Bicker, Battle, Broil, and Brawl
If you thought 2020's political discourse was fun and illuminating, you'll LOVE 2024.
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Two guys walk into a travel agency in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On the wall is a poster showing a tropical island, with palm trees and gorgeous young tourists laughing and cavorting around the pool—their gleaming cruise ship moored in the distance. A sign below the poster says, “Caribbean Cruise Package: $695.” The two guys nod at one another and one says, “No question. We’ll take two of those Caribbean packages.” The travel agent takes their money and then bashes both of them over the head with a blackjack, knocking them unconscious. Hours later, when they come to, they are lying on the deck of a garbage scow circling Staten Island. One guy says, “Man, my head hurts. I don’t remember a thing, but we musta drunk too many daiquiris or something.” The other guy says, “That’s weird. I don’t remember them serving daiquiris last year.”
In 2024, both of America’s political parties are out shopping for a second Caribbean cruise. At his Substack,
describes what he terms “The Stupidest Election of My Lifetime.” Barro writes:“We are headed for the first presidential election rematch since 1956. Both candidates are unpopular. Both candidates are also extremely well-known to voters.”
Given the likely choice this year, Barro favors Biden, but that’s irrelevant to my interest in his piece. What most caught my eye was the following paragraph:
“There is a popular but mistaken idea that paying close attention to politics is a civic duty. A lot of the people who espouse this idea are what the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists”: people who watch MSNBC or Fox News for hours on end, who reshare tiresome political memes on Facebook and ruin family dinners with political rants, and who generally make themselves miserable by being angry about the opposing party all the time, but who do not actually do anything (besides vote) that affects electoral outcomes. A Biden voter who spends the next ten months tearing his or her hair out in front of the television will have exactly the same effect on the election outcome as one who ignores the campaign until October, wakes up to discover that we really (really!) are doing this again, and then sighs and [votes for Biden]. That voter will have had more time to pursue a more fun hobby in the meantime.”
In the 1980s, a grad school classmate from Italy told me that he envied Americans’ capacity to remain friends despite political differences. The same, he said, was not true in Italy. He said one could still feel deep tension between his family members who had sided with Mussolini half a century earlier and those who had opposed him. Recently, we spoke and I recalled that conversation. I told him that the friendly, apolitical America that he envied 40 years ago no longer existed. He said he was well aware of that unfortunate change.
Just before the 2020 election, I wrote an essay on this ugly new reality. Below, I republish that essay, with a few edits to bring it up to date.
Why Are We So POLARIZED?!?
This is a lightly edited version of my op-ed, published by InsideSources on October 28, 2020.
Which way are we headed, politically, and why are we so polarized?
My first political memory is from age six—Election Night 1960. (I was irritated at being sent to bed before the winner was known.) Twelve years later, at age 18, energized by the ongoing collapse of segregation in my home state of Virginia, I was elected chairman of my hometown’s Democratic Party and served throughout the raging Watergate saga. The city’s Republican chairman was a family friend, and all the while, we enjoyed polite political discussions. We remained friends till he passed away in 2023.
Across-the-aisle camaraderie is almost unthinkable nowadays. Division seems to be the only thing uniting us. I’ve pondered why that is the case.
A common trope holds that over time, liberals (Democrats) moved sharply leftward while conservatives (Republicans) moved sharply rightward. That widening crevasse, the story goes, polarized us. I don’t buy it.
In a 2020 article—“Leftward Ho!”—my friend and colleague Chuck Blahous and I explained why not. We argued that for decades, there’s been a bipartisan shift toward the left with liberals/Democrats hurtling rapidly and conservatives/Republicans also heading leftward, albeit more slowly. Our analogy of liberals on a westbound airplane and conservatives on a westbound train went as follows:
“The trope (conservatives moving sharply right, liberals moving slightly left) appears to be an illusion borne of a moving reference point—in this case, the leftward-shifting political center. It resembles a passenger on a 350-mile-per-hour westward-bound airplane saying, “Wow! New York City is moving eastward at 350 miles per hour!” A more precise analogy would be that it’s like a passenger on the same plane observing a 50-mile-per-hour westward-bound train below and convincing himself that the train is moving eastward, in reverse, at 300 miles per hour. When too many authors write about political polarization, they in effect describe the behavior or distribution of passengers inside the moving plane or train but neglect the fact that both vehicles are moving west (left).”
As evidence, we listed present-day mainstream left-of-center policies that would have been unthinkable, say, at the 1996 Democratic Convention: Green New Deal, single-payer healthcare, canceling college debts, doubling the minimum wage, same-sex marriage, Supreme Court packing, sanctuary cities, Electoral College abolishment. We found no contemporary left-of-center policies that would have been too conservative for Clinton-era Democrats.
We did the same for conservatives/Republicans and similarly found only leftward movement: same-sex marriage, guaranteed health insurance for those with pre-existing conditions, nonchalance regarding deficits, abandonment of privatized Social Security accounts.
While the right’s leftward movement was slower, we found no significant examples of contemporary conservative thinking that would have been too conservative for Clinton-era Republicans. Yet, we’re now polarized as we weren’t in 1960 or 1996.
Today, neighbors cannot discuss politics. Families shatter over political differences. People openly demand that those with blasphemous political views be ostracized, fired, and even assaulted. We’re so divided that a small example of civility qualifies as national news.
Why?
I’m privileged to enjoy an amicable correspondence with a long-time friend whose politics and policy views are distant from mine. He asked for my thoughts on the origins of America’s polarization. Here’s an edited version of my response, supplemented by further thoughts and conversations:
ROE v WADE: In 2018, Michael Barone, whose abortion views are unknown to me, wrote “How Roe v. Wade Polarized America.” He notes that when the Supreme Court decided the case, Michigan’s Republican governor was pro-choice and Michigan’s Democratic house speaker was pro-life. Roe, Barone argues, prompted absolutism in both parties, honing a razor-sharp emotional wedge that ultimately made liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats untenable. The High Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization changed the contours of this chasm, but not its depth.
ELECTION 2000: The contentious election, ultimately decided by a divided Supreme Court, left a permanent bitterness. In contrast, Richard Nixon, a bitter partisan if there ever was one, refused to contest John Kennedy’s election, though he suspected (perhaps correctly) that ballot fraud in Illinois and Texas had deprived him of the presidency. Stoic acceptance of dubious results was part of a longstanding, unwritten truce in American politics, and Nixon feared that a presidency obtained after a bitter challenge wouldn’t be worth having. Something changed after 2000.
PRECISION REDISTRICTING: In a conversation with my friend and colleague, Dan Griswold, he noted that advances in computer technology have enabled legislators of both parties to gerrymander legislative and congressional districts to a previously unimaginable degree. (Chuck Blahous has analyzed this.) This produces one-party districts where winning strategies involve enraging ideological voters, rather than reaching out to centrist independents.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA: I’m an internet fan, but it has a toxic downside. In a superb documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” technologists who developed Facebook, Twitter and other platforms express terror at their creations — monstrosities that reward aggressive, divisive, anti-social behavior. A while back, someone noted that from 1975 to 2007 (32 years), Australia had four prime ministers. In the 17 years since, there have been seven—a fourfold increase in changes of government. The boundary between those two periods was marked by the introduction of Twitter and its ideological rage mobs.
And with that, I think I’ll put my computer down, grab my guitar, sit by the fireplace, and play some music.
POSTSCRIPT: Here’s a message I shared on Facebook three days after the 2020 election. “Estimate the amount of time you spent [over the past year] reading polls and watching election pundits and thinking about them and talking about them. Multiply that by how much money you earn per hour. Let’s say you spent two hours a day on this stuff over the past year. 2 × 365 = 730 hours. Now, let’s suppose you earn $20/hour. That’s $14,600. That is how much value you flushed down the toilet by paying attention to polls and pundits. Because, it turns out, none of them knew anything about anything.”
LAGNIAPPE
NOSTALGIA
I am deeply nostalgic for the civil discussions of politics that prevailed in the America of my youth. In the 1960s, my parents would hold parties on Election Night, and the invitees, Democrats and Republicans, would all come for the food and drink and camaraderie. At the end of the evening, some left with smiles and others with frowns, but all left as friends and family. No shouting, no anger, no outward displays of judgment. In honor of that memory, here’s a piano composition, ”Nostalgia,” that I composed and performed in 2022.
Bicker, battle, broil and brawl? At first, I thought that was a law firm.
Having been effectively disenfranchised at the House district level by gerrymandering quite a while back, I can definitely say it's had an impact on how I view politics and politicians.