The Problem Isn't Polarization. It's Extremism
The parties may disagree with each other but that doesn't mean they're equally to blame for the state of American politics
Forgive me for dragging up something that happened a little over two weeks ago on Meet the Press, but I think it’s worth picking over. It occurred on August 29, while host Chuck Todd was interviewing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Todd opened the segment by saying
It is not news that we are experiencing a pandemic of the unvaccinated and that our political divide plays a pretty big role in who is being infected, but now we have a stark illustration of this issue. [Roll graphic.] This is a list that we put together of 30 counties with the highest infection rates in the country, starting with the highest. As of yesterday afternoon, every county, with one exception, voted for President Trump. And most of these counties voted for him by 40 points or more. And when you look at where these counties are, you can see that this fourth wave of Covid has a distinctly Southern flavor, at least for now. Nationally, the seven-day average of new cases is now nearly 154,000. That is the highest since late January.
Todd then went on to talk with Fauci about a number of COVID-related issues before asking him near the end if we were “past the point of defeating this pandemic? Are we now -- is it now an endemic and we’re going to have to just all learn to live with it?” The rest of the interview played out like this:
FAUCI: Well, in some respects, yes, but mostly no. And let me tell you why I say no, Chuck, because we have within our power the wherewithal to really suppress this outbreak, at least in the United States. We want to do it globally and we’re playing an important role in that, but with regard to the United States, we still have about 80 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated. You showed that in the chart in the beginning of this segment when you showed the infection and the vaccination rates in certain parts of the country. If we really got the overwhelming majority of those 80 million people vaccinated, you would see a dramatic turnaround in the dynamics of the outbreak. So, it really is up to us. We have the power to do it, we just need to do it.
TODD: So, what you’re saying is right now we’re a victim of our own polarization.
FAUCI: I believe so, Chuck. I’ve been saying that and you and I have discussed this on your show multiple times. I mean, to me, it just is astounding. We’re dealing with a public health crisis and there’s still divisiveness about things like mandating and masks and things like that. Let’s crush this outbreak and put that divisiveness and those differences aside.
TODD: Yeah, this seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to rally people to this message, but it has been very difficult.
What grabbed my attention was Todd’s first response to Fauci: “What you’re saying is right now we’re a victim of our own polarization.” It’s practically a throwaway line near the end of a segment where Todd’s just trying to sum everything up so he can toss to commercial. But it’s a misleading characterization of what’s going on in this country.
“Polarization” is not an easy concept to pin down. Too often, polarization is simply used to describe the mere existence of conflict between political parties, but political conflict is inherent to party systems. Instead, the idea of polarization is used to characterize the nature of that partisan political conflict, specifically a.) How distinct the parties are from one another, and b.) How intractable political conflict between the parties is. Those two criteria often work in tandem, but they don’t necessarily have to: It may be possible for the parties to have a lot in common with one another yet allow small differences to lead to pitched partisan battles, or for parties that have little in common with one another to find ways to cooperate. Most people these days, however, would probably agree that the differences between the United States’ political parties are stark and that the conflict between them is difficult to resolve through cooperation, leading to high political polarization (although some might argue the pandemic relief packages passed in the last year of the Trump administration and the pending infrastructure bill suggest polarization has weakened somewhat; I’d need more convincing before I buy into that.)
Polarization has become a hot topic in political science over the past 10-15 years. In fact, 20-30 years ago, very few political scientists would have taught their students that polarization was a major factor in American society (although scholars today often trace the beginning of today’s trend toward greater polarization back to around 1978.) In the 1990s, most people would have said the parties were too similar to one another. If you’ll remember, Bill Clinton was regarded as a moderate Democrat who accepted the conservative governing consensus that had emerged in the United States in the 1980s. In 2000, most people would have told you the problem they had with the major party nominees for president that year—Al Gore and George W. Bush—was that they couldn’t locate any major distinctions between the two on matters of policy. That is definitely not how Americans talk about politics and the parties today.
It’s worth noting here that polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. In 2000, it seems the American people wanted a little more polarization, as that would have helped them distinguish between Bush and Gore and their respective parties. Additionally, in the decades after World War II, some complained the parties were too similar to one another and did not offer voters a clear choice on policy, particularly on civil rights. (Insert obligatory reference to the American Political Science Association’s 1950 report titled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System” here.) Yet polarization can become a political problem when pitched partisan conflict makes it nearly impossible to resolve pressing public concerns. Polarization can also poison the political environment in a way that leads partisans to regard one another as sworn enemies rather than compatriots with differences of opinion. Polarization can become a real problem in a political system like the United States’, which requires a lot of cooperation between the parties to navigate legislation through its convoluted system of divided government.
Ezra Klein wrote an excellent book about polarization last year titled Why We’re Polarized. It’s a comprehensive overview of the subject written in a way that is easily accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of politics. Klein explains how a lot of polarization is driven by narrow legislative margins, the role race has played in heightening polarization, how levels of polarization among the electorate may differ from levels of polarization among political elites and party activists, the influence of the media on polarization, and how political polarization has shaped and is reflected in our lifestyle choices, among other topics. I can’t recommend the book more highly.
I will say, though, that I had a funny reaction when I finished reading the book. I began wondering if Klein had spent all this time obsessing over the wrong issue; if, in the process of writing a book about the problem of polarization, he had merely diagnosed a symptom of a larger problem, or if the problem of polarization had morphed into something bigger, namely extremism.
It would be easy to lose track of extremism when trying to measure polarization. Polarization is mainly a measure of difference between two parties along with how intractable that difference is. It isn’t really concerned with where those two parties fall on an ideological continuum nor if their positions are normatively acceptable, just that those two parties are (to some degree) distinct from one another and that it is (to some degree) difficult for the parties to reconcile their positions with their opponents’ positions.
In other words, significant polarization could result from a disagreement between a center-left and a center-right party just as it could result from a disagreement between a pro-democracy party and a fascist party. In only one of those scenarios, however, is one of the “poles” of political polarization—the fascist party—an extreme ideological outlier. Measures of polarization don’t really concern themselves with that, though; they merely observe there is a notable difference between the poles that is hard to bridge, not that one of the positions of the poles is way out there morally while the other pole is within a range of morally acceptable political positions. (This scenario also reminds us that polarization is not necessarily a left vs. right phenomenon; it could be center vs. left/right, or center-left vs. far-left, or center-right vs. far-right. The point, again, is that measures of polarization are mainly concerned with the fact that a difference exists rather than making normative judgments about the bases of that difference.)
The idea of asymmetrical polarization comes close to capturing what’s going on here. Asymmetrical polarization occurs when only one of the parties shifts rather than both parties moving apart from one another. There are two notable examples of this in recent American history: In 1964, when Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party swung hard to the right, and in 1972, when George McGovern’s Democratic Party swung hard to the left. Both lost their presidential elections in landslides, as those candidates could not convince large swaths of the electorate to shift with them. Around forty years ago, congressional Republicans began sliding to the right again, but with more electoral success (notably in 1994). Democrats also appeared to shift to the left at that time (Senate Democrats actually began moving left after the 1980 elections, but not as dramatically as Republicans would move right in 1994) but that’s somewhat deceiving, since more conservative Republicans in 1994 had replaced a lot of moderate Democrats in Congress, leaving behind a more liberal Democratic caucus. Only in the past ten years have Democrats moved harder to the left on their own volition (see below).
But it’s important to note where the two parties have landed as a result of their ideological shifts over the past three decades. In 2019, the Manifesto Project studied the party platforms of the major political parties of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada and placed them on an ideological continuum from far-left to far-right (see below; for a closer, more interactive look, click here). It found the Democratic Party’s platform in 2016 resembled a mainstream left-wing European political party, one slightly to the left of Canada’s Liberal Party (currently led by Justin Trudeau) but slightly to the right of the United Kingdom’s Labor Party (currently led by Keir Starmer, formerly led by Jeremy Corbyn) and Germany’s Social Democratic Party (whose candidate for chancellor in the upcoming election is Olaf Scholz). That’s admittedly a pretty big shift within the American political framework for the Democratic Party from where it had been in the recent past, when, by international standards, it could best be described as a center-right party slightly to the left of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party (see above). Yet the Democratic Party and its platform is by no means an outlier within the wider western world, where its platform closely resembles other center-left parties.
The Republican Party, however, cannot be characterized as a western center-right party. It is far to the right of the cluster of center-right parties that include the UK’s Conservative Party (led by Boris Johnson) and Germany’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (led by Angela Merkel). It’s also to the right of the next cluster of parties that not only include Canada’s Conservative Party but also France’s National Rally (led by Marine Le Pen), the UK’s Independence Party or UKIP (formerly led by Nigel Farage), and Austria’s Freedom Party, all of which have been characterized as far-right populist European parties credibly decried as nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, and neo-fascist. (Again, for a closer, more interactive look, click here.) In fact, according to the Manifesto Project’s calculations, not only is the Republican Party closer in spirit to UKIP than it is to the UK’s Conservative Party, but it is even closer in spirit to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which, given the tendencies of far-right parties in Germany, is not a comparison one of the major political parties in the United States probably wants to invite.
The chart below, published by The Economist, also shows how extreme the Republican Party has become. This chart moves beyond a comparison of parties’ political positions to measure the extent to which a party uses populist rhetoric and the extent to which a party exhibits a lack of commitment to democratic norms (“liberalism” in the European sense of the word). Here you can see the Democratic Party has grown slightly more populist since 1982. The Republican Party, however, has become not only significantly more populist but also significantly more illiberal over the past forty years, so much so that not only does the GOP have more in common with western European far-right parties like UKIP, National Front/Rally, and AfD than it does center-right and center-left parties in western Europe, but it has more in common with the illiberal/autocratic political parties that hold power in Poland (PiS/Law and Justice) and Hungary (Fidesz). And remember: This chart was made prior to the 2020 election, the 1/6 riot, and Republicans’ continued efforts to discredit the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. (And if you haven’t been following the California recall closely, note how Trump and Republican candidate Larry Elder have sought to preemptively discredit the results of that election even though it was the Republican Party that orchestrated the recall in the first place.)
Take another look at that chart. Locate again the positions of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn there is significant political polarization in the United States given how far apart the parties are on that chart. But the main story that chart tells isn’t one of polarization; the main story is one of extremism, and how one party has shifted from being a liberal party to an illiberal party. Whatever polarization that follows from that has to be understood in that context. Furthermore, emphasizing the problem of polarization over the problem of extremism not only misses the main problem but could have serious consequences for the well-being of the United States’ democratic system of government. In fact, when it comes to a matter like the credibility of elections, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that Democrats insist on remaining polarized with Republicans on that issue rather than cave in to their Big Lie.
To Klein’s credit, he does acknowledge the Republican Party has shifted pretty hard to the right while Democrats, despite becoming more left-leaning, are still constrained in their pursuit of a more liberal political agenda by their broader ideological coalition. He also admits Republicans’ autocratic turn and their no-holds-barred approach to politics imperils American democracy. At some point, though, we have to ask ourselves if the source of our political problems has less to do with two parties who refuse to get along with one another—in other words, polarization—than it does with the extreme positions one of those parties has adopted.
We should also be careful not to conflate polarization generated by run-of-the-mill political competition with polarization caused by asymmetrical extremism. I think Chuck Todd is alluding to the latter since he opened his segment by looking at how overwhelmingly Republican 29 of the 30 counties with the nation’s highest COVID infection rates are. Dr. Fauci also hinted at this when he said the problem we’re facing now is divisiveness borne of opposition to pandemic mitigation strategies, which has been driven by the Right. And while it’s true many Republicans may refuse to get vaccinated as a way to distinguish themselves from Democrats, refusing a vaccine and raising doubts about the vaccine at this point in the pandemic is a pretty extreme position to adopt. Republicans, after all, could simply choose not to polarize on the issue of vaccines and get the shot; it actually makes a lot of sense from a self-interested perspective as well.
But ascribing the United States’ fight over vaccines to “our” problem of “polarization” can leave too many with the impression that the two parties share equal blame for the country’s problems and leaves out a lot of context. I get that Todd and Fauci have institutional incentives that lead them to avoid antagonizing Republicans, but they should also be careful not to inadvertently cast a pox on both houses either when the heart of the problem has moved beyond mere polarization to Republican extremism. Maybe Todd and Fauci can’t say that explicitly on Meet the Press, but it’s a truth Americans need to be aware of when they head to the ballot box a little over a year from now.
Photo credits: Montana Free Press; Vox; New York Times; The Economist
--
Speech of the Week
I am by no means a fan of President George W. Bush, but what he said in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—where United Flight 93 crashed after its passengers charged the cockpit to prevent terrorists from crashing it into the Capitol on 9/11—is truly remarkable: He equates those who attacked the United States on 9/11 with those Americans who attacked the Capitol on 1/6. The key moment comes at about 3:50 in the video. I’ve heard that formulation before, and while I know Bush has no sympathy for the MAGA crowd, I never expected to hear it come from this man, let alone in such blunt yet eloquent terms. Bush has little cache left in the Republican Party, but it still somehow felt like a turning point and a redemptive coda to his life story.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Josie” by Steely Dan (1977, Aja)