Politics—I don’t know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.
—Sean O’Casey
VOTERS WILL TOLERATE POLARIZATION AND EXTREME PARTISANSHIP to a point, especially if it doesn’t affect them directly. But by 2006, polarization was paralyzing government. It came at a time when the country was deeply divided over the war in Iraq, and facing a myriad of problems at home. After years of gridlock and extreme partisanship, the public had had enough; polarization ceased to be an insider’s game, and voters rebelled in a rare “wave” election.
Wave elections are ones in which the outcome significantly alters the political balance of power. By the fall of 2006, politicians (particularly incumbents) finally caught up with the extent of the voters’ anger. Republican incumbents, realizing that their party’s strategy of maximizing the base, which had worked in 2002 and 2004, would not work in 2006, tried to persuade voters that they were not partisan extremists. Partisans, yes; extremists, no.
Challengers in congressional races across the country attacked incumbents as members of a “do-nothing” Congress, and they put the blame squarely on polarization. Not to be outdone, even some incumbents who had engaged in the most outrageous polarizing preached the wisdom of “seeking common ground solutions.” To enhance this message, candidates reached out to the two most exciting and sought-after politicians in the country at the time, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL). Neither was on the ballot, but both made the evils of polarization a central ingredient of their message. Both are running for president in 2008, and there is no sign that their message will change.
The reelection of Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman in 2006 as an independent provided one of the first campaign tests specifically aimed at polarization…and polarization lost. Paradoxically, polarization had forced Lieberman to run as an independent because the Democratic Party denied him the party nomination. For partisans, it wasn’t enough that Lieberman had been loyal to their Democratic Party and most of its issues for three decades, or that he had been the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000. That he differed with them on one issue—Iraq—was enough for the polarizers to dump him.
(We are not suggesting that tenure entitled Lieberman to the nomination, or that the war in Iraq, especially among Democrats, was not a sufficient reason for a primary challenge. But, as we shall see, it was the polarizing tactics in the primary that were destructive and all too commonplace in today’s politics.)
Lieberman got his revenge by making party extremists an issue. He won the general election with support from Democrats, independents, and—amazingly—a majority of Republicans. Thirty percent of the antiwar voters, according to Lieberman, voted for him. For these voters, polarizing tactics that attempted to drive a decent man from office were as immoral as the war in Iraq. For several years, many mainstream Republicans had questioned if their party was too associated with religious fundamentalists. In the aftermath of the Lieberman primary, many Democratic Party leaders were raising the same questions about the party’s association with a resurgent, cyber-driven left.
Next door in Rhode Island, incumbent Lincoln Chafee, the Senate’s most liberal Republican, was challenged by conservative activists who wanted to deny him renomination. The Republican Party leadership in the state supported Chafee but couldn’t stop the rebellion on the right, and a primary challenger emerged. Chafee survived the primary, but only after Karl Rove, who might claim a patent on polarization, engaged in a highly publicized effort to save him. Chafee was too liberal for Rove and company, but his primary opponent was too conservative for Rhode Island. In a close race for control of the Senate, saving Chafee was necessary, even critical.
In the general election, Chafee tried to reestablish his independence: “I believe that neither Republicans nor Democrats are always right. I angered Republicans when I voted against the war in Iraq, and Democrats when I voted for legal reform.” But the senator’s association with the country’s most famous polarizer became a major factor in his inability to separate himself from an immensely unpopular president. He lost by a wide margin.
Chafee’s message of independence and antipartisanship (echoed by several other incumbent Republicans) could be interpreted as a survival strategy in a bad year for Republican candidates. Such reasoning does not explain why a similar message was adopted by many Democrats, including Chafee’s opponent, Sheldon Whitehead, who ran TV ads calling for bipartisanship, and this in a heavily Democratic state where such a message wasn’t necessary.
The most telling evidence that polarization may be eroding comes by way of former polarizers who are distancing themselves from the practice. Most political observers agree that Newt Gingrich, former Speaker and architect of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, was a skillful advocate and practitioner of polarization. In fact, some, particularly Democrats, believe Gingrich was the founder of the polarization movement.
When we spoke to Gingrich in the summer of 2006, he freely admitted that polarization had been an important component in the Republicans’ 1994 victory. More to the point, Gingrich agreed that it was a declining force in politics. Never one to be slow in recognizing the changing political winds, he immediately had ideas about how to end polarization. That’s remarkable, considering that before our meeting, he said he hadn’t given the topic much thought!
A conversation with the former Republican Speaker is an eclectic tour de force. Love him or hate him, few come away without a sense of awe. That is both a compliment to the man’s intellectual reach and a criticism of the confidence and audacity with which his historical revisionism fits so tightly with his Newtonian view of present-day events. Gingrich is a self-taught historian and the author of several historical novels, which may explain his uncanny ability to convince the listener that what he thought he knew about history was simply wrong.
Our first question concerned Gingrich’s role in polarization, and his response was predictably defensive:
If you can skip past Watergate, which some Republicans thought was a sign of [Democrat] bitterness, and get past the destruction of the secretary of labor [Ray Donovan] in the Reagan administration, or get by the destruction of Jimmy Carter’s budget director [Bert Lance], which some people thought was a sign of bitterness, though it was by liberals, and skip past the way Iran-Contra was handled and forget the bitterness over Nicaragua, I think it’s very easy to think it started with me.
In other words, in order to lay blame at Gingrich’s feet, you would have to ignore the evolutionary history of the events he says were at the root of polarization in Washington. Amazing and utterly convincing, until you look closely at the events he cites. Gingrich acknowledges that liberals forced Bert Lance out as director of the Carter Office of Management and Budget; by definition an internal battle, not polarization. He suggests that the Watergate investigation was the result of Democratic “bitterness,” not indiscriminate lawbreaking by Nixon. He points to Democrats in the destruction of Ray Donovan, as if it was a partisan lynching of the former secretary of labor, when in fact, Donovan was prosecuted by the Reagan Justice Department.
On Iran-Contra, Gingrich is right about Republican bitterness. What he failed to mention was that he organized the campaign to convince the press and public that Iran-Contra was Democratic revenge over Nicaragua, and not the lawbreaking and subterfuge that originated in the Reagan White House.
After his attempt at self-absolution, Gingrich began to lay out the case against polarization. What followed was classic Gingrich. He proceeded to describe a conference at the respected conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, where he and former Democratic Speaker Tom Foley were the featured guests. The topic was how Congress had changed over the last two decades. Newt waxed poetic, painting a picture of two former leaders and statesmen reminiscing about a bygone era when, as Speaker, they attempted to avoid polarization.
Who knew? In fact, Gingrich and Foley were über partisans whose battles (including Gingrich’s successful effort to recruit a candidate and fund a campaign that defeated Foley in 1994) were at the forefront of the age of polarization. Nevertheless, Gingrich insists that he had resorted to polarizing tactics only because the Democrats forced him to:
The Democrats toward the end of their reign as they lost popular support were tougher and tougher about using procedures. The two break points in the Congress before me in terms of the rise of Republicans were Representative Tony Coelho’s [D-CA] decision to steal the seat in Indiana [he is referring to the 8th Congressional District in Indiana that ended in a virtual tie between the Democratic and Republican candidates in 1984. The election eventually ended up in the House, where the Democrats proceeded to seat the Democrat despite Indiana’s secretary of state certifying that the Republican had won], because it led to bitterness on the Republican side that drove people to me; and the second was the day that Jim Wright had two legislative days on the same day, because that drove people like [then congressman] Dick Cheney nuts. It stripped [Republican leader] Bob Michael of the ability to be reasonable because his base was going crazy. There was a procedure that said you couldn’t bring something up without passing a two-thirds vote or something unless you laid it over to the next day. So in the middle of the day they voted to adjourn, rose, and came back in. They were driving people to me. Part of what the legislative process has to involve is a minimum level of mutual respect. You can function with each other even when you’re angry and even when you disagree. When I conclude that you will always win because you cheat, then I have to go to a similar level of intensity to offset that behavior. And that was what was happening all during the eighties and nineties.
Gingrich’s reasoning seems to be that since the Democrats did it first, he was forced to do it, too. He is certainly correct about the Democrats’ abuses; the events he describes are accurate, and in both instances the Democrats used their majority status to abuse the minority Republicans. What Gingrich fails to point out is that he would use these displays of Democratic power politics as evidence of the “arrogance of power” theme that was central to his successful campaign to drive the Democrats from power. Gingrich was brilliant when it came to drawing the Democrats into traps that played to his message. We will leave it to historians to decide if he was the trapper or the trapped.
In any case, Gingrich, ever the visionary, recognizes the importance of disassociating himself from polarization. Three months after we met, Gingrich announced the creation of a new committee, American Solutions for Winning the Future, and pledged to raise millions of dollars to find bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems. To his credit, he continues to be one of the few political figures who explores (and in many cases funds) new policy options, even if those policies run counter to his party’s orthodoxy.
Gingrich is also quick to dismiss the so-called get-out-the-base strategy, a principal campaign tactic of polarization:
I don’t buy this “base” mobilizing baloney, which I think is a guaranteed way to minimize long-term survival. It embitters the country and breaks the country apart and creates a profoundly mistaken model. It may work for one or two elections, but the cost you build up doing that bites you for a generation.
What Gingrich is describing is the primary culprit behind the growth of polarization—the practice of both parties to win elections by appealing to their partisan base. In the short term, the base strategy has won some elections, but the process has produced elected officials who come to office as extreme partisans beholden to those who are exacerbating the culture of polarization.
Over the two decades that polarization has dominated Washington politics, Republican polarizers have played the game far better than their Democratic counterparts. They have invested far more than Democrats in cutting-edge technologies to identify and turn out their voters (a technological advantage the Democrats had enjoyed for years prior to 1990). As a result, in elections prior to 2006, conservatives have outnumbered liberals at the polls.
Most political experts agree that the overwhelming majority of voters are moderate, but for several years had tilted slightly toward the conservative side. That changed in the 2006 elections, but not because the electorate had made an ideological shift. Most successful Democratic challengers were running against incumbent Republicans in conservative areas. They recognized that the liberal tag would hurt them, and chose to run on very moderate, sometimes conservative, platforms. They pushed Republican incumbents much further to the right on the ideological scale, and in the process won the moderate vote.
The 2006 election increased the number of moderate Democrats in both the House and Senate for the first time since the 1992 elections. The 1994 Republican takeover decimated the ranks of moderate and conservative Democrats, leaving a high percentage of liberals among the remaining Democrats in both houses. Moderate Democrats elected in 2006 are already beginning to move congressional Democrats toward the center. That may be frustrating to their more liberal colleagues (particularity among liberal polarizers), but to the moderates, winning reelection is far more important than supporting liberal positions that would be used against them in 2008.
Polarization may also have taken a hit among Republicans. Many of those reelected in 2006 won by small majorities, and those who were defeated were moderates, mostly from the Northeast and Midwest. The initial analysis of the moderate GOP losses concluded that the Republican caucus would move further to the right. But many of the Republicans who survived, no matter how conservative, seem to be less inclined (in 2007 at least) to pursue extreme ideological agendas. They are trying to seek at least some consensus with the majority Democrats in order to show voters back home that they got the message.
Despite the apparent interest in both parties in achieving consensus on some issues, the deep divisions over the war in Iraq have made efforts at bipartisanship difficult. But on some issues, such as raising the minimum wage, Republicans, who had blocked an increase since 1994, agreed to it in 2007. A minimum-wage increase may seem a small bipartisan step, but in the era of polarization, it is an important one.
How all of this will sit with their respective “bases” is yet to be seen, but if the reactions from groups like Focus on the Family on the right and MoveOn.org on the left to attempts by the new Congress to find consensus is any indication, they will not be pleased. Both groups, among the most powerful forces in their respective parties, promote polarization, believe in it, and need it to continue to raise money to stay in business. We do not expect them to go quietly into the night.
All this indicates at least a crack in the dominance of polarization. One thing that can be counted on in politics is the attention lawmakers give to the results of the previous election. Some will see 2006 as an aberration caused by Iraq and the last-minute Foley page scandal (Foley was a Republican congressman from Florida who got caught exchanging sexually suggestive e-mails and phone calls with former House pages). Some will see it as a referendum on an unpopular president. Most, we hope, will read the election results as the beginning of the revolt by the “radical middle,” in a backlash against the “radical right” and “radical left.”
Despite the 2006 election results, polarization still dominates national politics. There are simply too many people with vested interests in continuing the climate of polarization. Polarization was the model presented for many years on CNN’s Crossfire. It was an appropriate name for a show. The problem with cross fire is that people in the middle tend to get shot.
Polarization has always been a factor in politics and always will be, but it has historically been active at the fringes of American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus had been the dominant forces in politics and powerful counterforces to polarization. That changed over the last three decades as polarization came to dominate politics while bipartisanship became increasingly marginalized.
It is important to understand how, as a nation, we got into such a polarized state, and how politics operated before the era of polarization. The time has come to confront polarization, but it is an old rule in politics that in order to to defeat the opponent it is vital to understand where he came from, what strengths brought him to power, and which of his weaknesses can be exploited. Let’s start there.