Primary elections. They tend to bring out the most partisan voters and the winner ends up being the most partisan.
Gerrymandering. It always existed, but it’s far more sophisticated these days. Ultimately, it most congressional districts, the winner of the primary will win the general election.
Homogenization of the parties. It’s more advanced in the Republican Party, but it’s also happening to the Democrats. Up until the 70s or so, you had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Legislation was passed across party lines; now it’s one party or the other.
Fox News. They aren’t anything new – newspapers 100 years ago did the same thing – but the difference is that they reach a wider audience and there were fewer counterbalancing opinions. Fox got ratings by being opinionated, and by only airing one side of the issue, so other cable news networks joined in.
Religion coming to the forefront. There is a strong movement by religious organizations to take a direct interest in elections. Most of these are fundamentalists, whose worldview is “We’re right and everyone else is wrong.”
“Uncompromising” being a term of approval. Laws are passed by compromise, but if you change your mind, or do things for the greater good, you are at risk of losing your next primary (see #1)
“All politics is local.” This is a given, and it prevent politicians from doing things for the good of the country and seeing the bigger picture. The Pentagon wants to end development of a weapon they don’t want any more, saving billions of dollars? Can’t do that; it’s in my district.
Money. Politicians need to raise money, which makes them responsive to people who are willing to donate big sums. Thus they cannot change positions, even if they realize they’re wrong, because they know they’ll have to work that much harder to fundraise.
Public opinion polls. Makes it easier for politicians to pander to voters.
I take this both from my experience as a reporter and during my candidate training.
By working districts to provide safety in seating for politicians of one party or the other (depending on the state) you take away the means by which politicians are incentivized to compromise: the existence of significant voting blocks of a different persuasion.
Good enough. As a fictional example:
District ‘A’ has been gerrymandered by the state legislature to have a strong R leaning. District ‘B’ has been gerrymandered by the state legislature to have a strong D leaning. Both incumbents are thereby protected and face little possibility of losing to a challenger of the opposition.
YAY, say the incumbents.
However, by doing so you bring the actual electoral challenges to the PRIMARY election earlier in the year. So the race isn’t between an R and a D but between two Rs or two Ds. There are some factors here that need to be made clear:
Turn out in primaries are generally very light. Sometimes as little as 10% of those eligible to vote choose the candidate.
Those who DO turn out for primary elections tends towards those whole feel most strongly about party affiliation.
This leads to a race among the candidates to be the ‘most’ R or D. Over time any softening of a candidates public stance or voting that deviates from the partisan is seen as a ‘challengable’ weakness and can lead to an upset.
So we end up with a group of elected officials for whom compromise can be a concept that leads to unemployment.
Now mix that for 20 years and some of those ‘no compromise’ elected officials are in true positions of power. Here in SC Senator DeMint is seen as the man who decides who gets the seal of ‘true R’ approval. It’s not unheard of for him to decide that an incumbent isn’t a true believer and arrange for someone more orthodox to challenge and defeat that person. For an R in SC challenging DeMint is a no-win situation.
Given the above facts we end up with elected officials for whom there is simply either no gain in bipartisanship or who genuinely believe that such is wrong with a capital WRONG.
The solution is to override gerrymandered districts at both the federal and state level. Engineering districts where the registration balance has to be as close to 50-50 (or something similar but taking non-party voters into account) would be, to my eyes, a good thing. But I don’t know how to accomplish that given that those creating the districts are the same as those benefitting from the districts.
The abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was a major factor. It used to be that television and radio networks had to be politically neutral in order to keep their broadcast licenses; now they’re allowed to advocate for a political viewpoint.
I don’t. The partisanship during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, or during the furiously disputed 2000 election, was more intense than the Tea Party’s wettest wet dream. How quickly we forget.
About a generation ago, capitalist news outlets began to recognize that the more shocking and outrageous things were drawn the more reaction it created, the more viewers it generated. Witness all the ‘Crossfire’ type shows. At one time they were paneled by informed, articulated, intelligent hosts. But then, whenever some guest said something ridiculously stupid or outrageous, that became news. Self generating news. It wasn’t long till someone recognized more conflict meant more viewers and larger advertising revenue. So, for several years, such shows were transformed into blowhards being stupid towards each other. There ceased to be civility, and they moved further and further from truth. The guys in charge began to recognize that there was money to be made in polarizing the country. Pretty soon, politicians began to recognize that it was the more outrageous, even if factually incorrect, sound bits that got coverage. And so dialogue transformed into shocking sound bites with no real purpose beyond creating more conflict which could be exploited for profit. None of them gave a shit about what it was doing to the country or national dialogue, only about the money they made. It was from this petri dish of dysfunction that the likes of Sarah Palin rose up.
I agree completely. (So does the Prez – this was his first response when asked this very question just two days ago.)
There are other factors (others mentiond them), but this is a big one. Geographer Mark Monmonier covers this subject well in his easy-to-read research analyses.
There’s a similar phenomenon in sports, especially pro basketball, where players try to make the most ridiculous dunks during a game because they know that even if they miss they’re going to be on SportsCenter the next night. Anything brief and attacking is going to get play; more play means more coverage; more coverage means more money, volunteers, and votes.
To sum I think everything up in this thread: there’s a big upside to being hyperpartisan, and not a whole lot of downside.
The internet has allowed partisans to discuss politics with the like minded. Talking to people with similar views intensifies the views that are held. Before the internet if someone talked politics all the time in an intense fashion they were called a bore and shunned. Now an effeminate looking Salvadorean or a woman with an annoying greek accent gives them a chance to find others with similar interests to fulminate all they want and the validation they feel from the like minded intensifies their passions. So now the internet has increase political passion and given the passionate but ignorant an outlet for expressing their partisanship.
Couldn’t resist injecting a little squirt of hyperpartisanship into the middle of your own otherwise cogent comments, eh? Like a beautiful golden Twinkie filled with creamy shit.
In broad brush strokes, I think three recent events have polarized the electorate:
The impeachment of Clinton;
The contentious Gore/Bush election and the fact that it was decided more on court rulings than on the ballot box; and
The decision by the Bush administration to rule as if they had a mandate, rather than to seek compromise with the other party; specifically, the decision to invade Iraq and the fact that those who were opposed to the war were often labeled as traitors, or supporters of despotism.
In order for a democracy to thrive, the losing side has to feel that it is still a member of society and that there is more to gain by trying to work with the other side and to try to win the next election, but those three events broke with that tradition: Clinton’s impeachment and the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore V. Bush seemed to suggest that the Republicans were not intrested in winning elections, only in holding power and the fact that opponents of the Iraq war were labeled as traitors meant that if your side loses, then you are not even to be considered a co-patriot anymore.
My guess is the spread of cable news (including but not limited to Fox) and the loss of “local” politics. Before cable news everyone watched the local station which was bound by the fairness act. Now news is for the whole US and aimed at issues of national controversy not things of local importance which often don’t fit into the left/right divide.
The disappearance of more and more local papers and the rise of the internet are inflating this extremism. It’s really hard to make moderates exciting, sexy, and newsworthy.
Well, I’m not convinced that today’s partisanship is all that much more “hyper” than the partisanship that has come before. And if it is, I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing necessarily (I generally want the government to do less, and gridlock is one avenue to that end).
Also, color me surprised as hell to learn that the SDMB by and large believes it’s all the Republicans’ fault.
I dunno - I was prepared to blame you personally.
I’d guess that the internet just happens to go well with unthinking confidence - perceive a problem, spout off some ill-considered but satisfying sounding “solution”, sit back smugly. It would favour (and be more nurtured by) whichever party embraced the less-considered platform. If the Democrats were still into the chest-pounding unionized working-class stuff, this would be their time.
It used to be politics and then money . Now it is business. Business never sleeps. It looks out for its own interests night and day. It is uncompromising and single minded.