Dynamics of American Democracy

Partisan Polarization, Political Competition and Government Performance

Eric M. Patashnik, Wendy J. Schiller

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700630028
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy is in crisis. Washington is failing. Government is broken. On these counts many politicians, policy experts, and citizens agree. What is less clear is why—and what to do about it. These questions are at the heart of Dynamics of American Democracy, which goes beneath the surface of current events to explore the forces reshaping democratic politics in the United States and around the world.Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners of politics and governance, this volume charts a twenty-first-century landscape beset by ideological polarization and political tribalism; rapid demographic, economic, and technological change; the influence of online news and social media; and the increasing importance of public attitudes about gender and race. Against this fraught background the authors consider the performance of the two-party system, the operations of Congress and the presidency, and the ways in which ordinary citizens form their beliefs and make their voting decisions. The contributors' work represents a wide range of perspectives and methodological approaches and provides insight into what ails American governance, from the practice of politics as tribal warfare to the electoral rules that produce a two-party hegemony, and from the impact of social media—including how differently conservatives and liberals use Twitter—to the significance of President Trump in historical and institutional perspective.Finally, Dynamics of American Democracy goes beyond diagnosis to present and evaluate the value and viability of proposals for reforming politics.

PART ONE

A Historical Perspective on Today’s Tribal Politics

CHAPTER 1

The Rise of Tribal Politics in Historical Perspective

James A. Morone

American politics has grown increasingly partisan, moving beyond spirited competition to a kind of fury that can best be tagged as tribal.¹ The two parties—once ideological cousins with plenty of overlap in the middle—now reflect different worlds. As polarization grows, both party leaders and their followers stake out very different positions. On policy issues, like the environment, where there was little disagreement between the parties twenty years ago, the parties now take radically different perspectives. Moreover, partisanship has spilled beyond politics and policies. Republican Party members call Democrats “immoral” and “lazy,” and Democrats fire back with “closed-minded” and “dishonest.” Where’s the ideal place to live? Among Democrats, 46 percent chose cities; among Republicans, 4 percent. On dating apps, people even spurn romance with partners from the opposite party—and that’s just as well, since six out of ten parents would be unhappy about their children marrying someone from across the political divide (up from 4 percent in more quiescent times).²

Today, no one gives voice to fierce partisan animosity quite like President Donald Trump, who seemed to egg on violence at his rallies. Pointing to black protesters being hustled out of one venue, he told the cheering crowd, “They used to treat them very, very rough,” or, still more directly, at another rally, “Knock the crap out of them” and “I’d like to punch him in the face.” When white nationalists murdered members of a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh or mailed bombs to liberal Democrats across the nation, in October 2018, the White House—from press secretary right up to vice president—were in the extraordinary position of denying that murder and attempted murder were the president’s fault (quoted in Sides et al. 2018, 2).

The fierce partisanship has spread and touches—many would say menaces—every aspect of government. “We are appalled by the current state of politics in America,” write two congressional veterans from either side of the aisle. When we arrived in Washington, “Congress was both fun and productive.” Now it’s all gridlock and scorched earth. “The Republicans grew radical,” adds a longtime Republican staffer (political scientists call it “asymmetrical polarization”—one side going to extremes). And the Democrats, he continued, are hesitant, lost, clueless (Davis et al. 2014, 2–3; see also Lofgren 2012 and Hacker and Pierson 2006).

Is all this doom-mongering anything new? Or are sharp political elbows, gridlock, and jeremiads about awful government long and familiar traditions in American politics? After all, nothing that Donald Trump had jeered or tweeted on the 2016 campaign trail is any nastier than the broadsides launched during the very first contested election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who was described as a “hideous hermaphroditical character who has neither the force nor firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And the violence? Historian Joanne Freeman recently totaled up seventy fights with fists or weapons in and near the House and Senate Chambers between 1830 and 1860. Of that long list, only one is widely remembered, but it went far beyond anything we have seen in recent times: Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC) pummeled abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), striking him some thirty times with a cane as his colleague Laurence Keitt (D-SC) stopped anyone from interfering. It took Sumner three years to recover from his wounds. Brooks resigned from Congress, became a hero, was unanimously reelected, and collected dozens of new gold-headed canes from his admirers. And is Congress (or Federalism, for that matter) more “broken” today than it was in the golden bipartisan 1950s when, year after year, Congress failed to break filibusters and legislate the most basic rights for civil rights marchers braving terrible state-sponsored brutality? (see Morone 2020, chaps. 2 and 4; on fistfights in Congress, see Freeman 2018).

In this chapter, I suggest how the present partisan warfare reflects long-standing patterns in American political history. Yes, every feature we lament today has a long American legacy: white supremacy, nativism, populism, voter suppression, and the rest. Is there anything new in the present politics? Yes, again. The difference is that the old patterns have come together today in new and unprecedented ways. In the past, no party embraced both racial justice and immigrant rights—the positions were long spread out between parties or party factions. The result: party politics long diffused tribal conflicts; today, it amplifies them.

This chapter explores what the history of American partisanship tells us about the current state of American politics and speculates about what we might do to rescue contemporary politics and policy from the tribal war between “us and them.” We begin with a kind of partisan baseline: the very first contested election.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF SLAVES: THE FIRST ELECTION CAMPAIGN

The founders knew that parties and competition were wrong. Good leaders, they thought, should rise above partisanship or self-interest and simply do what was right. Washington pleaded for unanimity as factions tore up his cabinet; he devoted his Farewell Address—by far his most celebrated piece of writing—to warning the country against the “horrible,” “baneful,” “frightful despotism” of party spirit. Jefferson, as usual, managed the most quotable summation: “The last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not get to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all” (Washington 1796).³

Partisan conflict was wrong, but what could they do? By 1800, each side (the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams and the Democratic-Republicans led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson) believed that the other side would wreck American democracy.⁴ Each party denied it was a party while it plunged into a no-holds-barred partisan campaign. In the process, they offer a very rough baseline for the critical dimensions in partisan politics. Four important themes mark that distant campaign. Each offers a rough early variation of a partisan perennial that runs through American history right to the present.

The Constitution and the Vote

The Constitutional Convention never established voting rules, much less a right to vote. Instead, the founders passed the job to the states. Of course, they dreamt up the electoral college. But who would select or elect those electors? This was left to the states. And down in the states, the ruling majorities immediately measured the existing rules by a simple criterion: did they boost their party’s chance to win? In 1800, seven (out of seventeen) states either fiddled with the rules or seriously debated doing so.

In Virginia, for example, Jefferson had stoutly supported choosing electors district by district—that, after all, was more sensitive to the voice of the people. Now he had changed his mind. In a letter to governor James Monroe, he commented on the folly of permitting Adams to take one of the Commonwealth’s electoral votes (as he had done in the previous election of 1796). Virginia smoothly switched to winner take all, which guaranteed Jefferson all twenty-four electors. Massachusetts and New Hampshire flipped the vote from the public (meaning white men with property) to the more reliably Federalist legislatures. In New York, Hamilton and the Federalists crushed their rival’s plan to pry the vote from the Federalist legislature and vest it in the people, voting by districts—until the Federalists unexpectedly lost control of the legislature and shamelessly turned around and pressed Governor John Jay to do precisely what they had previously rejected (he quietly declined). Pennsylvania’s divided government fought so long and so hard about the voting rules that Jefferson expected the Keystone State to miss the election altogether (Jefferson 1896, 429–434; for a summation of voting machinations, see Larson 2007).

State control set off the scramble to tilt the rules in 1800. Once that scramble went into motion, it never ended—right down to the present day. The American electoral process has few set rules and, more dramatically, no right to vote. Over time, eight amendments regulating elections never created national rules. Or rights.

For example, the Seventeenth Amendment is usually described simply as providing for the direct election of senators. But it does not actually guarantee anyone a ballot. Take a closer look at who actually gets to vote directly for their senator: “Those with the qualifications requisite for the electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.” In 1913, that meant white men only in North Carolina or Georgia; the Seventeenth Amendment granted women the right to vote for senators in Montana and Utah but not in New York and Texas. The partisan manipulation of the rules continued through the years—repeatedly tangled up, as it was in the young republic, with controlling immigration and African Americans (Lichtman 2018; Keyssar 2000).

Wild Irishmen and French Refugees

In 1800, the parties clashed over refugees and immigrants. Democratic-Republicans embraced them (and were none too punctilious about whether they were eligible to vote as they thrust ballots into their hands). Federalists feared the newcomers as a disruptive, even revolutionary, influence and pushed through Alien Acts to curb their influence. The most controversial of the three Acts gave the executive branch the power to hunt down dangerous aliens and deport them without constitutional protections or judicial process. At the same time, Sedition Acts forbade the rising newspapers from criticizing the government (which they had been doing with great gusto). Each side blamed the other for putting the American experiment at risk—by fostering anarchy (as the Federalist charged) or by suppressing free speech (as the Democratic-Republicans responded).

What we remember is Jefferson and his followers standing up to Alien and Sedition acts that were tinged with autocracy. However, to the Federalist mind, the Democratic-Republicans were leading the new country into a bloody anarchy like the French Revolution (which the Jeffersonians unabashedly admired). Remember, the Constitution was little more than a decade old and had not yet sunk deep roots in law or politics.

The Alien and Sedition Acts posed a fundamental political choice that divided the society at the time: proper hierarchical order versus robust free speech. The basic choice was deeply entangled with the refugees who had fled nations like Ireland, France, and Haiti as revolutions and counterrevolutions sent people fleeing for the United States. The newcomers—often fired up with fervor inspired by the French Revolution—provoked questions about the nature of the country right from the start.

Race

At the same time, questions of race and slavery rattled Americans and have now been strangely forgotten. The election of 1800 fired up that early American contradiction: shouts for liberty in a society that protected slavery. Beginning in 1791, slaves successfully rebelled in the F...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: A Historical Perspective On Today’s Tribal Politics
• Part Two: Political Institutions and Government Performance
• Part Three: Public Opinion and Political Behavior in a Polarized Era
• Part Four: Ideas for Reform
• Part Five: Donald Trump and the Evolution of American Politics
• Conclusion: Reflections and Paths Forward
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover