| In yearning for a return of the civility of yesteryear, is Barack Obama actually yearning for the return of the Dixiecrats, who sought to keep blacks legally segregated in South in a condition of second-class citizenship? In a word-yes. Of course it's not a conscious intention on his part. But the presence of a significant block of Southern Democrats in Congress was an important factor in producing a defacto three-party system that muted overall polarization to historic lows for a period of decades from the 1930s to the 1970s.
It was not the only factor, of course. Nor is polarization synonymous with incivility. There was a dramatic jump in incivility in the House when Newt Gingrich took over the Republican leadership, and Republicans simultaneously took over the House in 1994. But the rising polarization is what set the stage for Newt's emergence, and the continuing polarization has only grown more intense. All this was explained in a book published in 2006, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, which is based on the most complete record of Congressional voting in existence-a complete record of Congressional roll-call votes where the minority vote was at least 0.5% of the House or Senate.
In the big picture, polarization in Congress correlates dramatically with levels of income inequality, which is also correlated with levels of foreign born residents. But the Southern Democrats are part of the mix, and as they disappeared, and were replaced by Southern Republicans, the remaining Democrats were more liberal as a group while the new Republicans helped move their party significantly to the right.
What this strongly suggests is what I and many others have argued on various other grounds-that FDRs success-which correlated with a dramatic drop in polarization-shows that left-liberal policies that benefit society as a whole are the best way to bring the nation together, no matter how vehemently conservatives may oppose them. Of course conservative opposition will be fierce at first, but as the policies take hold, and begin to work, support for extreme conservatives will wane, and that is how polarization will decline and civility will be restored.
Charts galore on the flip... |
| I'll begin by presenting a series of charts, with only a modicum of explanatory commentary. Then I'll proceed to discussion.
Polarization: The Fall And Rise In Both Houses
The first thing to establish is the long-term contour of polarization, and that it is remarkably similar in both houses. The long-term contour-falling dramatically during the Great Depression/New Deal period of liberal policy dominance, and remaining low throughout the New Deal political era, tells us that liberal dominance, far from causing polarization, coincided with its dramatic reduction. As liberalism waned, polarization re-emerged. Now, corelation does not prove causation. But it does suggest it, and more proof will be forthcoming below. The similarity in both houses tells us that gerrymanering, for example, is not a major factor. That doesn't mean it's not important on other grounds, but it is not a driving factor in polarizing Congress. It also tells us that we can generally rely on data from one house of Congress to stand in for the other.
Polarization And Income
Reinforcing what we already know from the general contours of American political history, these two charts, using different measures, clearly show the tight relationship between polarization and income mentioned above: as the Great Depression and liberal policymaking sustained relative income equality, polarization stayed low; as liberalism waned, income inequality grew.
Polarization And The Foreign Born
The percentage of foreign born also correlates surprisingly well. As the authors argue, this makes sense in a politically saliennt way: a large chunk of the foreign born are not citizens and have lower incomes. They increase income inequality, but lack the political power to vote for policies that would tend to counter the rise of inequality. Thus, their increased presence erodes the self-correcting mechanisms that would tend to keep inequality from growing too extreme.
Polarization Broken Down: The Liberal/Conservative Economic Dimension
Polarization has two main dimensions. The main dimension is liberal/conservative on economics and government activism. We show that first, for each house, broken down by the Democrats' North/South division.
Note how Northern Democrats (damn libruls!) have barely changed since the midst of WWII? It's the relatively conservative Southern Democrats who have become relatively more liberal since the early 1970s (responding to an increased black voter base?) and the Republicans who have grown more conservatives, starting a few years later. There's simply no way to blame Nancy Pelosi, David Obey, Jan Schakowsky, Henry Waxman and Barney Frank for polarizing the House. Their block of Northern Democrats are pretty much were they were when the Battle of Midway was won. Three things have changed to increase polarization: Southern Democrats have grown more liberal. Southern Democrats have grown more scarce. And Republicans have grown more conservative. Liberal Northern Democrats had nothing to do with any of that. Except, of course, that they ended segregation, which set in motion the decline of the de facto three party system, which will be discussed below.
In the Senate, Northern Democrats have grown steadily more liberal since the early 1980s. But the trend, though steady, is relatively modest compared to the Republicans and the Southern Democrats, especially if one looks back a few more decades. Northern Democrats are not substantially different than they were back in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Not so the rest.
Polarization Broken Down: The Civil Rights Dimension
The Civil Rights dimension is a less significant determinant, and has effectively disappeared in recent years, as racial issues have increasingly become questions of distributive justice, subsumed under the first dimension. The Civil Rights dimension-which is actually a bit more ambiguous since it also picks up the Populists' bimetalism in the late 19th Century-emerged as highly significant before the Civil War, then disappeared as a source of polarization, only to re-emerge again during the period covered by these charts. Though some polarization still exists, the degree of polarization is not the same as the amount that this polarization contributes to polarization overall, which is not shown on these charts. The latter his virtually disappeared entirely.
Analysis
Explaning what all this means, Nolan McCarty was interviewed by The American Prospect in July 2006, just after the book came out:
What's happened in the past 25 to 40 years or so is that as economic inequality has increased, there's been a polarization of the parties on economic issues -- mostly due to the Republicans moving to the right. In the '70s and the '80s there was a rapid increase in incomes at the top without the commensurate increase of incomes at the bottom. And economic policies that Republicans had promoted and lost elections on in the '60s they began to win elections on in the '70s and '80s with the support of this new wealthier vote. So, there's a direct relationship between the polarization of the parties on economic issues and the increased economic inequality that took place, primarily because these new, wealthier voters gave an impetus to a set of policy priorities -- lower taxes, a more libertarian set of economic prescriptions -- that reinforced inequality.
The question is, why hasn't this increased economic inequality produced more redistribution?
Typically economists, political economists, and political scientists think that economic inequality is self-correcting: If inequality increases there will be a mobilization of lower-income voters in a push toward greater redistribution of wealth to offset that inequality. Here's where immigration is a big part of the story, though, because at the same time as economic inequality in America was increasing, immigration was increasing, too. There were increasing numbers of low-wage workers, but an increasing proportion of those were immigrants who were not yet naturalized and therefore not able to vote for redistributionist policies. And so there's a reinforcing effect from the composition of the work force being more immigrant and less citizen, because these low-income workers can't vote.
But, I already said that, didn't I? Well, now you know I wasn't just putting words in their mouths. That's really what the authors say.
And what about the religious right?
[TAP:] The current administration puts a lot of polarizing cultural issues out into the national debate. Are these just red herrings that distract from more salient economic issues?
[McCarty:] I don't buy into the Thomas Frank view that these cultural issues are red herrings, fake populism by economic royalists of the Republican Party. Lower-income religious Americans are only slightly more Republican than lower-income Americans in general. What's very dramatic is that we find a coalitional structure that's emerged in which the base of the Republican Party isn't religious conservatives or economic conservatives, but religious high-income voters who have no conflict between voting their values and voting their pocketbook. Of course, if you look at what Republicans have done in office, they really have pushed on the economic issues -- the tax cuts, the privatization of social security, the deregulatory agenda and so on -- more than the cultural issues. And while some have interpreted this to mean that the Republicans aren't serious about conservative religious issues, I just think it's more that they have this coalition of high-income Americans. The religious issues are important to certain parts of this coalition, but it's not the dominant part. They just don't find the same value in pushing morals that they find in pushing economics.
Where did the polarization come from? Here's what McCarty says:
Polarization started to increase right after the Great Society. There had been a real consensus on economic and social policy: that Keynesian macroeconomics and the welfare state social policies were the way to go. The breakdown of this consensus caused by the economic changes in the 1970s created today's increased political polarization. Keynesian economics unraveled, and so the consensus about the government's role in the macro-economy changed; the urban crisis of the 1970s undermined faith in New Deal/Great Society-type liberalism.
At the same time there was a real skills premium in the economy so the value of education started to rise relative to unskilled labor, and thus you had an increase in economic inequality. The beneficiaries of this change, both because they had been perhaps disillusioned with the previous policy consensus, but also because they were doing quite well under the new consensus, began to support Reaganomics and other conservative economic policies.
The polarization we see today is the Democratic Party supporting the remnants of the old consensus and the Republicans representing this alternative libertarian, small-government consensus. Other issues started getting drawn into this split, creating the polarization we see on non-economic issues. Although we argue that for the most part the polarization on social issues has been overstated, you can't deny that there are other religious and cultural issues coming out of the 1970s -- Roe v. Wade and so forth -- that have reinforced these divisions.
Bear in mind, this comes from a rather conventional political scientist. None of these guys is a wild-eyed radical, or even a progressive activist. They just deal with what the American political system puts on their plate. There is no consideration of comparing the American welfare state and its effectiveness with other, much more effective examples, which could, potentially, have prevented the impacts of the 1970s from being as severe as they were. So I am hardly presenting their argument as the end of all possible discussion. Rather, it is a sound, moderate starting point, based on virtually all the data available from congressional voting.
This caveat is important to keep in mind, as we turn to an article by another co-author, "The Decline and Rise of Party Polarization in Congress During the Twentieth Century" [PDF] by Keith T. Poole. His analysis is fine, as far as it goes, but I am not suggesting that it is the last word. First, a couple of passages from the main body of the paper:
The political party system of the 1940s and 1950s emerged during the latter part of the New Deal when, in the wake of the 1936 elections, northern Democrats heavily outnumbered southern Democrats in Congress. Many of the programs initiated during the subsequent Second New Deal were not to the liking of the South. Voting on minimum wages in 1937 and 1938, followed by voting during World War II on the poll tax and voting rights in the armed forces, helped to split the Democratic Party into two distinct regional wings. Voting in Congress became two dimensional in order to differentiate northerners from southerners on civil rights and related votes.
With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1967 Open Housing Act, this second dimension slowly declined in importance and is now almost totally absent. Race related issues - affirmative action, welfare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. - are now questions of redistribution. Voting on race-related issues now largely takes place along the liberal-conservative dimension and the old split in the Democratic Party between North and South has largely disappeared. Voting in Congress is now almost purely one-dimensional - a single dimension accounts for about 93 percent of roll call voting choices in the 108th House and Senate - and the two parties are increasingly polarized....
The rapid decline in the importance of the second dimension reflects the realignment of the South towards the Republican Party. During the past 30 years Republicans have moved steadily to the right on the liberal-conservative dimension with conservatives replacing more moderate Republicans outside the southern states and conservatives replacing moderate and conservative Democrats in the South. The effect has been a rightward movement on the liberalconservative dimension of the Republican Party as a whole. As a result, the number of southern Democrats declined and as a group they became much more liberal.
And now, the conclusion, which makes it quite clear how important the Dixiecrats were to the "moderation" of the earlier era in which Barack Obama could not even have gone to an integrated school while he was growing up, much less run for President:
Conclusion
The beginning of the modern trend to greater polarization began with the breakdown of the three-party system in the 1970s. For almost fifty years the United States had a three political party system (late 1930s to early 1980s). In Congress all three parties easily formed coalitions with one of the others against the third depending on the issue at hand. The northern and southern Democrats united to organize the House and Senate and thereby seize the spoils due the "majority" party. The northern Democrats and Republicans united to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the "conservative coalition" of Republicans and southern Democrats united to block liberal economic (and in the 1970s, social) policies.
The demise of this system began with the assassination of President Kennedy. President Johnson was able to do what Kennedy was unable to do - push fundamental civil rights legislation through Congress. This was followed by President Johnson's 1964 landslide victory over "extremist" Barry Goldwater that produced a liberal northern Democratic Congressional majority for the first time since 1936. This destabilized the Democratic coalition. Democrats in the 89th Congress no longer required southern support to pass many of the expansive federal programs that are so much a part of our current political debate. These programs along with other redistributive programs initiated by the federal courts - mandatory school busing being the most conspicuous - led to a polarizing backlash11 in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The effects of this backlash were blunted by Watergate, and the Republican Party did not fully recover its footing until the 1980 elections.
The old southern Democratic Party has, in effect, disintegrated, and with it the disappearance of the second dimension of congressional voting. Race has been drawn into the first dimension because race-related issues are increasingly questions of redistribution. The end result is that the Democrat and Republican parties have become more homogeneous and are now deeply polarized. The moderates are gone and we are left with a polarized, unidimensional Congress.
Now, perhaps Obama is aware of all this. Perhaps he's a whole lot smarter than I'm implicitly giving him credit for. Perhaps he is deliberately mischaraterizing the source of polarization, because he dare not address what I have talked about if he wishes to be President, rather than social critic.
That's a possibility I'll look at in my next diary.
p.s. One final note: There's more goodies to come from this analysis that have nothing to do with Obama. Obama has raised these concerns to a high level of visibility, but the concerns--and their not-always obvious implications--exist independently of his candidacy. |
