It’s Not Such a Dirty Word: Why We Get Partisanship and Ideology Wrong

Nick Scorza
Aug 9, 2017 · 19 min read

Most people in the media talk about partisanship like it’s opioid addiction, or the constant threat of terrorism — a sad fact of life in the 21st century that we have to endure because we can never fully eliminate it. Most popular opinion outlets either lament the hardened partisanship of the people they oppose, or bemoan its overall existence as a kind of moral failing. Partisanship is a drug, a cheap and fast high that brings out our basest political instincts, keeps us engaged in meaningless pitched battles, and prevents us from doing the hard work of actually governing.

We the people are portrayed as partisanship addicts, and the politicians and partisan media we consume are the dealers, taking the low road to easy money and electoral success. There’s some truth to this, of course, and you can have fun with the analogy — Facebook ‘fake news’ mills and Infowars are the hard street drugs, while Fox News is a powerful pharmaceutical company pushing a more refined form of the same thing (and if you’re conservative, feel free to swap those examples with the ones you consider most relevant).

But here’s the thing. While yes, a lot of it is dumb, plenty of partisan media on all sides (there are more than two sides, that’s part of the problem) is actually smart, well-written, and honest about its priors. Furthermore, the folks complaining loudest about partisanship cast themselves as above it, but they’re usually not — they may not take cheap shots, but they most certainly have an ideology, and that’s mostly what we mean when we call something ‘partisan.’

‘Partisanship’ in our common usage can mean unfairly demonizing the other side and ignoring the faults in your own. It can also mean holding positions that are too far to the right or left of what commentators feel is appropriate. It is considered dirty partisanship to smear your opponents with ad hominem attacks, or ignore the same faults in your side you complain about in the other side — but also to advocate strongly for a position that’s too far from the center, wherever that center happens to fall.

In this grand narrative, politics used to be ruled by certain points of consensus between our two major parties, and our government institutions were built on norms based on these points of consensus. Then we all just went insane. At some point, the right wing went way right, and started wanting to burn everything down, and now the Democrats have started to open up their left flank more seriously in response (while conservatives often insist they’ve stayed the same while the left moved way left).

The Great Divergence

Why, centrist pundits wonder, would we turn our backs on something that worked so well during what many consider America’s postwar golden age? Surely, we’ve been hoodwinked by charlatans and ne’er-do-wells, who’ve convinced us that those with opposing views are our mortal enemies. Again, I’m not trying to say political charlatans don’t exist — in fact we’re lousy with ’em, but the thing is, we always have been.

What’s different now, and obscured I think partly by choice and partly by the absence of history from this discourse, is that the entire 20th century was a long political sorting process, in which the two parties shifted from one political axis to another.

The Democratic Party began in the 19th century as an explicitly populist party, while the Republican Party was an anti-slavery party (meaning at that time that they wanted to keep slavery contained in the south — abolition was still a bridge too far for many Republicans), yet they inherited most of the former Whig Party’s base. Democrats were largely the party of populists, radicals, reactionaries, and rabble rousers, while Republicans were the party of the establishment and cultural elite. Both parties contained elements of what we would today call the Left and the Right, sometimes diverging geographically and other times in the same area. One of the most transparently ahistorical “arguments” some conservative pundits try to make whenever Civil Rights or Black Lives Matter comes up is that Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow. This is true, of course — but only because the 19th and early-20th century Democratic Party contained a large swathe of Southern conservatives and white populists that all became Republicans when the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights movement. Some of them were still alive until fairly recently — and no one mistook Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms for left-wingers.

The modern Left-Right divergence of our parties was gradual — the early 20th century Republican Party contained liberals like Teddy Roosevelt and conservatives like William Howard Taft. Somewhere out there is an alternate dimension where TR won the soul of the Republican Party and made it the party of progressives, leading Barry Goldwater and co. to take over the Democrats instead. Some people would say the sorting really begins with FDR and the New Deal, others with the Civil Rights movement and the conservative backlash to it. It doesn’t really matter precisely where it begins and who is responsible — all of these events and more played significant roles in shifting our parties’ centers of gravity. Through all of this time, we were probably as partisan and ideological as we are now, we just didn’t have two parties that represented those ideologies perfectly (we still don’t, but more on that later). I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m willing to bet a large percentage of cooperation from the golden age of American bipartisanship came down to liberals working with liberals or conservatives with conservatives across party lines.

Conservatives now seem further to the right of their past brethren, but that’s largely because they’ve consolidated the American right into one party. Conservatives of yesterday decried Medicare and Medicaid as the death of freedom just like they did about Obamacare. They seem more stridently anti-government today, but they’re also less overtly racist — having replaced this with at worst covert racism and dog whistles, and at “best” equal-opportunity contempt for the poor (at least until Trump came along, anyway). Democrats have moved left on social issues while moving to the center on the economy (until now, somewhat). What both of these parties have in common, though, and the reason that they’re both running into trouble in the 21st century, is that they’re both parties of the Upper Middle Class and above — what we clumsily call the elite.

Left and Right are grand heuristics born of the upheavals of the 18th century — the beginning of the slow death of aristocracy and the difficult birth of nation-states and modernity as we know it, followed by the Industrial Revolution and labor movement, which split early liberals (who had previously defined themselves against aristocracy and monarchy) into Libertarians and Leftists. Left and Right contain many ideologies within them that differ greatly from each other and sometimes overlap in awkward ways, but in our grand tradition of oversimplification, we’ve tried very hard to collapse all of this thought into two broad ideologies and two parties. What we call ‘Conservatism’ is a fairly recent thing, born largely from William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and their fellow travelers (taking Edmund Burke as a spiritual father). In a linguistic coup, this amalgam of lasseiz faire capitalism, traditional social values, and aggressive foreign policy became synonymous with the totality of right-of-center thought. When we bother to distinguish this school of thought from the broader right-wing spectrum, we use the vague and awkward phrase ‘movement conservatism.’ Straussian neocons, Mises/Rothbard libertarians, religious traditionalists, blood-and-soil paleocons and more have all been subsumed into the movement, until now.

Likewise, the left was always an uneasy alliance between labor leftists, center-left professionals, Civil Rights advocates, environmentalists, anti-war activists, and more. Some of these groups overlapped a lot, others not at all. The history of Civil Rights and the U.S. left was not, as some people try to portray, a clear cut battle between intolerant proletarian economic leftists and pro-Civil Rights economic centrists. Rather, the people whose civil rights were in question — moderates and radicals alike — did most of the fighting — and their victories were hard-won and resisted at first just as intensely by both the center-left and white labor unions before they got on board.

Republicans and Democrats both relied on political bases they never fully satisfied, partly due to political reality and partly by choice. The right courted social traditionalists, but gave them only symbolic victories while focusing on tax cuts and deregulation. The left moved gradually from solidarity to meritocracy — from fighting to improve the lot of the poor and working class of all backgrounds to fighting to ensure that the upper classes appropriately reflected America’s diversity. I’m not saying that Deomcrats don’t try to help the disadvantaged — but they don’t sell their attempts well or fight for them hard enough. Likewise, I’m not saying Republicans wouldn’t abolish Roe v Wade if they could. In either case, it’s just not what their top priority is. Democrats are afraid to run on a straightforward left-wing economic message, while Republicans run on social issues and only discuss their economic agenda in vague and carefully chosen terms because they know it’s less and less popular with even their own base.

Stating My Priors

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m pretty partisan. Only I wouldn’t say that — I’m more of an ideologue than a partisan. I’m a member of the Democratic Party mainly because I want to vote in primaries in the closed-primary state of New York. Ideologically, I’d say I’m a Scandinavian-style social democrat. I want universal healthcare and a robust social safety net that helps more than just the very poor. I want economic policy that curbs the excesses of inequality and sands the rough edges off capitalism without abandoning markets completely. I want stronger unions and a larger role for public goods in the economy — and I want a society open to everyone living in it, that tries hard to redress historical wrongs and end structural bigotry of all varieties.

When voting, I use what I call the “reverse Buckley” — voting for the most left-wing candidate I think can win an election (as long as they’re competent and not a total scumbag — scumbags come in all stripes). I vote for what I see as the lesser of two evils a lot, as I suspect many people of vastly different ideological persuasions do. I’m lazy, but I do try to shift the course of the nation toward one I think would be better for everyone (even the rich, in some ways) through democratic and nonviolent means, and I’m not sorry about it.

I’d say I’m at least somewhat pragmatic about my ideology. What I really want is an end to poverty and a more equal society, or as close to those goals as we can achieve through peaceful means that preserve human freedom (another concept we have vastly different definitions of). Social democracy seems like the best route to get there to me, but I’m certainly open to other ideas. If we could achieve the same ends with low taxes and a smaller government, I’d be all for it (though I’d also want some way to mitigate the undemocratic and anti-egalitarian effects of extreme wealth). I’m thoroughly ideological, but I’m willing to see the good in other ideas, and willing to compromise and work in increments. Having an ideology means I have certain values and goals, but doesn’t make me blind to facts.

“The Personal Is Political”

We look at ideology as the death of thought — a zealous certainty about the way the world works that must account for and explain everything, and excommunicate everything that doesn’t fit. If that’s true, we’re in big trouble, because we all have an ideology of some sort. Politics is the answer to the question of who gets what in society, and it affects everything. If you’re complaining that something or other is “politicized,” you usually mean one of three things — 1) that a tragic event is being exploited in a particularly crass or misleading way to further political ends, 2) that you yourself are using a misleading argument to keep people from making very relevant political points about a current (usually tragic) situation, or 3) you’ve just realized that not everyone feels the same way about a particular aspect of society that you do, and you find this disconcerting.

As a left-winger who grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, I have very conflicted feelings about my football team — I don’t mind supporting them no matter how much they lose, but I hate their name (and of course all the other problems with the NFL as an organization). I remember when the controversy cropped up again most recently, and some people were lamenting the politicization of something they thought was pure and outside the realm of politics. Well, the only reason they thought that was because they weren’t aware until now that other people felt differently — either because they didn’t think to listen or didn’t have to.

Similarly, some critics of the recent March for Science felt it was unacceptable to politicize science even in the most limited of ways. I get the sentiment behind this — science should not be made to serve narrow political interests or ignore available areas of inquiry. But the framework for the scientific method — the world of observable phenomena and repeatable experiments — is an ideology. Granted, it’s more of a facet that has been incorporated into a wide variety of ideologies, but it didn’t exist for most of human history, and it’s far from universally accepted even among contemporary worldviews. Science (I’m here referring to the organized discipline based on Enlightenment thought, not to the broader practice of learning about the world or the body of knowledge it has produced) is based on testing hypotheses by conducting experiments, observing the results, and then repeating. Repeatable experiments could all be cosmic coincidence that could change at any moment, or the current whim of a divine being. There could be a Cartesian demon screwing with your perception of the universe. And some people still believe in demons, Cartesian and otherwise.

If you could split ideologies into their component parts like atoms, they’d be made of paradigms — models for how the world works, ethics — systems of what is right and wrong, and goals — what is desirable for humanity. But when we talk about them in contemporary American politics, we tend to assume they are only paradigms, while we pretend we all agree on ethics and goals. Paradigm disagreements are often interesting, but they’re the least relevant questions for how we live our lives. We can debate whether or not pure socialism or pure libertarianism would work for days, and it might be interesting or illuminating, but it won’t amount to much politically. There are some paradigm questions that are politically urgent (whether or not a fetus is the same as a baby, for example), but on the whole, questions of ethics — like whether taxation is a civic necessity or a form of theft — are usually more relevant to our daily lives. In the most general sense, maybe, our goals are the same — we all want society to be the best it can be — but once you get into any sort of specifics the differences involved are huge. Some people want an equal society, but don’t agree on what that entails — others want a society defined by some variety of de facto or de jure hierarchy. Some people want a monocultural society, while others think a monocultural society, even of the culture they belong to, would be hell.

We often can’t admit we have such profound differences, and so we try to prove our ideology is more rational, and produces better objectively measurable outcomes that surely everyone will recognize. This is a grand misunderstanding for several reasons. No ideology is ‘correct’ in this way — they are all to some extent ways of understanding the world by simplifying it. Even if you limit your worldview to just the scientific method and the knowledge it has verified, you’ll soon run in to questions that don’t yet have good answers yet — how much freedom is the optimal amount? What is the best way to achieve true, lasting happiness? What is the optimal way to structure an economy? You could wait until research catches up with these questions, if it ever does, but that would mean taking no action on many pressing issues. It’s also hard to really measure what ‘best’ means — sooner or later you’ll have to define it specifically, and that means making value judgments, which means ideology. An ideology is also not just a model of how the world works, it’s a list of concrete goals, and of the means that are acceptable for achieving those goals. You can say your goals are only getting to the truth, and your only method careful observation — and I hope you do, every society needs people who do this, and we would be better off with more of them — but it means either sitting out a great many important discussions and decisions, or being honest with yourself that you have an ideology in addition to objective truth.

The Political is Personal

So if we all do it, why is it such a dirty word? Well, first and foremost because ideology is easiest to point to in extremists, and extremists understandably make us uncomfortable. Extremism is relative to a certain extent — some people would call me an extremist based on my ideological priors above, whereas to me any Republican to the right of John Kasich looks like an extremist. But no matter where you fall on the multifaceted ideological spectrum, ideology becomes easier to recognize the more distant it is from the point you occupy.

Secondly, while the vast majority of Americans who regularly vote are partisan, they aren’t uniformly ideological. Now hold on, you might say, you’ve just been arguing that everyone has an ideology — yes I have, and they do — but I’d also say ‘formal’ ideologies are not the norm.

Most people build a worldview out of a combination of the views they grew up with, their life experiences, their dreams and desires, and their own self-interest. These worldviews aren’t necessarily consistent or coherent, but they’re also not rigid and doctrinaire. This isn’t a matter of mix-n-match ideologies being bad and rigorous, coherent world iews being good, or the opposite. Nor is it all down to the well- vs. poorly-educated, or low-information vs. high-information voters (not always the same groups, btw). If you subscribe to a formal ideology, you’re probably more likely to have some higher education, but that certainly doesn’t make you correct, and plenty of college grads don’t pay that much attention to formal politics. No, mostly it comes down to your level of interest. People with formal, consistent ideologies who spend a lot of time thinking about them and debating them are the geeks of the political world. They’re pressured to adopt or develop consistent, explicable worldviews because they like to debate. People who build their worldviews on the fly are the normies.

A recent post-mortem of the 2016 election revealed predictably large groups of people who are left or right of center on both social and economic issues — ideological liberals and conservatives. It also revealed a large swathe of voters who are socially conservative and fiscally left of center. This is a worldview that encompasses a large percentage of American voters, but there’s not a good name for it. Some people have suggested ‘populists’ or ‘hardhats,’ but those only capture a portion or facet of this group, and come with lots of cultural baggage. Conversely, a formal ideological position (or range of positions) that’s very well represented in think tanks, in academic writing, and on the Internet — libertarianism — has very few actual adherents (at least in these results). So what gives here? Why are we so out of touch with our own national ideological composition? The libertarian thing is easy enough to explain — lots of rich folks gravitate toward libertarianism — especially Wall Street and Silicon Valley types — and they have the means to ensure their worldview is represented in political and academic discourse through think tanks and journals. The bigger mystery is why a major facet of American ideological focus goes nameless.

Probably because most people arrived at it personally. It does have some formal precedent — one facet of this worldview is the unofficial political ideology of the Catholic Church (and potentially other large organized religious bodies), but in general it tends to be an idiosyncratic ideology born of personal feelings, life experience, and background.

But I think there’s another reason it goes unheeded, in the U.S. at least — there’s another nameless ideology that monopolizes the limelight and has played a very significant role in America’s self-conception for most of the 20th Century — an ideology many people have gone to great lengths to believe and present as just common sense or the absence of ideology.

If I had to pick a name for it, I’d call it High Church Centrism (‘High Church’ because it takes itself and its traditions very seriously, and sees itself as almost a kind of American civic religion — with weekly worship services on Meet the Press and Face the Nation). High Church Centrism presents itself as pragmatic and traditionally American (and in many ways it is both of those things). It combines socially-liberal tolerance of difference with fiscally-conservative enthusiasm for deregulation, privatization and low taxes. Its chief opponents are the deficit and (less overtly) entitlement spending. (It sounds a bit like libertarianism in the abstract, but it’s totally different — for starters it’s much more moderate, much more comfortable with government, and much less philosophically rigorous). It comes in left- and right-leaning variants, but its cri du coer is “both sides do it!”

It’s well represented in newspaper editorial boards, the boardrooms of more staid and long-successful corporations, the ‘establishment wings’ of both major political parties, and especially in the many operators, bundles, power brokers and hangers-on in Washington DC. It’s been very effective in giving (some) Americans a self-image they’re proud of, and holding many people with very different goals and conceptions of “what is good” together in uneasy coalitions for a long time, but it’s not working the way it used to.

The Center Cannot Hold

High Church Centrism always put itself forward as a common-sense, non-ideological worldview for adults who see the world as it truly is, not as it should or could be. It rejected what it characterized as both the pie-in-the-sky idealism of the left and the sentimental and xenophobic nostalgia of the right, but it never commanded enough popular support to win without voters who leaned either right or left. It sold itself to the right by claiming to be the ideology of regular Americans — the silent majority, who wanted order, cultural stability and economic security. It sold itself to the left by embracing social liberalism — opening the bounty of the American way of life to everyone who was willing to play by its rules. Its right-leaning economic policies were justified to the left and the ‘populists’ with the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats — the rich getting richer was the best way to help the poor, and as long as the upper and upper-middle classes were diverse enough, we were living in a fair and just society where everyone had the opportunity to succeed.

So what went wrong? Well, a rising tide really did seem to lift all boats, up until the 1970’s, when productivity gains stopped correlating with income growth across all classes. Basically, the rich and upper middle class kept getting richer — in the case of the top 0.01% astoundingly so — while lower-middle and working class wage growth slowed or stopped altogether. It took us a great deal of time to even acknowledge this. Rural whites were particularly hit hard by this change (minorities were hit harder, but have always been hit hard in America. Low-income rural whites had up until the past few decades benefitted from the way things were). Many of these white working-class folks are conservative, but many also make up that nameless demographic of socially conservative and economically liberal or quasi-liberal, and many of them have been voting Republican, and allowing Republicans to consolidate congressional districts, reject the center, and move further to the right.

The left has too-often looked down on these people as voting against their own interest by choosing Republican candidates whose only real goal is tax cuts for the rich. There’s some truth to this — socially conservative goals are hard to achieve and resisted by a great many people, while economic goals are easier to achieve while people aren’t paying attention, even if a sizeable chunk of your own base is against them (besides, that’s where the serious donor money comes in). But let’s face it — Republicans have done a very good job of articulating a socially conservative message to the audience that wants it (even if it rarely translates into legislative victories at a national level) whereas Democrats have been very bad at articulating an economically left message — in some cases because they don’t want to. I don’t believe all center-left fiscal policies are bad — I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is great, and should be vastly expanded to cover more people (and made much easier to use), but Democrats do a very poor job of explaining it and advocating for it. I’d prefer single payer, but the ACA is an unquestionable improvement on what came before — but Democrats did a terrible job explaining and advocating for that too, allowing Republicans to brand it with things like ‘death panels.’ At the end of the day, voters in the nameless demo have to choose between Republicans who clearly advocate for half of what they believe in, and Democrats who hem and haw and don’t seem serious about the other half.

One of the few silver linings of Trumpism is that it’s exposed how unpopular right-libertarianism and Buckleyite movement conservatism really are outside of a very comfortable set — even though the Trump administration basically continues to pursue these policies while pretending it’s doing new and different things. Make no mistake — the blood and soil paleoconservatism that threatens to replace movement conservatism is dire, and has the potential to send our country down a very dark road. But now there is also an opening to articulate a genuine left-of-center economic platform in a way that hasn’t been done since the New Deal. Democrats should pursue a meaningful fiscally-liberal platform that includes single payer health care, a more robust social safety net, a higher minimum wage, and support for unions. They should advocate for these policies as fair, common-sense solutions for an economy that no longer works for everyone. They shouldn’t give an inch on social issues, by any means — in fact, both economic and social liberalism are about fairness, it’s as simple as that, and when it’s presented that way it seems much less threatening to voters who for decades have been primed to reject the markers of cultural liberalism.

We’re probably in the midst of a large-scale ideological and partisan shakeup, which will redraw many of the fault lines of American politics. Intense partisanship is a symptom of that. It’s been with us for a long time, but the shared narratives that work to keep it in check have unraveled for good and ill. Many of the truisms that have guided our civic religion for decades are no longer true (and some never were). But the stakes are far too high to cling to what worked before, or to sit it out and see how it’s resolved. If you believe in something, make a case for it, whether or not you think it’s popular. If you still think High Church Centrism is the best policy for the nation don’t just try to rebrand it — make an honest case for why. And if, like me, you’ve been hesitant to fight for what you actually think will make people’s lives better because you thought it just wasn’t popular enough — speak up. You may not get another chance.

Nick Scorza

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Writer, city dweller, cultural omnivore. Opinions expressed are mine alone (unless you agree).