That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Every boy and every gal

  Who’s born into this world alive

  Is either a little liberal

  Or else a little conservative.

  In fact, that is not the case. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, a careful 2004 study of the subject by the political scientist Morris Fiorina (with the assistance of Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), demonstrates that while the political views of Republican and Democratic activists have pulled apart, those of Americans in general have not changed much, and that the public’s views skew closer to the center of the political spectrum than the beliefs and preferences of the officials they elect. Americans are closely divided, Fiorina explains, but they are not deeply divided. “We are closely divided because many of us are ambivalent and uncertain, and consequently reluctant to make firm commitments to parties, politicians or policies,” he writes. “We divide evenly in elections or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center, while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes.”

  More support for this finding comes from the way the successful presidential candidates of the last two decades presented themselves to the electorate. Each signaled during the campaign that he would govern in moderate fashion and lower the level of partisan rancor in the country, although none has had any discernible success in actually reducing partisanship. George H. W. Bush promised to preside over a “kinder, gentler” America, suggesting that his policies would be less harsh than those of his Republican predecessor, Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton styled himself a “different kind of Democrat”—that is, a less liberal figure than most other members of his party. Acknowledging the country’s distaste for the partisan warfare of the Clinton years, George W. Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” He promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative.” When the Bush years proved to be, if anything, even more divisive than the Clinton ones, the American people turned to a first-term senator who had introduced himself to them in 2004 with a speech to the Democratic convention featuring the memorable line “There isn’t a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.”

  The difference between the opinions of politically active Americans and those of the electorate as a whole, between what the wider public apparently wants from its government and the kind of polarized governance that it gets, means that a serious disjunction exists between the American people and the government they elect. It means that representative government in America today does not accurately represent Americans.

  Writing in the journal Hoover Digest (October 30, 2004), Fiorina, who is a political scientist at Stanford, elaborated on this critical point, which is at the center of his research:

  Observers of contemporary American politics have apparently reached a new consensus around the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and religion, divisions so deep and bitter as to justify talk of war in describing them. Yet research indicates otherwise. Publicly available databases show that the culture war script embraced by journalists and politicos lies somewhere between simple exaggeration and sheer nonsense. There is no culture war in the United States; no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.

  To be sure, said Fiorina, there are noisy warriors on both sides who like to skirmish and joust, and, no doubt, “many of the activists in the political parties and the various cause groups do hate each other and regard themselves as combatants in a war. But their hatreds and battles are not shared by the great mass of Americans—certainly nowhere near ‘80–90 percent of the country’—who are for the most part moderate in their views and tolerant in their manner. A case in point: To their embarrassment, some GOP senators recently learned that ordinary Americans view gay marriage in somewhat less apocalyptic terms than do the activists in the Republican base.”

  If centrist swing voters have vanished from American politics, said Fiorina,

  how did the six blue states in which George Bush ran most poorly in 2000 all elect Republican governors in 2002 and how did Arnold Schwarzenegger run away with the 2003 recall in blue California? If almost all voters have already made up their minds about their 2004 votes, then why did John Kerry surge to a 14-point trial-heat lead when polls offered voters the prospect of a Kerry-McCain ticket? If voter partisanship has hardened into concrete, why do virtually identical majorities in both red and blue states favor divided control of the presidency and Congress, rather than unified control by their party? Finally, and ironically, if voter positions have become so uncompromising, why did a recent CBS story titled “Polarization in America” report that 76 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of Independents would like to see elected officials compromise more rather than stick to their principles?

  No question, Republican and Democratic elites are polarized, Fiorina concluded, “but it is a mistake to assume that such elite polarization is equally present in the broader public. It is not. However much they may claim that they are responding to the public, political elites do not take extreme positions because voters make them. Rather, by presenting them with polarizing alternatives, elites make voters appear polarized, but the reality shows through clearly when voters have a choice of more moderate alternatives—as with the aforementioned Republican governors.”

  Voters have recognized this. A Rasmussen poll taken in October 2010 (just before the midterm elections) found that a plurality—43 percent—of likely voters believed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in Congress were “the party of the American people.”

  This disjunction is a major fact of the nation’s political life. It is a major reason that the United States has failed to address the four major challenges that it faces. It also bears on the question of what can and should be done to shock the political system into addressing those challenges, a question that we take up in chapter 15. How could this gap between American politics and American society have become so large?

  The Way We Were

  In the 1950s and 1960s, when the baby boom generation was growing up, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties were coalitions of liberals and conservatives. (Some political scientists at the time even called it a “four-party system.”) The Democrats included conservative Southerners, whose opposition to the Republican Party dated from the Civil War. They became known as “Dixiecrats” when they temporarily bolted the party in 1948 over the issue of segregation to support the independent pro-segregationist candidacy of the then South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond.

  The Republican Party included people with fairly liberal social views who tended to be more conservative in economic terms than most Democrats. Most lived in the Northeast, and in the 1960s, as their ranks began to thin, they came to be known as “Rockefeller Republicans,” after New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. One of their number at the beginning of his political career was George H. W. Bush, who grew up in Connecticut, a son of Prescott Bush, a businessman who later served as a senator from Connecticut and belonged to the moderate wing of the Republican Party. (The other, more conservative wing had its center of gravity not in the South, as is the case today, but in the Midwest.) In George H. W. Bush’s two terms as a Republican congressman from Texas, he was such an enthusiastic proponent of Planned Parenthood, an organization in disfavor among most Republicans today, that he earned the nickname “Rubbers.”

  In the days when both parties included both conservatives and liberals in large numbers, compromise was easier than it is today because each party contained factions sympathetic to the views of elements in the other one. Moreover, because these ideologically more diverse parties had to compromise within their own ranks just to arrive at positions on various issues that all party members could support, their positions were often not all that far apart, and they were accustomed to resolving differences.

  What happened to change the situation, to create t
he ideologically pure parties we have today? Broad social changes over the last four decades played a big part. Ron Brownstein calls this “the great sorting out”—the migration of politicians into much more internally uniform camps of conservatives and liberals. Beginning in the 1960s, opposition to the civil rights movement, a movement that was embraced by the Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson, led Southern conservatives to defect to the Republican Party. A decade later the rise of social conservatism within that party, in connection with issues such as abortion, school prayer, feminism, and gay marriage, pushed Northern Republicans of moderate social views into the Democratic camp. The number and the proportion of liberals in the Democratic Party increased, as did the number and weight of conservatives among Republicans. Over time, centrist groups within the respective parties (such as the Democrats’ Democratic Leadership Council and the Republicans’ Ripon Society) all but disappeared. Liberals and conservatives tended to be the people most active in political affairs, and so exercised more influence in each party than in previous eras. The other party was increasingly viewed as the enemy and the rules of engagement were “take no prisoners.”

  At the same time, at the politicians’ behest, the boundaries of congressional districts at the national level, and legislative districts at the state level, were redrawn so as to concentrate members of one party or the other and thereby make that district “safe” for either a Republican or a Democratic candidate. This practice, known as “gerrymandering,” is an old one. As Jeff Reichert, the director of the documentary film Gerrymandering, explained on NPR (November 11, 2010):

  Redistricting is supposed to be just a benign kind of administrative practice that takes place every 10 years. We have to adjust the lines to account for population. The problems come in when you have political manipulation of the process. And the term comes from 1812. There was a governor of Massachusetts by the name of Elbridge Gerry who was in office, and his party decided to disadvantage the other party, and they drew a district that packed the members of the other party into that one place. And it looked to a political cartoonist of the day like a salamander. And so he said, it’s not a salamander, it’s actually a gerrymander.

  With computerized databases and Google maps, gerrymandering has become much more sophisticated. So effectively can the state legislatures, which draw electoral boundaries, carve out districts so that one party or the other is virtually certain to win that these days, it is said that elected officials are the ones who choose their voters as much as it is the voters, exerting their democratic right, who choose their officials. The state of California provides a vivid example. The state has fifty-three congressional districts. In the four elections between 2004 and 2010—a total of 212 electoral contests—only one district shifted from one party to the other.

  Source: National Atlas of the United States®

  What this means is that in “safe” districts the crucial election is the primary, in which registered Democrats or Republicans select the party’s candidate. Once you win the primary in a district gerrymandered to your party’s advantage, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are virtually guaranteed to win the general election. Because the voters in primaries generally must be registered members of the party, and because the ones who vote in primaries tend to be the most ideologically committed members of the party, candidates nearer the extremes of the political spectrum tend to do better in primaries than those positioned closer to the center. After winning the primary, the extreme candidate is then in a position to get the votes of more moderate voters in the general election—because in effect the only other choice is the extreme candidate from the other party. Moreover, once elected, the official knows that the only politician who can knock him or her out of office is not a candidate from the other party, whose chances have been reduced almost to zero by gerrymandering, but a more extreme candidate within his or her own party, who can pose a challenge in the next primary. The desire avoid a primary challenge discourages moderation and compromise with the other party while the representative is in office.

  In this way, moderate voters elect extreme candidates: The political system does not offer them moderate choices. It works so that, as former senator Evan Bayh, a centrist Democrat who represented a relatively conservative state, Indiana, told us, “It’s the people in the middle—the moderates, the independents—who get turned off and drop out, which only accentuates the power of the two extremes.”

  A Broken System

  The geographically grotesque, politically uncompetitive electoral districts that gerrymandering can produce are the result of the political machinations of Democrats and Republicans working in state legislatures around the country. But the polarization of the American political system—seen, above all, in the great sorting out of the two parties so that liberals are concentrated in the Democratic Party and conservatives in the Republican Party—is also the product of broad and deep social, economic, and technological forces that have shaped American society for half a century and more.

  Nor is a deep division between the two major parties an altogether novel development in American history. American politics have been polarized in several eras prior to this one, but the previous occasions do not offer useful precedents for dealing effectively with the nation’s major challenges.

  In the early years of the republic, the Federalists and anti-Federalists stood at least as far apart from each other politically as Democrats and Republicans do today, and harbored, if anything, even greater distrust and distaste for each other. In the presidential election of 1800, the allies of Thomas Jefferson hinted that his opponent, John Adams, was a secret monarchist bent on restoring the kind of regime against which the colonies had successfully rebelled. The Adams camp claimed that Jefferson was a North American version of the Jacobins, who had shed so much blood in the French Revolution.

  This animosity did not cripple the American government, because that government, presiding as it did over a small agrarian country far removed from the European center of international affairs, had little to do. The duties of the continent-sized, twenty-first-century, postindustrial superpower of more than 300 million people, with the world’s largest and most complex economy, are considerably more extensive, and the costs of governmental dysfunction therefore are far greater.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, political polarization over slavery went so far that it led to violence on the floor of the Senate. On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Republican, was delivering an antislavery speech when Preston Brooks, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina, set upon him with a walking stick and beat him nearly to death. A few years later, of course, the entire country was convulsed in violence over the same issue—hardly a good model for our own times.

  Even short of such terrible violence, a polarized political system cannot furnish the responses to America’s principal challenges that the country needs. It cannot do so because, in contrast with the broad voting public, the activists in America’s two major parties are both deeply divided and closely divided. “Great innovations should not be forced upon a slender majority,” Thomas Jefferson once said, and in the twenty-first-century United States they cannot be. Power in America is constitutionally dispersed between the executive and the legislative branches and between the House and the Senate. For that reason, a political party would have to be very powerful over an extended period of time to be able to enact a comprehensive program. Because the two are relatively evenly matched, neither the twenty-first-century Republicans nor their Democratic counterparts have any real prospect of achieving such political dominance. But even if they could, that would not necessarily be a good thing, because neither party alone has all the answers for dealing with globalization, the IT revolution, the nation’s deficits, and its pattern of energy usage. As we have tried to demonstrate, we need a hybrid of the best of both right and left now—better public schools and more charter schools, more domestic drilling for oil and gas and a
carbon tax to drive energy efficiency and clean power innovation, more tax revenue and more spending cuts. Just bouncing back and forth between the two extreme party positions is not going to solve our problems.

  There is another way in which hyper-partisanship blocks needed action on the nation’s major challenges. The partisan rancor, the namecalling, the mutual distrust, and the resulting paralysis on the issues of greatest importance for the nation’s future have made a predictably bad impression on the American public, resulting in a loss of credibility for all political leaders. Michael’s maternal grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century, once told Michael about a three-way debate among candidates for mayor of New York City. After the Republican and the Democrat had spoken, the Socialist began his speech with these words: “I want to tell you that you can believe what my opponents say. That’s right! I am here to vouch for their truthfulness. When the Democrat tells you that the Republican is no good, you can believe him. And when the Republican tells you that the Democrat is no good, you can believe him, too.”

  The American people have evidently been persuaded by what Republicans and Democrats have said about each other, and as a result public esteem for government has fallen to all-time lows. This has a huge cost. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib once noted: “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”