Democrats, the opposite has occurred. Fewer conservative Southerners make the party more liberal. Meanwhile, redistricting by both parties has created ever-safer seats. In 1992, 281 House seats were safe, estimates political scientist Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego; by 2002, the number was 356. Candidates appeal less to centrist voters. The result is a growing disconnect between politics and ordinary life. Politics is increasingly a world unto itself, inhabited by people convinced of their own moral superiority: conspicuously, the religious right among Republicans; and upscale liberal elites among Democrats. Their agendas are hard to enact because they're minority agendas. So politicians instinctively focus on delivering psychic benefits. Each side strives to make its political "base" feel good about itself. Polarization and nastiness are not side effects. They are the game. You feel good about yourself because the other side is so fanatical, misguided, corrupt and dishonest. Because real differences between party programs have narrowed, remaining differences are exaggerated. Drab policy debates become sensational showdowns -- one side or the other is "destroying" the schools, the environment or the economy. Every investigation aims to expose the other side's depravity: one side's Whitewater becomes the other's Halliburton. Entertainment and politics merge, because both strive to satisfy psychic needs. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore are powerful political figures because they provide moral reinforcement. Politicians, pundits and talking heads all appeal to their supporters' strongest passions and prejudices. Stridency sells, because -- for many people -- polarization feels good. Politics should reflect and conciliate the nation's differences. increasingly, it does the opposite. It distorts, amplifies and inflames conflicts. It's a turnoff to vast numbers of centrist voters who do not see the world in such uncompromising absolutes. This may be the real polarization: between the true believers on both sides and everyone else. More Robert Samuelson columns

Questions or comments about the content of this site may be directed to the Web master at [email protected][/email]. Copyright 2004, Washington Post Writers Group

[Buccaneer]

I thought this part speaks the truth and one which I have been guilty of

Polarization and nastiness are not side effects. They are the game. You feel good about yourself because the other side is so fanatical, misguided, corrupt and dishonest. Because real differences between party programs have narrowed, remaining differences are exaggerated.

This is perhaps why I have been getting out of thinking along the liberal/conservative spectrum and going with the alternative libertarian beliefs. Being involved in such game is nasty and has no redeeming value. As he said, "Politics is increasingly a world unto itself, inhabited by people convinced of their own moral superiority: conspicuously, the religious right among Republicans; and upscale liberal elites among Democrats. Their agendas are hard to enact because they're minority agendas."

[vtbub]

That may have been the best political article I've read in years.

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by that dude wrote

"Politics is increasingly a world unto itself,

That is the truth, period.

[Barkeep49]

The Austin American-Statesman has been running a great series called "The Great Divide" which disagrees whole heartedly with Samuelson. This piece of reporting to me is far more comprehensive and convincing suggesting that there is indeed a big divide and that extends to the very communities we live in. Here is the first of the three articles that have been published. If you want the Cliff Notes version read the last two paragraphs for a good summary of the article.

Headline: The schism in U.S. politics begins at home
Subheadline: Growing gaps found from county to county in presidential race
Written by: Bill Bishop

The assumption since the 2000 election has been that the United States is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Nationally, this is still true.

At the local level, however, that 50-50 split disappears. In its place is a country so out of balance, so politically divided, that there is little competition in presidential contests between the parties in most U.S. counties, according to an Austin American-Statesman study of election returns since 1948.

American democracy is based on the continuous exchange of differing points of view. Today, most Americans live in communities that are becoming more politically homogenous and, in effect, diminish dissenting views. And that grouping of like-minded people is feeding the nation's increasingly rancorous and partisan politics.

By the end of the dead-even 2000 presidential election, American communities were more lopsidedly Republican or Democratic than at any time in the past half-century. The fastest-growing kind of segregation in the United States isn't racial. It is the segregation between Republicans and Democrats.

The political division found by the Statesman and its statistical consultant, Robert Cushing, is a change from the recent past. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, U.S. counties became more and more politically mixed, based on presidential voting. Through the 1950s and '60s, Americans were more likely to live in a community with an even mixture of Republicans and Democrats.

In 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford by only two percentage points, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in counties with landslide presidential election results, where one party had 60 percent or more of the vote.

Twenty-four years and six presidential elections later, when George Bush and Al Gore were virtually tied nationally, 45.3 percent of voters lived in a landslide county. And now the nation enters a new election year divided both ideologically and geographically in ways few can remember.

Political and racial segregation are moving in opposite directions. John Logan at the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research calculated the change in segregation between blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000 in the nation's more than 3,100 counties. Even though the country remains deeply divided by race, U.S. counties on average became more integrated racially over those 20 years.

Politically, however, the nation rapidly divided. Using the same demographic calculation that measures geographic racial disparity, and substituting Republican and Democrat for black and white, political segregation in U.S. counties grew by 47 percent from 1976 to 2000.

The result is that voters on average are less likely today to live in a community that has an even mix of Republican and Democratic voters than at any time since World War II. They are less likely to live near someone with a different political point of view and are more likely to live in a political atmosphere either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.

"I don't think we are at a really dangerous stage," said Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and an author of books exploring issues facing democracy, "but if it's a case that people really are pretty rigidly Republican or Democratic and that's widespread, that's not healthy. Our democracy is supposed to be one where people learn from one another and listen."

Sunstein's concern is rooted in more than 300 social science experiments over the past 40 years that have found a striking phenomenon that occurs when like-minded people cluster: They tend to become more extreme in their thinking. They polarize.

This research would predict that the increasing physical segregation of voters in the United States would result in a more polarized and partisan political culture. And that is exactly what is happening.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press late last year examined public opinion polls back to 1987 and found that the United States "remains a country that is almost evenly divided politically — yet further apart than ever in its political values."

In mid-March, the Gallup poll found that while 91 percent of Republicans approve of the incumbent, President Bush, only 17 percent of Democrats feel likewise. The gap between Republican and Democratic support for an incumbent — 74 percentage points — is the largest Gallup has ever observed at this point in a presidential election year.

Highly partisan presidential politics isn't the only sign of political segregation. As counties become more politically pure, they push their representatives in state legislatures and Congress to more extreme positions. Legislative compromise becomes almost impossible. Meanwhile, election campaigns become less interested in convincing a dwindling number of undecided voters and more concerned with whipping up the enthusiasm of their most partisan backers.

Democrats and Republicans joke these days that they can't understand each other, that they feel as though the parties exist on different planets.

It's no joke. They do.

Thinking in clusters


There is nothing new in saying people enjoy being around people like themselves. The Prophet Amos asked, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" And Pauline Kael, the movie critic, was stunned with Richard Nixon's victory in the 1972 Republican landslide. "I don't know a single person who voted for him!" said the well-cloistered writer.

"Do like-minded people tend to cluster together, and to talk mostly with others who share their inclinations?" asked social psychologist David Myers in an e-mail. "You bet they — we — do. Most of us need only look at our friends and the people we've been talking with during the last couple of days to observe likes talking with likes."

What nobody realized until now is that the American electorate was sorting itself into these like-minded clusters on a national scale.

The United States has undergone a vast social shift since the 1970s, a rapid-fire change in where we live, what we think and how we vote. This country-wide sorting of people and ideas is the unexamined backstage story of the nation's increasingly rancorous politics.

To understand the nation here at the beginning of an unfathomably bitter presidential campaign, it helps to toss out most of what we think we know about American politics.

Thirty years ago, the Washington Post's top political reporter, David Broder, wrote a book titled "The Party's Over." Broder, like most political scientists, noticed that people had grown tired of the two major political parties.

Voters were splitting their tickets, as party loyalty "seriously eroded," Broder wrote. Americans had lost the "habit of partisanship." Younger voters increasingly thought of themselves as independents because they no longer saw a difference between Republicans and Democrats. Members of Congress regularly crossed party lines to support bills introduced by their opponents.

Parties were dead. Voters were independent. Parties and politics lacked ideological fervor or consistency.

What Broder couldn't have known then was that voters were beginning to change the way they thought about politics and parties. The 1970s were a turning point.

What Broder also didn't realize — what nobody knew until now — is that the mid-1970s was also the time, according to Cushing's analysis, that Republicans and Democrats mixed most thoroughly. If the democratic ideal is to have integrated communities, where people with different beliefs and of different parties must confront one another and get along, 1976 was the high point of post-war democracy.

Then the nation changed.

Since the early and mid-1970s, the American political scene shifted almost completely from the independent-minded, ticket-splitting, non-partisan landscape Broder documented:

• Voters have grown more partisan.

Party loyalties rebounded in the 1980s and by the 1990s partisanship among American voters — their propensity to identify themselves in polls as either Republican or Democrat — had increased to levels not seen since at least the 1950s. Since 1980, party loyalty has increased to levels "unsurpassed over any comparable time span since the turn of the last century," writes Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels.

• Voters have become less independent.

The percentage of true independent voters peaked in 1978 and has declined since. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who see important differences between the parties went from 46 percent in 1972 to 66 percent in 2000.

• The parties have become more ideological.

The percentage of conservatives who call themselves Democrats — and liberals who call themselves Republican — has been declining since 1972. The two parties once were a stew of conflicting ideologies — mixtures that included northern liberal Republicans and conservative rural Democrats. Now they are growing more ideologically pure.

• Congress compromises less often.

Despite the rancor caused by war and the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were fewer strict party-line votes in those years than at any time since World War II. Since then, the number of times a majority of Republicans in Congress has voted opposite a majority of Democrats has steadily increased.

The percentage of these party-line votes in the 1990s was higher than for any 10-year period since 1950 and the parties "differ more on issues now than at any time since the early days of the New Deal," wrote Colby College political scientist Mark Brewer.

• Voters cast more straight party tickets.

In the 2000 and 2002 elections, ticket splitting — where voters cast ballots for both Republicans and Democrats — "declined to the lowest levels in over 30 years," according to University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist David Kimball.

By the beginning of this century, compromise had disappeared from the House of Representatives. Voters were becoming staunch supporters of parties they increasingly saw as ideologically distinct. Democrats had more liberal voting records. Republicans were more conservative.

Thirty years after Broder predicted the end of party and partisanship, Roger Davidson in the Congressional Quarterly Almanac wrote that the country is "in the midst of the most partisan era since Reconstruction."

Beneath these national measures of increasing partisanship, however, there was another trend developing, as communities shifted and strengthened their political allegiances. At the local level, voters were grouping in like-minded communities. Counties were becoming either more Democratic or more Republican each election.

At the microlevel of society families gathered to make decisions about where and how to live. The discussions at these kitchen table summits weren't overtly political, but decisions about schools and neighbors and lifestyle all had political results. In deciding where and how to live, the country was segregating by political preference.

The Reagan line


Until 1980, Williamson County was mostly Democratic. But in every other presidential election from the end of World War II until Ronald Reagan first won the presidency, the parties were competitive.

Williamson County flipped in 1980, voting for Republican Ronald Reagan. It hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since. Since 1980, the Republican margin in Williamson has only increased, until in 2000, in a presidential election that was dead even nationally, 71 percent of Williamson County's voters cast Republican ballots.

Los Angeles County, Calif., is the anti-Williamson. This huge county was Republican from 1948 through the end of the Administration of President Reagan, in 1988. The only blip was a vote for Johnson in the 1964 landslide election. The elections were close, however. The 1960 Kennedy/Nixon contest was a toss-up in Los Angeles County, just as in the rest of the country.

But since Los Angeles tipped Democratic in 1988, the county has grown more and more Democratic. In the 50-50 election of 2000, 66 percent of the voters in Los Angeles County were for Al Gore.

Los Angeles and Williamson counties are traveling in opposite political directions, and they are moving fast. Their radically different political trajectories aren't aberrant. If anything, Williamson and Los Angeles counties are typical of what's happening in thousands of U.S. counties.

Counties tip to one party or another, staying with that party election after election — and then the counties lean further. Republican counties, on average, are becoming more Republican. Democratic counties are becoming more Democratic, according to the Statesman's analysis of more than 50 years of presidential voting results.

Before counties tipped and became persistent supporters of a single party in presidential elections, their residents voted close to 50-50.

Once these counties tipped, however, their average voting majorities became extreme. And the longer these counties stayed with a single party, the larger those majorities grew.

There aren't just a few counties that have tipped Democratic or Republican. Most American voters live in counties with presidential party preferences that haven't changed in a generation, according to Cushing's analysis. And the majorities in those counties are growing.

Sixty percent of Republican voters live in counties that have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1980. Sixty percent of the Democratic voters live in counties that have voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1988.

Three of every five voters live in counties where children have been born, graduated from high school and gone off to college without ever experiencing a local change in presidential party preference.

The two parties do, indeed, occupy two different worlds.

Why are these political divisions being created? How is it happening? Are people moving to places to live among like-minded neighbors? Or are the parties changing to reflect the ideological contours that exist already in the nation?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions. There probably isn't a single answer, but a constellation of forces that have together divided the country.

The effects of this segregation and clustering, however, are easier to predict and to see.

"If you don't have anyone in your network of associates who thinks the least bit different from you, then it's pretty easy to grow confident in the correctness of your views," said University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel.

"There is no opportunity in those counties or neighborhoods for dissonance to arise. And so by keeping dissonance out, you wind up gravitating toward a more extreme political position. This is one explanation for the increase in ideology you see not only in the public, but in Congress."

The rancor of the presidential campaign is blamed on the personality of the candidates, the barbarity of political consultants and on the demands of political contributors. The one cause of this civic bitterness that has not been fingered is the one that should be most obvious, the one that is manifest in our communities.

Over the past 30 years, Americans have created their own communities of political solidarity and ideological insulation. One by one and place by place, we have constructed a great divide, boundaries of partisanship as plain as a map and as powerful as belief.

[Buccaneer]

Imo, clusterring is a noticeable phenomemon but it becomes exaggerated in political results because of the lack of real choices or more accurately, the choice between two extremes. Because most voters feel that they HAVE to vote for someone, choose the lessor of two evils and therefore, the pundits automatically assume that a vote for X means a pro-X vote and an anti-Y vote- if that makes sense.

[WussGawd]

Great topic, Bucc. For once, I find I agree with you. I believe most Americans are a lot less polarized than the talking heads (on both sides) would have us believe.

[Barkeep49]

Actually clustering is important. If a particular voting district swings heavily in one political direction then the primary, instead of the general election, becomes more important. Primaries, by definition, not only disenfranchise members of the opposite party and independents, but also cater to party extremes as those are the voters most likely to show up. And so we get rid of moderate candidates as it becomes harder for these people to win the nomination.

Further, clustering is important since it makes it easier to demonize the opposition. If you are surrounded by like minded people, and don't have to talk to those who hold a differing opinion, it becomes far easier to buy into the caricature of the otherside.

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by Barkeep49

Actually clustering is important. If a particular voting district swings heavily in one political direction then the primary, instead of the general election, becomes more important. Primaries, by definition, not only disenfranchise members of the opposite party and independents, but also cater to party extremes as those are the voters most likely to show up. And so we get rid of moderate candidates as it becomes harder for these people to win the nomination.

Or even apply this to the city or state level. In Baltimore City (and DC as well for that matter), the real race for mayor is the primary. I couldn't even tell you if Martin O'Malley or Anthony Williams were opposed in the general election. The same thing applies for the US Senate races. Any Republican who opposes Sarbanes or Mikulski doesn't stand a chance.

[ISiddiqui]

Reason had an article on EXACTLY this a few weeks back:

http://www.reason.com/links/links061704.shtml

Polarized Moments
Dark Blue, Bright Red?
Julian Sanchez




Ever since the presidential coin-flip of 2000, we've been hearing ad nauseam what a deeply divided nation we are. Now, it seems, we're also deeply divided about how deeply divided we really are.

Bill Bishop's widely discussed and thoroughly researched May series for the Austin American-Statesman was only the most recent, albeit the most comprehensive, depiction of a bifurcated America, occupied on the one hand by traditionalist, religious GOP voters in rural areas and exurbs, and on the other by cosmopolitan secular liberals. Both, we're told, are increasingly fiercely partisan and ever more concentrated in "landslide" counties where one major party candidate takes a huge margin of the vote.

The inevitable counternarrative has finally surfaced, with a lengthy John Tierney piece in this weekend's New York Times claiming that the Red/Blue "value chasm" is "largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway...shouting at each other." Even David Brooks, whose primary shtick is a wonkified version of the "it's funny how black people and white people are different" act beloved of uninspired stand-ups, recently made a nod in the same direction, suggesting that our partisan polarization isn't just the upshot of some essential chasm between the Nascarites and the Lattéans, but rather "inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class."

One problem with the "two Americas" thesis is that if you take a quick glance at the core constituencies of the two parties, there sure seem to be a lot more than just two. Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist's Washington, D.C., correspondent and co-author of The Right Nation told me that "at the recent 40th anniversary celebration of the American Conservative Union, [i] found myself thinking 'what do these people have in common?' You have the [National Rifle Association] saying government must stay out of my gun locker at all costs, and the Family Research Council saying government must stay in people's bedrooms at all cost, so to some extent it's a coalition of convenience."

The blue state coalition doesn't seem any more organic. Inner city minorities, affluent urbanites, and blue collar union members, three key Democratic groups, may share a statistical metropolitan area, but it's not clear this entails some kind of larger cultural continuity. Yet there is a persistent unifying force Wooldridge sees: Self-definition in opposition to an imagined other. Much as Democrats today seem less animated by enthusiasm for Kerry than hostility toward Bush, Wooldridge found among the motley crew on the right "a common sense of who the enemy is: People at the ACU dinner were never as happy as when they were raging against the Clintons."

In a sense, that may explain the popularity of the "two Americas" narrative. For reasons I'll discuss below, that sense of belonging to the same team is becoming more important as a political organizing tool. The two Americas picture confirms the worst stereotypes about the opposition shared by loose political coalitions, in effect constructing genuine opposed communities by circulating the idea of them—similar to the way the proletarians in Marxist theory was supposed to awaken to class consciousness via their discovery of shared oppression by the bourgeoisie. Perhaps ironically, campaign finance reform may have aided the process by shifting political communication resources from the relatively risk-averse parties to 527s like the MoveOn Voter Fund. Few official campaigns would run anything like the culture warmongering Club for Growth ad in which a couple declares that Howard Dean "should take his tax hiking, government expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, body piercing, Hollywood-loving left wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

Problematic as a stripped down binary portrait of American politics is, the elite kabuki story won't entirely work either. The germ of institutional truth in that counternarrative is that aggressive top-down gerrymandering and the bottom-up geographical self-segregation by political ideology have given candidates powerful incentives to shift their focus from persuading undecided centrist voters to a strategy of base-mobilization. That would push political rhetoric to extremes even assuming constant voter attitudes. But the idea that the appearance of vigorous partisanship is wholly some sort of epiphenomenon driven by elite conflict also rings false.

If anything, urban elites on opposite ideological sides are probably more moderate, at least in their private convictions, and closer to each other than their counterparts in the wider country. Hill staffers delight in telling stories of how their putatively extreme bosses in the House and Senate mock behind closed doors the wild rhetoric they deploy in public for audiences back home. Democrats will make protectionist noises when they need to, but my sense is that their hearts mostly aren't in it; they "get" free trade. And Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum is on to something when he writes of a niggling suspicion that "urban conservative intellectuals—i.e., most of the ones who actually write about this stuff —are faking it when they write about socially conservative causes." Skim, say, National Review and you'll find that, with the notable and humorous exception of John Derbyshire, the kind of visceral distaste for homosexuality that seems to drive grassroots activism on issues like gay marriage is largely absent, pundits there argue the conservative side mostly through tepid pseudo-sociology.

There are also shifts too recent and dramatic to explain in terms of gradual processes like migratory sorting. Consider the recently released Biennial Pew Media Survey, which tracks media consumption habits. The big trends over the past four years are the dramatic shift to cable and online news sources, as well as more ideological sorting among news outlets. Hard though it may be to believe now, only four years ago, Republicans and Democrats regularly tuned in to Fox News at about the same rate. As recently as 2000, viewership by party affiliation remained close, with 25 percent of Republicans and 23 percent of Democrats looking at the world through Rupert Murdoch's eyes. But by 2004, 35 percent of Republicans decide based on what Fox reports, while Democratic viewership dropped off to 21 percent.

There are huge differences in perceptions about media venue credibility as well: Republicans are in general far more skeptical of major media reports than Democrats, but over the last four years became significantly less likely to say that they believe "all or most" of what they hear from CNN or the networks, while Fox News, the outlet least trusted by Democrats, became the one in which G.O.P. voters place the most faith. That divide cashes out as a significant difference in factual beliefs: A survey conducted last year [PDF] by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that viewers who count Fox as their primary news source were far more likely than others to believe that WMD stockpiles had been found in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein worked closely with Al Qaeda, and that world opinion supported the war.

In part, that may be a manifestation of a trend technology critic Andrew Shapiro worried about in his 1999 book The Control Revolution: As media options proliferate, we abandon the "daily we" of Walter Cronkite's centralizing "that's the way it is" media space in favor of a self-reinforcing "daily me" we each construct by browsing through Fox News or Air America or The Nation, or, well, Reason.

But we may also be paradoxically polarized by the very consensus on big issues found by the sociologists Tierney cites in his Times article. Big clear problems—the Soviet Union, 70 percent top marginal tax rates—gave rise to Reagan Democrats and frequent aisle crossing. On the issues that genuinely divide us today, we are confused people, living in what Reason editor Nick Gillespie has called an "age of uncertainty." The strictly factual debate over the justification for the war in Iraq was hugely murky for those of us without access to the intelligence purporting to show Hussein was likely to threaten the U.S. The Medicare bill was a 700 page monstrosity which has thoroughly perplexed its supposed beneficiaries. And while public ignorance is nothing new, the more uncertain the information available to each of us, the more likely we are to use heuristics like ideology or candidate personality. Consider that we've gone from a supposedly less partisan time when visions of slashing whole government agencies danced in Gingrichite heads to one in which the big debate is how much more cash to pump into a massive, unwieldy social insurance program, and when the difference between Bush and Kerry even on hugely divisive questions like Iraq can be hard to suss out.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait scarcely gives Bush a pass on the policy end, but he's confessed to bristling no less at the cowboy's persona. Since, as Wooldridge's observation suggests, that kind of personal animosity may be what the parties need to construct their respective political communities, the GOP is probably delighted that Chait is feeling Blue.

Julian Sanchez is Reason's Assistant Editor. He lives in Washington, D.C.

[Mac Howard]

The fact that the parties have become closer together on many issues is perhaps a cause of the nastyness - both sides then exaggerate the differences and even create them where they don't really exist for election purposes. Not only are the minor difference amplified but, because it's difficult to maintain rational justification, they're pursued with rigidity.

A second factor is surely the collapse of communism and the movement of the extreme left into mainstream politics. As extreme movements they were easy to isolate and ignore - in the UK we used to call them "the looney left". But now these same people inhabit the green movement (where they can oppose capitalism on environmental grounds) and the acceptable left wing parties. This brings a stridency from the left which then triggers an equal and opposite reaction from the far right. The result is that the two sides are being increasingly represented by the rigid extremes and many of the moderates retire from the debates disallusioned by the level of antagonism.

[cuervo72]

Is NoMyths striving to make us all one big ball of purple?

[NoMyths]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Is NoMyths striving to make us all one big ball of purple?

Pink, baby. Don't you believe the homo-agenda Fritz keeps putting out there?

Frankly, I think everyone who thinks they know what's up reeks of moral superiority. Regardless of red/blue/libertarian nonsense. Including myself.

[NoMyths]

dola...

More seriously, I'd say yes, Cuervo...I want folks to be more educated and more aware. Guess purple's as good a color as any.

[Poli]

OT: The Myth of Political Polarization

Last post by: NoMyths.

This struck me as odd.

[NoMyths]

Originally Posted by ardent enthusiast

OT: The Myth of Political Polarization

Last post by: NoMyths.

This struck me as odd.

Me too.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Nice hookup Barkeep, interesting to see something from another area that very much matches my impression of Georgia's political landscape over the past 20 yrs or so.

A couple of odd points struck notes with me too:

The percentage of true independent voters peaked in 1978 and has declined since.

I wonder what the definition of "true independent voters" is.

At the microlevel of society families gathered to make decisions about where and how to live. The discussions at these kitchen table summits weren't overtly political, but decisions about schools and neighbors and lifestyle all had political results. In deciding where and how to live, the country was segregating by political preference.

I can certainly vouch for that, although in my case, the discussion also included a number of overt political topics as well.

In the 2000 and 2002 elections, ticket splitting — where voters cast ballots for both Republicans and Democrats — "declined to the lowest levels in over 30 years," according to University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist David Kimball.

I wonder if that is tracked statistically from actual voting data/info (as in "somebody looks at the ballots") or if it's based on exit-polling/some other form of unverifiable voter responses?

[Peregrine]

Wow that is an excellent article, Bucc, and hits the nail right on the head.