I’m talking about the take-no-prisoners, compromise-be-damned current political phenomenon. I know politics is a contentious business, and there have been some knock-down-drag-out political fights in the past, but the current hyperpartisanship boggles my mind. I’m wondering what led us to this point. What factors in our socio-political state have led to this? I came up with the Tea Party, which has both reflected and exploited rage and Fox News, ditto. I suppose I could look scornfully at the Huffington Post, too, but it doesn’t seem like it has much influence, frankly. For the record, I’m an independent and not opposed to either party.
Are there other influences? Are there influences BEHIND the ones I’ve mentioned? In other words, if Fox News reflects an enraged, hyperpartisan mindset, then what led to that mindset in the first place?
I realize some people will disagree with me about Fox News and the Tea Party, and that’s fine. Maybe I’m missing some liberal factors; let me know what they are. It does seem like the mindset is more of a Republican phenomenon than a Democratic one, but I could be missing something. I’d like to know what factors I’m overlooking.
It seems to me it all started with 9/11. It was pretty easy for Fox News et al. to exploit the fear of the American people. Then on the other side you have a bunch of very left wing folks who regarded pretty much anything Bush did as an atrocity (I’m not a Bush fan by any means, but I could never call any democratically elected politician a ‘‘fascist’’ with a straight face.)
Actually in my mind, the moment things changed can be traced back to Peter Jennings. As cameras panned live over the wreckage in New York city, Mr. Jennings said, ‘‘This moment has forever changed the course of our history. The American people are now at war.’’ It’s the one thing I can’t forget… the one day even the talking heads couldn’t keep their shit together. I think the fear captured in that moment and the words that were spoken created an expectation of how the situation would be handled.
Finally, Obama scares the pants off of conservatives. He’s all dark and scary looking and his rhetoric heavily favored the working class when he was running for office (not that his policies do.) They think class warfare, they think socialism, Fox News stokes the fire, and everything explodes.
Just kidding. The most convincing theory I’ve heard is that for the past 60 years or so we’ve had three factors that have kept political parties co-operating:
Between 1932 and 1994, the federal legislature was dominated by one party. This gave the GOP reasons to co-operate with the Democarts (since they were going to be stuck in the minority anyways) and since some of the most contentious debates were between liberal and Conservative Democrats, Dems had reasons to try and get votes from the GOP. Now however, the majority is up for grabs every election, and so everyones out to win at all costs every cycle.
Regional variations used to be more salient. There used to be more of a difference between a Southern Conservative Democrat and a liberal Northern Democart then between Democrats and Republicans from the same regions. Now, however, the biggest ideological gap is between the most conservative Dem and the most liberal Republican
Racial issues were more derisive, and cut across party lines (sort of a sub-case of reason 2) Liberal Dems used to ally with Northern Republicans on Civil Rights issues, and these issues were amongst the most contentious of the time. Racial issues are of course still contentious, but there’s no openly racist block in the Congress anymore.
All of these three factors have weakened or disappeared over the last decade or so, and as such, the parties have become more and more polarized. Where there used to be two or three ideological axis in the House, allowing for deal making and aisle crossing now there’s just one. And the majority is always up for grabs, so no one wants to give the other side a “victory” even on issues they agree on. So we’re left with an increasingly divided Congress, while at the same time House and Senate rules and traditions still assume a certain amount of bipartisan co-operation, leaving us our current dysfunctional Congress.
It goes back before 9/11. Remember all the shit that flew around Bill Clinton?
The real difference is communications. Take a “scandal” like George H.W. Bush and his supposed ties to the deep, dark Trilateral Commission, or Nancy Reagan casually remarking that sometimes she consulted with an astrologer. Twenty-five years ago, that kind of stuff got a couple of jokes in Johnny Carson’s monologue and maybe a sketch on SNL. Now there’d be websites, 200,000 hits on Google, talking heads debating it on cable news and endless regurgitations on message boards.
You weren’t a member here during the 2004 elections, I see.
Obama was elected with a majority in Congress. The economy sucks, and nothing he has tried is working. Spending and the deficit are out of control, and the Tea Party was elected based on that. Obviously those whose political careers are based on pork barreling are going to feel threatened by that, and people who feel threatened don’t react coolly.
If and when the economy recovers and the deficit is brought under control, it will be back to business as usual. Except on the SDMB, where it will continue unabated, aimed where it always it.
It works. People who exploit extreme positions win elections. And this has been true for a Long time. Check out the people who got prohibition passed as an example. The Tea Party (and the original “tea party” folks are another example) are just the latest incarnation.
The whole situation is depressing.
It is of more interest to attempt to identify times when extremism didn’t work. The early 70’s? Liberals remember with fondness the accomplishments of Richard Nixon (EPA, clean water act, etc). What were the center of the road years? And how do we get back to those good old days-brief as they were?
Low voter turnout is part of the problem. When 90% of eligible voters vote, the only way to win is with a broad cross-section of support. To get that you need to be relatively moderate – Support the positions of one bloc, but not too strongly so you can still retain the support of other blocs with conflicting agendas. So compromise is kind of built in to the process.
When 40% of eligible voters vote, an alternate strategy opens up: Support a small number of voting blocs, but support them so wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly that their excitement about voting for you drives up their participation rate. A bloc of 25% of the electorate that supports you so strongly that 90% of them vote will win it for you, even if everyone else supports the other guy (but less enthusiastically).
Hotelling’s Law would suggest the opposite: rationally, the two main political parties should be almost identical. Obviously a lot of people argue that this is the case. But if so, where does the extreme partisanship come from? Do the parties magnify their differences to conceal how small their differences actually are?
I would identify a few different factors distinguishing modern politics from that of a few decades ago.
Control of Congress is now at issue in every election, so the stakes are therefore higher. In Congressional (as opposed to Presidential), rallying the party’s base to boost turnout is probably more effective, on both sides, than reaching for the middle.
Congressional districts are more gerrymandered. Redistricting software has become sophisticated enough to draw on a very granular basis, enabling maximum distribution of that state’s majority-party voters, and conversely maximum packing of the opposition party’s voters into certain districts.
The internet empowers voices farther out on the political spectrum. When political commentary was heavily dominated by three networks, and a few major newspapers and magazines, all of whom were aiming at a mass audience, those outlets would naturally tend toward a lowest-common-denominator centrism. Now there are many more ways for voices farther out on the left and the right to make themselves heard.
The republicans had their way from 2000 to either 2006 or 2008. It was an era of republican dominance - they got their tax cuts, wars, deficits, deregulation. It was the ideal world for them in terms of what they could do with the government - control of the whole govenrment, blind support from the public due to 9/11, etc. They had freedom to mold the government how they wanted.
And they wrecked the world.
So they can’t run on positives. They can’t say “vote for us, and we’ll return to the glory days where Republicans are in charge”, because that would be so transparently ridiculous. So instead they run on the negatives - they dial the hatred and fear mongering up on the democrats up to 11. The goal is to get people frothing at the mouth, so hateful at the democrats that they won’t evaluate what republican governance would mean - that it doesn’t matter because the democrats WANT TO DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU LOVE!!!11. The less legitimate, positive, truthful stuff you have to run on, the more you need lies and fearmongering and hatred.
One factor nobody has mentioned: Vietnam. IMO, the US “losing” the Vietnam War, the Democrats’ move toward dovishness, has greatly effected the political environment.
Ronald Reagan made huge changes to American politics. He did compromise and wasn’t a a ‘take no prisoners’ sort of guy but, he changed the political game by making money such a huge deal. He raised tons of money for his campagian.
So, money became much more important.
Now Clinton raised tons of money by moving the Democratic part to the center or even to center/right. The Democratic party abandoned the poor/working class in order to get the big donations to get elected.
This allow Republicans to move to the far right. You get Gingrich, the Contract with America, and the use of ‘wedge issues’ like abortion to get people to the polls. Of course one elected a bait switch strategy was used. “Oh did we say we’d ban abortion? Can’t do that right now but we can cut taxes on ‘business’.”
Read “What’s the Matter with Kansas” for a deeper explanation.
It’s funny how people talk about Obama as if their political memory only extends to the last election.
IMHO, the who hyperpartisianship thing is a result of social and economic changes that have been occuring for the past several decades. If you look at a political map by county instead of state, you can see that the division trends along more urban vs rural divisions instead of neatly by state or region. And urban dwellers tend to be more diverse, more educated and more dependent on government services.
There is also a growing economic divide as our country moves from an industrial economy to a service economy. In spite of some annecdotal articles, salaries for highly educated services professionals (bankers, lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, engineers, etc) tends to far outpace those for individuals with less than college degrees who can often barely find jobs.
The more partisan they present their news, the more rabid their viewers become. The more rabid their viewers, the more money they make. It’s self-sustaining at this point; they have no financial impetus to tone things down.
And since we’ve got one side becoming more and more blindly partisan, the other side is doing the same in self-defense. I’m not excusing Left’s blind partisanship- I think at this point, they’re just as bad as the Right. However, I think the original cause is Fox News.
If we’re talking partisanship, we’re talking much farther back than the past few decades. I’m talking the calcified, no-compromise, in-your-face partisanship we’ve seen in the past couple of years. The Tea Party gave voice to it, Fox News exploited it. I can see why it’s effective, but I think it really did ramp up in 2008.