What’s the Trouble with Political “Polarization”?

I was reading a piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times on the governor’s race in Georgia and how it reflects an assumed “problem” in our politics today: political polarization. This polarized politics departs from the reasonable “center.” Here’s how Kevin Sack and Alan Blinder describe it:

But Georgia’s political middle, long the dominant force behind the state’s thriving commerce and pragmatic leadership, suddenly finds itself all but abandoned.

The narrative is there is a “reasonable and pragmatic” center that is being abandoned for “extreme and radical” politics of the left and right (as a side note: David Adler’s research demonstrates it is actually the center itself that is most hostile to democracy). To illustrate this, the reporters dug up the must mild-mannered suburban voter possible.

“It would be nice if we had a more moderate option,” said Kathrine DeLash, who works at a pet store in suburban Cobb County and doesn’t identify with either political party. “You don’t get that with the candidates we have right now. The people who shout the most to their own people get the most attention, and it doesn’t matter what they’re saying as long as they shout the loudest.”

This person is supposed to stand in for a “mass” of people who don’t like polarized shouting and crave moderation/pragmatism. But, what do we mean by the “center”? Over the last several decades, the centrist politics embraced by Republicans/Democrats alike is at its core a style of politics inoffensive to the donor class backing both parties. In this sense, it is fundamentally undemocratic and uninspiring at the same time. The center has also meant diverging on important ethical issues like abortion and gay marriage, but converging on the standard neoliberal economic policies favored by the donors— free trade, deregulation, cutting government spending, and a reluctance to raise taxes in a way that could fund significant public investments.

There’s a reason for this convergence on economic policy. Since the 1970s, PAC money has become an ever more central aspect of political campaigns (with all the outrage about Citizens United in 2010, it was the 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo decision that equated money with “free speech”). Politicians hired consultants who told them money on campaign ads and mailers were the secret to success and high-donor fundraising trumped all other concerns. The only problem was that rich corporate donors don’t like policies that actually offer something to the masses of people — say transformative investments in education, health care, or aggressive regulations or tax policies. Since their political coffers were funded by the 1%, their policies would in no way inspire or mobilize the masses into enthusiasm for their politics and campaigns. This is why we see Presidential voter turnout drop precipitously since the 1970s. In 1960, nearly 63% turned out for the Presidential election: a shameful statistic for any democracy. But, it just kept going down: 53.5% in 1976, and a truly ridiculous 49% in 1996. Barrack Obama’s inspiring rhetoric, political skill and historic candidacy ratcheted turnout back up to 58% in 2008, but it dropped back to 54% by 2012 as hope faded for real change. Midterm election trends are even more depressing. 48.7% came out in 1966. In 2014, it was a measly 35.9%.

During the heyday of centrist politics, inequality worsened and more of the middle class fell into the ranks of the working poor. More of these average working class voters were convinced that “politics” offered them nothing. They disengaged to join the ranks of the nonvoters. And, nonvoters are disproportionately poorer. Yet, the corporate funded centrism did appeal to a certain set of voters — suburban, middle class professionals of various kinds, which became the core “base” of both parties. Republicans sought out business owners, bankers, and people in engineering and the extractive industries. Democrats sought out professors, techies, lawyers, government workers, and other “all around smart people.”

For “suburban moderates” as they are called, voting is an essential “duty” as citizens in a democracy. But, politics, for them, is less about a material needs — they were well off enough — and more about a deep sense of identity and almost a “team” mentality. All that matters is “beating” the other team. Given the right-wing nature of corporate power funding, the right was insurgent during this period. As a defense, moderate suburban Democrats argued we could only win by being “practical” — free trade, gutting the welfare state, abandoning unions. Any bold, anti-corporate program, risked defeat and the rise of a new demagogue — Nixon to Reagan to W, to Trump — each one worse than the last. Abandoning this pro-corporate “centrist” strategy was seen as a dangerous risk that would alienate America’s supposedly moderate, centrist core (yet few would explain why this “core” was shrinking year after year as turnout dropped). Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama were inspiring speakers and spoke eloquently about vague ideas of “change”, but ultimately their campaigns served the corporate interests who funded them — and the mass of people in need of change became increasingly disillusioned.

Fast forward to today. Since the pro-corporate policies ultimately only enrich the 1%, the lives of the suburban “middle class” basis of both parties are also becoming increasingly impoverished. Millennials enter a job market based on stagnant income, hyper-competitive job scarcity, and ballooning student debt. Middle aged adults face constant job insecurity and the extraordinary cost of childcare. Boomers deal with an insecure retirement system run by Wall Street and a vulture health care system that raises premiums year after year, and refuses to pay for basic care. As the lived experience of almost everyone gets worse, people (finally) started seeking alternatives to milquetoast centrism. After four decades of politics that basically said we could only “chose” between right and left wing versions of pro-corporate globalization, “polarization” simply means more and more people are questioning a politics that only serves the 1%. Also, as life gets worse for the majority, politics is becoming less and less about rooting for “teams” and more about ideological explanations of how and why our lived conditions continue to erode — and how politics might improve our lives. Trump, of course, represents the nationalist and xenophobic critique of “centrist globalism.” This view opposes neoliberal corporate-led free trade and lax immigration policies (which also, of course, benefit the 1% of employers who rely on pools of cheap labor). The left has rediscovered that a politics hostile to corporations that offers the poor, working masses an inspiring platform based on real benefits, will, believe it or not, actually inspire people to get into politics. This has been true all along. If the left simply mobilizes 10% of the disillusioned and mainly poor working class people (largely people of color) who do not vote, they win every time. But, the Democratic Party has always been in a pickle: actually offering those disillusioned masses a politics that appeals to them offends the donor base (listen to a recent episode of “This American Life” where Berniecrat, Jeff Beals is reprimanded for talking populist economic policies at a fundraiser — “You should have talked about LGBT” he was told). As Doug Henwood puts it, “[The Democratic party is] a party of business that has to pretend otherwise for electoral reasons.”

So, this is what “polarization” is. It is simply masses of people waking up to the fact that what is called “centrist” or “moderate” or “middle of the road” is a politics by and for a rich minority of the population. Centrism mainly engages the materially well off suburbanites for whom politics is a game you watch on cable television. In other words, polarization means a “‘properly political” version of politics is coming back: antagonistic interests with competing blocs of the population, and competing ideological visions of the world, fighting over material resources. “Polarization” is democracy, if we believe democracy should be based on the interests of the masses of people rather than the rich and powerful. The last 50 years of corporate-run-elections, and voter disillusionment was no democracy at all.