The polarization paradox: Why hyper-partisanship favors conservatism and undermines liberalism
By deciding to "fight fire with fire" and beat conservatives at their own game — progressives share much of the blame for America's political dysfunction.
A version of this article, co-authored with Dietram Scheufele, was originally published online in September 2012 at the Breakthrough Journal. After reading our essay from twelve years ago, I encourage you to read “Reconstructing a Center That Can Hold,”— the Breakthrough Journal’s recent Substack launch essay. In combination, the two articles preview many topics I will be writing about at IDEAS in the lead-up to the November elections.
September 2012 — If President Obama is reelected in November, he will almost certainly face a Congress that is more divided along ideological lines than at any period in more than a century. Extreme polarization also extends to the states, where vicious battles over budgets and union rights have led to recall votes, legislative walkouts, and intense protests.
Increasingly, the art of governing and compromise has been replaced by a culture of constant campaigning and relentless negativity as political leaders prioritize short-term electoral ambitions and small-scale policy fights. Meanwhile, public confidence in government sinks ever lower.
Progressives tell a one-sided story about the complex causes of America's political dysfunction. They blame the conservative movement, Fox News, libertarian billionaires, and the "do nothing" Republicans in Congress. Much of this story is true. Though both parties have moved toward their ideological poles — the extreme rightward shift of the GOP accounts for much of the increase in polarization.
How could the Left be expected to embrace compromise and moderation when no one was left to compromise? By 2003, progressive leaders believed they had no choice but to “fight fire with fire,” beating conservatives at their own game. Over the next decade, they built a vast ideological infrastructure of mega-donor networks, think tanks, news watchdogs, and media echo chambers.
The strategy has been dangerously misguided. Extreme polarization has served conservatives very well, driving moderate leaders from politics and promoting feelings of cynicism, inefficacy, and distrust among the public. Instead of going to war against the Right, progressives would have better served their social and political objectives by joining with moderates to rebuild America’s institutions and civic culture.
The outrage industry
In general, higher levels of education and political engagement are no defense against ideological tribalism. Indeed, the opposite is the case. The best-educated Americans tend to be the most partisan and polarized.
When elected officials, candidates, and activists define every policy issue as part of a broader ideological struggle — party labels become brand names, each standing for a distinct set of conservative or liberal positions.
The highly educated and politically attentive are the most polarized because they are better at recognizing these ideological labels, more likely to react to these cues in ideologically consistent ways, and more skilled at offering arguments to support their initial gut responses.
The implication, warns social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that the best-educated partisans excel at "my side" reasoning but often fail at critical self-reflection. "Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side," he notes.
Polarization has been further strengthened by dramatic changes in the media system over the past decade. In the 24-hour news cycle era, commentators and bloggers rely on the latest poll result, insider strategy, negative attack, or embarrassing gaffe to appeal to ideologically motivated audiences.
The hypercompetitive battle to win audience attention incentivizes “brawling, aggressive outreach by bloggers, organizations, and smaller publications to keep viewers, listeners, readers, and donors agitated,” write Tufts University scholars Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey Berry.
This “outrage industry” specializes in provoking emotional responses from audiences, trading in exaggerations, insults, name-calling, and partial truths about opponents —reducing complex issues to “ad hominem attacks, overgeneralizations, mockery, and dire forecasts of impending doom.”
Based on an analysis of ten weeks of television, radio, blog, and newspaper commentary in 2009, the researchers concluded that elements of outrage are most prevalent among right-wing pundits and the conservative media but are also a staple of liberal outlets and commentators.
On TV, they estimate that elements of outrage appear every 90 to 100 seconds, with Fox News’s Glenn Beck Show and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann leading among the programs analyzed.
“We have created a system in the media in which the pure malevolent glee and demonization and dirty tricks and kinetic heat of the horrible last days of particularly brutal elections can happen all year round now,” noted MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in a 2010 Harvard University speech. What is bad for democracy, she admitted, is good for her ratings:
As someone who speaks overtly from the Left to an audience that is not entirely of the Left but which expects to hear liberal opinion from me, the closest thing I know of as a way to goose my own ratings is to showcase some villainous behavior from a media figure on the right. The numbers rise then because there is an appetite for hearing that media figures on the right are terrible people doing terrible things…that same appetite is evident on the other side, and I have the inches-thick pile of threats to prove it.
Yet as news organizations and commentators consistently define politics in terms of cynical and deceitful strategies, losing an election or a policy battle becomes especially divisive for the politically engaged.
“A belief that one’s side has experienced an illegitimate loss … prompts the losing partisans to become increasingly angry,” writes political scientist Diana Mutz. “At this point, it is no longer about differing political philosophies; it is about right versus wrong, truth versus deceit, good versus evil.”
When asked in 2012 to reflect on the factors promoting political gridlock, retiring Democratic congressman Barney Frank offered a similar conclusion:
Now, the activists live in parallel universes, which are both separate and echo chambers for each. If you’re on the Left, you listen to MSNBC, you go to the blogs, Huffington Post, et cetera, and you basically hear only what you agree with. If you’re on the Right, you watch Fox News and the talk shows, and you hear only what you agree with. When we try to compromise, what you find is not people simply objecting to the specific terms of the compromise, but the activists object even to your trying to compromise, because they say, ‘Look, everybody I know agrees with us, so why are you giving in?’
Indeed, the evidence suggests that today’s media enables a spiral of political polarization and mobilization among the most politically engaged, according to communication researchers Wolfgang Donsbach and Cornelia Mothes. They also suggest a parallel spiral of political disengagement and demobilization for moderates and those lacking a strong interest in politics.
For these groups, which disproportionately include young people and non-white voters, it is increasingly easy to trade out media coverage of public affairs for entertainment and celebrity news.
Primary pressures
Over the past 30 years, the best educated have also been the most geographically mobile, settling in areas that match their lifestyle preferences and political outlook. This geographic sorting has contributed to a rise in noncompetitive general elections, with many Congressional seats determined by the much smaller proportion of ideologically motivated voters who turn out for primaries.
Meanwhile, the relative lack of moderate voters and centrist sources of campaign funds and volunteer activity limits the ability of moderate candidates to run and win in primary races.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has likely worsened this dynamic by enhancing the ability of ideologically driven donors to tip the scales of election races in favor of strongly liberal or conservative candidates. Consequently, the parties may be more closely aligning themselves with the priorities of super-wealthy partisans.
Political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write that changes in leadership and legislative rules have further strengthened the divide between the two parties. Increased pressure in Congress to produce legislative results has driven both parties to boost the power of House leadership to steer legislation, reduce input at the committee level, and reduce the chance of amendments by the opposing party.
Since the 2008 election, the GOP strategy of opposing any legislation favoring Democratic electoral chances — combined with the disciplining pressures of primary races — has made a difficult compromise process virtually impossible.
Agents of dysfunction
The roots of our increasingly polarized politics are long-standing and run deep, but three conservative leaders have played an outsized role in spreading dysfunction.
The first, Newt Gingrich, came to the House of Representatives in 1979 determined to unseat the decades-old Democratic majority. Initially lacking resources and power within his party, Gingrich brought ethics charges and exploited scandals that provoked Democratic leaders “into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives,” Mann and Ornstein write.
The second, Grover Norquist, turned anti-tax pledges into a powerful weapon for maintaining party discipline, limiting the ability of Republican moderates and others to work across party lines. Republicans must sign the pledge to win primary elections and uphold the pledge to keep getting reelected.
The third, Karl Rove, used the George W. Bush presidency to align White House leadership with the conservative polarization strategy. Rove positioned the president as a “national clarifier,” standing “forthrightly on one side of a grand argument” and then winning the argument by “sharpening the differences and rallying his most intense supporters.” He believed that an election won by even a single vote could shape history by leading the country in a new ideological direction, regardless of whether a proposed agenda held majority public support.
According to Rove, the prime objective was to mobilize the conservative base and force moderate voters to choose a side by sharpening the ideological differences between the parties. This bitterly negative campaigning style, he believed, would also depress turnout among young adults and non-white voters. Republicans didn’t need majority support among these Democratic-leaning groups to win elections — they just needed them not to participate.
To execute this new theory of change, Rove reshaped the practice of politics in three other important ways. First, during the 2002 and 2004 elections, Rove and his GOP allies pioneered using “big data” techniques that combined expansive voter information with micro-targeting strategies. Few Americans were considered swing voters in this new precision approach to campaigning. Instead, elections were won by identifying, registering, and turning out at a high rate those voters who were already inclined to support Republicans.
Second, Rove and his conservative allies aimed to create and reinforce communities of like-minded others. These echo chambers — led by Fox News, political talk radio, and the Drudge Report — reinterpreted every issue and event through an ideological lens and with political ends in mind.
Third, the goal of politics was not just to win but to destroy the legitimacy of the other side by persuading “voters (and donors and viewers and readers) that an opponent lacks the character and credibility even to deserve a place in the contest,” Halperin and Harris write.
The progressive message machine
Their decisive defeat in the 2002 midterm elections convinced Democratic strategists that they needed to be more like their conservative opponents—rebuilding the party around a tightly controlled, ideological power base.
Rob Stein, a Clinton-era political appointee, was a major catalyst behind liberals’ embrace of a new style of politics. Stein researched the conservative movement’s network of donors, think tanks, and media outlets and started showing progressive activists and donors a PowerPoint presentation detailing the “Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix.”
The “money matrix,” Stein explained, was composed of roughly 200 mega-donors whose first loyalty was not to the GOP but to a radical conservative ideology. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute served as the “conservative message makers,” cultivating ideologically consistent ideas, experts, and talking points, which were then funneled to conservative magazines, talk radio hosts, and Fox News. During the 1990s, the conservative message machine had spent an estimated $1 billion on generating and promoting conservative ideas.
“This is perhaps the most potent, independent, institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,” an admiring Stein told Matt Bai of the New York Times. In comparison, liberals had come to the battle largely unarmed, Stein explained, spending substantial amounts of money without a coordinated strategy, shared policy agenda, or ideological narrative.
In 2003 — around the same time Stein began recruiting donors to support a new liberal message machine — former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta launched the Center for American Progress (CAP). According to Podesta, despite the many environmental, civil rights, and other single-issue groups flourishing on the left, policy strategy and messaging were uncoordinated, and few could deliver in elections. CAP’s primary mission would be to address these flaws, developing and coordinating a consistent progressive vision across issues and elections.
Podesta collected an impressive roster of scholars and former Clinton administration appointees to burnish its image as a serious think tank. Yet, at its core, CAP would operate less like the prestigious Brookings Institution and more like a campaign-style war room. “Others strive to be objective, we don’t,” Jennifer Palmieri, former CAP vice president for communications, told Bloomberg News.
By 2010, CAP and its affiliated CAP Action Fund were a $40-million-a-year operation, employing 250 people and spending more than a third of its budget on communications and grassroots campaigning. The organization’s blog, Think Progress, is the heart of its messaging operation. There, a collection of intensely partisan bloggers and journalists churn out opposition research and strategic interpretations of news and events, relentlessly reframing every policy issue as part of a broader ideological struggle for the country's future.
In 2004, Media Matters for America joined CAP at the center of the new liberal message machine. The media watchdog was founded by David Brock, who had begun his career as a conservative writer for the American Spectator, famously labeling Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a bit slutty” in one article and investigating Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual exploits in others.
In 1997, Brock publicly broke with the conservative movement, and in 2002 he published the mea culpa memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.38 In 2004, he followed with The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy,39 which he concluded by outlining his vision for a new liberal counterweight to the conservative movement.40
As of 2010, Media Matters was a $15-million-a-year organization, employing 90 staff who monitor Fox News, talk radio, and other media outlets, publishing 20,000 pieces of content annually. Media Matters claims credit for campaigns that forced the conservative pundits Laura Schlessinger, Don Imus, and Glenn Beck off the air. Yet much of its daily output is aimed at countering any perceived conservative slant from the 24-hour news cycle.
“This is our Pearl Harbor”
Following the 2004 election, all the major elements were in place to remake Democratic politics in the image of the Right. With liberals reeling in the aftermath of John Kerry’s loss, Rob Stein gathered prospective donors at a strategy meeting in Washington. “The US didn’t enter World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. We just had our Pearl Harbor,” a co-organizer told those gathered.
Stein and the other organizers warned that progressive donors needed to make long-term investments in a new progressive infrastructure if the Democratic Party survived. In 2005, they formed the Democracy Alliance to serve as an investment club for about a hundred mega-donors, with the initial goal of raising $200 million.
The network gave away over $50 million in its first nine months, selecting 25 organizations out of more than 600 applicants. Among the most influential Democracy Alliance donors were a small group of liberal billionaires who have become familiar names in political circles. George Soros, Peter Lewis, and the Hollywood producer Steve Bing have poured tens of millions into the liberal message machine. According to news reports, CAP’s founding owed much to Soros, who would donate an estimated $15 to $25 million to the organization over its first five years.
By 2008, nearly half of Democracy Alliance’s members had donated to CAP or its affiliated CAP Action Fund. Independent of the Democracy Alliance, CAP also benefitted from an estimated $20 million in support from billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler.
The same group of liberal mega-donors was instrumental in creating the prototype for today’s super PACs. In 2004, Soros, Lewis, Bing, and the Sandlers donated a combined $73.7 million to independent expenditure groups, with nearly $60 million of this total supporting groups affiliated with MoveOn.org, Americans Coming Together, and the Media Fund. The latter two groups coordinated voter turnout and advertising in battleground states, collecting $196.4 million in donations, mostly from wealthy individuals and labor unions.
The apparent goal of these billionaires, and that of the Democracy Alliance, was not just to help Democrats win elections but also to break with Clinton-era centrist politics, which they criticized for being too accommodating and for failing to articulate a clear progressive vision for the country. This, as much as winning elections, was what the Democracy Alliance and liberal mega-donors sought to change.
Against “one, true” progressive vision
For many progressives, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign represented the evolution of their efforts to surpass Republicans in campaign sophistication and remake the Democratic Party as a liberal force.
To win the Democratic nomination and general election, the Obama campaign adopted strategies from the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. The former Vermont governor used the Web to recruit thousands of “Deaniacs,” organize face-to-face gatherings of his supporters — and raise more than $25 million for his campaign through smaller online donations.
Building on these strategies, the 2008 Obama campaign team sent an estimated one billion emails and generated a list of 13.5 million supporters. The campaign website and e-mail strategy was a powerful pro-Obama echo chamber, directly engaging voters and bypassing the news media. These tactics effectively increased participation and turnout by minorities, young people, and other groups likely to vote for a Democratic candidate.
Yet Obama’s victory ultimately depended on his success in appealing to moderate voters, thereby expanding his support base. In doing so, Obama displayed more of Bill Clinton's “national synthesizer” style than Bush's “national clarifier” style.
Clinton had sought to blur, disrupt, and ultimately bridge partisan differences, not to clarify them. As journalists Halperin and Harris describe, Clinton selected “the best ideas from all parts of the ideological spectrum.” He assembled them in ways that served the needs of an electorate motivated more by results rather than ideology.
Obama went to painstaking lengths to indicate his willingness to compromise and cross partisan lines. In his speeches, he used a “post-partisan” moral vocabulary to transcend ideological boundaries, showing “himself to be a liberal who understood conservative arguments about the need for order and the value of tradition,” Haidt argues.
Obama also strove to distance himself from deeply partisan political strategies. As early as 2005, in a post to the Daily Kos community, he challenged the liberal narrative about the need to create a rival infrastructure and a disciplined message machine, perceptively warning of the effects on political discourse and culture:
According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists … we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican Party.… In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda.… I think this perspective misreads the American people.… To the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward.
As the 2008 general election launched, David Brock, John Podesta, and George Soros each planned independent expenditure campaigns on behalf of Obama. Yet Obama publicly and privately discouraged the efforts on his behalf. This was, no doubt, mainly because he didn’t need them. Obama’s campaign was so flush with cash that independent efforts, at best, were redundant and, at worst, risked becoming counterproductive. Obama raised $745 million across the primary and general election campaigns, doubling the $368 million raised by McCain.
But Obama also understood that the liberal donors and activists spearheading the independent efforts had differing ideas about liberalism and the Democratic agenda. The wealthy donors of the Democracy Alliance, for example, tended to favor progressive groups over more centrist organizations like the Democratic Leadership Council and the Truman National Security Project, a preference that did not, in many circumstances, help Democrats actually win elections or govern effectively.
Driving the message
After Obama’s victory, the liberal message machine went to work in an unfamiliar context. In 2009, for the first time since the earliest years of the Clinton presidency, Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.
Led by CAP and Media Matters, the machine featured a heavily staffed war room focused on “driving the White House’s message and agenda,” reported Greg Sargent at the Plum Line blog. The strategy was to coordinate messaging among liberal groups and reduce complex policy questions to “talking points and narratives that play well in the media and build public support for the White House’s policy goals.”
MSNBC bolstered these efforts, fully embracing its position as the prime-time ideological counterweight to Fox News — thereby adding a cable news platform to the liberal message machine.
Faced with an opponent in Obama who had surpassed them in both money and sophistication, conservatives now had to rally in response, escalate their spending and strategies, and “take back their country.” But whatever Republicans may have lacked in terms of money and infrastructure, they more than made up for by way of ideological coherence.
Conservatives had worked to drive moderates from the party, a dynamic further reinforced by GOP electoral losses in Senate states and House districts over the previous two election cycles. As a result, Republicans were able to quickly coalesce around a strategy of determined opposition to the Obama agenda.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and other conservative leaders realized that the fate of the struggling American economy, which Democrats had inherited mainly from their Republican predecessors, would largely determine Democratic electoral fortunes over the subsequent several cycles, mainly if Republicans stayed united.
By refusing to cooperate with the Democratic agenda, Republicans successfully limited the scope of the stimulus package. During the 2010 mid-terms, Democrats were forced to run on the success or failure of economic measures that Republicans had watered down and unanimously opposed.
The Republican strategy received a massive boost from the unexpected rise of the Tea Party, which provided a master narrative about big government and a genuine grassroots base to pressure Congress and enforce party discipline.
Fox News helped create a “community of meaning” for the movement by providing Tea Party supporters with shared discourse about national politics and events and branding the movement as an extension of the “Fox Nation.” To mobilize participation, viewers were invited to go to the network’s website, where they could find Tea Party-related events in their local area.
These efforts culminated in August 2009 with protests against “Obamacare” and “socialism” at congressional town meetings. With the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown several months later, Democrats no longer held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This forced them to enact Obama’s top policy priority, health care reform, through a budget reconciliation measure. Brown’s victory also hindered the effort to pass legislation to cap US carbon emissions and presaged the heavy losses that Democrats would suffer in the 2010 midterm elections.
By 2011, it had become clear that creating a liberal message machine to match conservatives had not heralded the dawn of a new age of progressive policies and governance. Instead, the machine had contributed to political trench warfare. Despite the massive political spending by ultra-wealthy progressive donors, Obama’s victories could simply be reversed with the next turn of electoral fortune.
Forever war
As the 2012 election approaches, the escalation appears to be endless. Liberals and conservatives speculate endlessly about the other side's fundraising prowess, each warning of dramatic disparities to mobilize their respective donors and activists.
Based on Obama’s 2008 totals, conservatives argue that Obama may raise more than $1 billion for his campaign. Liberals counter that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has opened the door to $500 million in spending by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and groups supported by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Future election cycles promise even more spending by the liberal and conservative message machines — which will strengthen their ability to apply ever more advanced technological tools to mobilize their bases and demonize their opponents.
Yet by defining almost everything in politics as “us versus the radical fringe” and centralizing resources within a handful of organizations, liberals have institutionalized a bunker mentality that rewards groupthink and substantially reduces opportunities for developing innovative ideas and practical approaches to governing.
Liberals who break with conventional perspectives or attempt to cross the fault lines that polarization has etched into our political culture are too often “debunked” as misinformers, labeled contrarians, or accused of aiding the enemy.
Extreme polarization has also led to public disgust with politics, government, and "Washington." The resulting damage to our civic culture disproportionately harms liberals, whose core social and political objectives almost always entail government services, investments, and interventions in private markets.
The ideological arms race with conservatives also risks putting Democrats at an inherent electoral disadvantage. Over the past decade, surveys of the general public show that conservatives consistently outnumber liberals by almost 2 to 1 — and this advantage decreases only slightly among those Americans who vote on election day.
This means that Democrats have to appeal to a much broader coalition of voters than Republicans and must rely on support from a substantial majority of moderates. Protesting limits on Plan B contraception access or fighting the approval of the tar sands oil pipeline are admirable actions that inspire wealthy liberal donors and core constituencies. Yet, they are either uninspiring or problematic for moderates, the voters liberals need to win over to prevail in elections.
Similarly, Democrats have increasingly come to depend upon young people and minorities, who comprise a growing proportion of eligible voters. However, among these potential supporters, intense negativity and extreme polarization promote feelings of cynicism and inefficacy, likely adding to the propensity to tune out the news. To mobilize young people and minorities, Democrats are therefore forced to spend ever-greater resources each election cycle on canvassing, texting, social media, celebrities, and narrowly targeted appeals.
A time to build
In the aftermath of a 2012 election that is likely to be among the most brutal campaigns in history, liberals would be well served to turn more attention and resources to rebuilding our civic culture and reconstructing a vital center in American politics rather than investing ever more heavily in the liberal message machine.
Liberals should prioritize reforming our civic and political institutions to allow for moderation, deliberation, and crosscutting discourse. They must recognize that progressive governance cannot exist without a functioning civic culture.
A place to start is the primary system, which remains a central mechanism creating pressures against compromise. How both parties choose candidates must be reformed so incentives favor candidates who appeal to a more diverse cross-section of voters instead of a narrow, ideologically consistent constituency. California and Washington, for example, are experimenting with “top two” primary models. These and other innovations merit careful consideration.
Specific to presidential elections, Harvard University political scientist Thomas Patterson has proposed shortening the primary season, moving the primaries closer to the party conventions, and giving every state a meaningful say in candidate selection. A shortened campaign season could also benefit efforts at campaign finance reform by reducing the demand for fundraising.
But fixing our electoral system is not enough. Our most critical need is to rebuild our civic infrastructure, investing in institutional reforms that enable interaction with people who are politically different from us.
In particular, strong regional newspapers have historically helped citizens identify and understand important regional interests that cut across partisan and ideological agendas, serving as a partial counterweight to partisanship in Congress. With the decline of our regional newspapers, Americans’ capacity to confront problems, make informed political choices, participate in decision-making, and forge compromise has been dramatically weakened.
Former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie and Columbia University communication scholar Michael Schudson have suggested several methods for supporting local news reporting, restoring the function once played by our great regional newspapers.
These include allowing newspapers to shift to a nonprofit or low-profit designation, creating university-based news organizations, and increasing local reporting by public media organizations. Further, they call for a shift in outlook from mega-donors and philanthropists, who “should consider news reporting of public affairs to be a continuous public good rather than a series of specific projects under their control or a way of generating interest and action around causes and issues of special interest to them.”
As a complement, we must increase investments in civic education that address the effects of our like-minded social enclaves and our addiction to ideologically congenial media. Most promising is the prospect of a national civil service program for high school graduates that would send them to work with others from various political and social backgrounds and live and engage with communities unlike theirs.
We would also do well to encourage greater ideological diversity in our intellectual institutions. Haidt, for instance, has observed that the lack of ideological diversity among social psychologists means that certain research questions about politics and moral reasoning are pursued over others and that results are selectively interpreted and translated. He has called for increasing the number of conservatives among university-affiliated social psychologists over the next decade, and we would extend his critique to other social science fields, including communication, political science, and sociology.
Our studies among engineers, chemists, and physicists show that even after controlling for experts’ professional judgments, personal ideologies influence how they interpret the policy implications of their work.
There is no reason to believe things are different in the social sciences, especially when analyzing ideologically divisive policy debates. In our experience, peer review is an imperfect safeguard against groupthink and ideological bias. Increasing the ideological diversity within our ranks can only benefit our research.
Similar principles should define the convening of forums and meetings among think tank intellectuals, civil society leaders, philanthropists, journalists, and creative professionals at the national level and across states and regions.
TED meetings, Aspen Institute events, SXSW, and Sundance are billed as “‘thought-leader gatherings’ where ‘rock stars’ emerge from their ‘silos’ to learn about ‘disruptive’ ideas that have been carefully ‘curated,’” as New York magazine recently described.84 Yet most of these forums are sponsored and populated by the very same donors, leaders, and voices that fund, organize, and benefit from the liberal message machine.
Ultimately, the policies and actions we might adopt to address polarization are probably less important than our posture toward the problem. In questioning progressives' reaction to our increasingly polarized politics, we offer no defense of conservative leaders who appear to be deliberately promoting dysfunction as a way to boost the influence of a mostly white Republican base.
But for better or worse, as the party of government, progressives have a greater incentive than conservatives to reach across the aisle and pursue pragmatic solutions to America’s problems. But progressives need not do so passively. Compromise and reasonableness can be every bit as potent a weapon for progressives as polarization has been for conservatives.
Progressives must reach out to conservatives by addressing legitimate issues with current liberal policy preferences and programs. This also means collaborating on pathways toward achieving legitimate conservative policy objectives. Yet as progressives do so, they must also significantly raise the political costs of obstructionism.
Progressives would do well to consider the lessons that the United States, like other powers before it, has learned when challenged by foes in asymmetrical conflicts. By this, we mean that even though conservatives have great resources to expend on behalf of their political objectives, they still must fight an uphill battle. Conservatism’s central political project has arguably been to delegitimize the welfare state in the face of a public that still, even after forty years of guerrilla warfare and efforts to “starve the beast,” remains deeply supportive of it.
When political scientists Mann and Ornstein identify the beginnings of our dysfunctional politics and government with Gingrich, they describe a classic asymmetrical strategy. Gingrich’s objective was to delegitimize the Democratic leadership that had controlled the House for almost fifty years and, in the process, delegitimize the government and welfare state they presided over. Where once Gingrich was a marginal player in the Republican caucus, conservatives in the brand of Gingrich now control the GOP and often the government. Yet they have proved unable to dismantle the welfare state, even when controlling all three branches of government.
If progressives respond to the provocations of the Right with rigidity, vitriol, outrage, and a growing unwillingness to compromise, they only strengthen the hand of their opponents, contribute to the gridlock of our political institutions, provide Republicans with an easy justification for obstruction, and ultimately make the unthinkable — the dismantling of the postwar welfare state — thinkable. In this sense, Conservatives are playing a long game, happy to starve the beast and delighted by dysfunction, even when they control the government. For this reason, as progressives unwittingly conspire to turn American politics into a zero-sum game, conservatives win even when they lose.
CITATION | PDF
Nisbet, M. C., & Scheufele, D. A. (2013, Winter). The Polarization Paradox: Why Hyper-Partisanship Strengthens Conservatism and Undermines Liberalism. The Breakthrough Journal, 55–69.
*For references, see the original version at The Breakthrough Journal.
This is so painfully prescient it’s hard to read. And even though I’d come around to view things more like you by the time this was written, I certainly hold some responsibility for the original turn toward the culture war fight club the left took in the early 2000’s. And all these forces (and outcomes) have only gotten worse since. It’s long past time for liberals/ democrats to stand up to the most extreme in our own camp: to be in-group moderates. Plus, the rigidity, vitriol and outrage aren’t fun anymore.