A Touch of History: How the Heck We Got Here (Part 1)
A common response when someone finds out that I am an American politics professor is “Wow! You must have a lot to talk about in your classes.” Indeed, but that’s sort of like saying to a divorce lawyer: “Wow! You must talk a lot about relationships and planning for the future.” The conversations are fraught, one must be careful of phrasing, and much of the time students sit in resolute silence rather than risking affront. It’s awful.
Students do not believe me when I tell them that it hasn’t always been this way. Quite the contrary, politics used to be a bit more fun. I was chatting with one of my favorite former students recently who graduated in 2010, and he reminded me that in one of our classes together I hung up a “No-No Words” board where we (together) would add identifiers and labels we thought were beyond the pale. It seems sweet now – less than a dozen years later, most of those words are so commonplace, they’re used these days in political ads.
This turn into No-No territory has happened gradually over time, worming its way through both (little d) democratic victories and challenges to the country. Since the mid-Twentieth Century, more Americans have fought and won the right to actively participate in politics, and the subsequent expansion of what political scientists call “identity politics” has fundamentally changed the actions and composition of the two political parties. The past half century has also seen tremendous changes in political behavior driven by technological development and the financial reward for electoral victory. DC, which had been a political town, became a business town where the product was politics. Together, the diverging parties and the shift in motivation resulted in our modern day hyperpolarized political climate. The next several posts explain how this happened.
Developments of the Mid-Twentieth Century
America in the mid-Twentieth Century is frequently referenced as one of idyllic national agreement… if you are Caucasian. If you are not white, you probably have a different idea of this time and it’s far less ideal. As Ezra Klein notes, the two parties were close together on policy issues because a) they were fairly homogenous, both consisting mostly of white guys and b) the policies they crafted reflected this sameness as they disregarded everyone else.
Hence, an insufficient, super-fast summary of American political development from 1936 until the late 1960s:
· Franklin Roosevelt is elected in 1932 in the throes of the Great Depression, ushers a whomping Democratic majority into Congress, passes a big part of his New Deal program, changes the way Americans think about their rights, and expands the government bigly.
· Conservatism (as we think of it today) is born in reaction against this big government.
· Black people are ignored, discriminated against, and in many cases violently attacked.
Okay. Now that we are all caught up, during this time the Democratic and Republican Parties were so similar, the American Political Science Association (APSA) put forth a paper in 1950 called “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” suggesting the two parties become divergent. Be careful what you wish for.
The divergence commences when the Civil Rights movement kicks the country where it counts and the GOP backs away from its position as the “Party of Lincoln” toward a position more akin to the “Party that drives Lincolns and Beemers in the suburbs.” Don’t get me wrong: The Democrats were not fabulous on the issue of Civil Rights either, but they were the better of the two, and Black leaders learned that they had to form coalitions with their oppressors to get anything accomplished. For example, at around the same time that Civil Rights laws were being passed in the mid-1960s, so too were new, punitive immigration laws that fundamentally changed the way the laws treated immigrants entering the United States from our Southern border. The point here is that racial, ethnic, and gender groups moved to the left, not because they were necessary liberal (hi Latinos! I see you!) but because they seemingly had no other option in a two-party system.
So, this was the start of the identity politics movement where the Democratic Party bearhugged civil rights groups and women’s rights groups every four years (and sometimes not much more than that). The Democratic Party became the coalition party of herding cats with disparate constituencies, many of whom were grudging supporters. The GOP, meanwhile, became (stereotypically speaking) the party of Country Club rich people who bought The Preppy Handbook without a hint of irony. And speaking of a lack of irony, a song (sung to the Michael Jackson tune “I’m Bad”) at the 1988 Gridiron Dinner made fun of George H.W. Bush with the lyrics: “If your daughter's in cotillion. And your son's enrolled at Choate. And your wife is worth a million. I'm sure to get your vote.” Wocca wocca! But maybe only if you were in the audience of a white-tie dinner in DC with movers and shakers and journalists and fancy people. (I wasn’t in the audience. But I read about it in the Washington Post.)
Much of the politics of the 1980s and 90s was rooted in this division and it was an important time, because this when many Americans began to feel increasingly ignored by both parties: the urban poor, working class, disaffected veterans, farmers, and the rural poor, many of whom expanded the extremist right movement.
Because while the Democratic Party was paying more attention to Americans who had never before had a seat at the political table. not all Americans agreed with this movement and furthermore many Americans were not doing well themselves. There were people ready to tap into that anger, especially anger at the Democratic Party for being more diverse and more progressive, and there was a new/old way to spread this message: talk radio. Radio as a medium had been around for decades, but talk radio, where entertainers could yodel and howl for three straight hours of political wrath, became the new kid on the block in 1987.
Long story short, there was a federal policy that required broadcasters to air competing views on controversial issues called the Fairness Doctrine, and conservatives hated it because they thought the media was too liberal in the first place and the Fairness Doctrine gave the left an additional arrow in their quiver. When the Reagan Administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, the door opened for one-sided monologues featuring trash-talking, incendiary pundits and before you could say “Ditto Head,” Rush Limbaugh had a devoted audience of 20 million Americans listening to him on 650 radio stations around the country.
Turning on that microphone that gave rise to a powerful influence over a massive swath of Americans who didn’t realize how angry they were. They found out soon enough.
Next Time: The Triumvirate of the Right Devise the End of Bipartisanship