Thinking to Extremes
How American Politics Became So Dysfunctional
This is the first of two articles examining the role of binary thinking in polarizing American politics.
Binary thinking is the mental equivalent of flipping a coin. It is a tack for dealing with complex problems by reducing them to more simplistic either/or perspectives such as good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. There are no gray areas. Viewing the world this way largely discounts context and ambiguity. It lacks the capacity to consider the other side, let alone other alternatives. And the outcome is often anger, fear, and prejudice. “Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking,” said the late Hans Rosling, co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation. [It] “is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking all the time.” Nowhere is this more evident than in politics.
Wishful Thinking
America’s political system has been a duality pretty much from the get-go. Indeed, naming the country the United States of America was arguably an act of wishful thinking. Despite warnings from the likes of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison that competing factions would be “more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for their common good,” electoral politics has been dominated by two major parties. (George Washington was the only independent ever elected president.)
Early on, the political class organized itself into camps like Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Whigs, and Know-Nothings, before settling on Democrats and Republicans in the1850s. Since then, one or the other has won every presidential contest, and controlled one or both houses of Congress. But from the start, their rivalry was marked by conflict. The Republican Party was founded in the Northeast to oppose the expansion of slavery, though not to abolish it. For their part, Southern Democrats fully endorsed the practice, while their Northern counterparts believed its fate should be determined by individual states and territories. Ultimately, the matter was resolved by war.
In the years that followed, partisanship prevailed until the turn of the century when both parties focused on addressing problems brought on by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corruption. In what was labeled the Progressive Era, the administrations of Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson marshaled legislation to regulate big business and curb monopolies. The two leaders also championed notions like voting rights for women, workers’ compensation, and conservation.
Across a New Spectrum
It wasn’t long, however, before the parties again went their separate ways, but this time via a more complicated and subjective form of dichotomous thought. Whereas partisanship is essentially an allegiance to policies and platforms, ideology is an adherence to principles and values; and it can amplify, undermine, or even transcend party loyalties. In the U.S., traditional conservatism had sought to promote and preserve precepts like individualism, religion and morality, support for family, and limited government. As such, it did not necessarily clash with classical liberalism, which at the time advocated free markets and laissez-faire economics, civil liberties, and limited government. By the Great Depression, the two persuasions were clearly at odds.
At that point, liberalism became indelibly linked with the social democratic programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which attracted not only a coalition of blue-collar workers, farmers, racial and religious minorities, rural white Southerners, and Northern urban intellectuals, but also reformist Republicans like Nebraska Senator George Norris and New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, who co-sponsored pro-labor legislation. Conservative Republicans, on the other, made it their mission to overturn the New Deal, a goal to which they are still committed.
Over the next three decades conservatives chafed at the domestic trajectory of the country, culminating in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Albeit best remembered for its disastrous war in Vietnam, the Johnson administration spearheaded more than eighty laws establishing, among others, Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp Act, Head Start, scholarships and low-interest student loans, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Even though the latter two were passed by majorities in both parties, they would, nonetheless, irrevocably alter the political dynamic.
After signing the Civil Rights act, Johnson purportedly confided that “we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come;” and while he was re-elected by the largest margin in history, his opponent Barry Goldwater was the first Republican since Reconstruction to win in deep Southern states. The significance of this wasn’t lost on Richard Nixon, whose so-called Southern strategy was articulated by its principal architect Kevin Phillips, who predicted “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”
The Gipper’s Impact
Phillips was right, and during the 1970s Nixon began realigning American partisanship. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan would do the same with ideology. An acolyte of Goldwater, Reagan too had opposed the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, which he believed was “humiliating to the South.” But unlike his mentor, he was able to move modern conservatism into, and even beyond, Republican mainstream:
· Under Richard Nixon, the party had endorsed banning sales of cheap handguns, but Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
· In the 1970s, Republican support for abortion rights was similar to that of Democrats until Reagan successfully courted religious groups like the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention, which had previously sanctioned abortion when a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk, or in the case of rape or fetal deformity.
· Past polling has shown that Republicans had been consistently more likely than Democrats to report a great deal of confidence in science, until the mid-1980s when party leaders began to publicly depreciate the value of scientific data.
· At the 1980 Republican National Convention, the party amended its platform to end support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been endorsed by Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford
During this time, ideology trumped partisanship as the key determinant of political binary thinking, and what became known as the Reagan Era permeated American society as extensively as Roosevelt’s New Deal doctrine. Reagan won by landslides in the 1980 and 1984 presidential races, each time garnering votes from one of every four registered Democrats, along with 45 percent of union households despite his assault on organized labor.
Having been trounced in two election cycles, Democrats recognized the need to shift their position to win back voters. To that end, they nominated Bill Clinton, who billed himself as a “different kind of Democrat,” and who governed under the rubric of the Third Way, which attempted to juggle a progressive social agenda with centrist policies closer to those of conservatives, including a balanced budget, law and order, and welfare reform. Although he managed to right the party to a considerable degree, it still faced strong headwinds.
Things Really Get Ugly
For if Ronald Reagan was the godfather of contemporary American conservatism, Newt Gingrich was its hit man. The Georgia congressman led the charge during the 1994 midterms in which Republicans not only assumed command of both houses of Congress but netted ten governorships and control of multiple state chambers. Yet not content to simply beat his opponents, he strove to eviscerate them. He questioned Democrats’ patriotism, accusing them of wanting to destroy the country. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich urged his members to castigate the other side whenever possible and appointed some of the most contentious among them to committee chairs. In doing so, he took binary thinking to extremes and set a new standard for political polarization.
Hostilities subsided somewhat in the aftermath of 9/11 when George W. Bush sought the counsel of a different breed of conservatives. Neocons were former liberals and socialists who, in the 1960s, were alienated by the New Left counterculture and Democrats’ failure in Vietnam. Devout global interventionists in the promotion and defense of democracy, they were more interested in combating terrorism abroad than in battling Democrats at home.
But ideological and partisan animosity reached new heights after the 2008 election. Shortly after Barack Obama occupied the White House, the Department of Homeland Security reported that the economic downturn and the election of the first African-American president presented “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.” Projections by the Census Bureau that more than half the population in 2050 would be other than white was an added incentive. By 2010, the FBI identified white supremacist violence as the leading threat of domestic terrorism. Though the Republican Party didn’t openly embrace such racism, it made little or no effort to counter it. In fact, the newly formed Tea Party movement, which launched within days of the inauguration, often lampooned Obama and his family as monkeys.
About the same time, an article in the Harvard Business Review heralded the coming of the “Female Economy.” In 2009, women controlled half the wealth in the United States. During the Great Recession, a larger percentage of women were employed than men; and wives earned more than their husbands in 29% of American households. Moreover, the number college-educated females in the adult population surpassed their male peers.
The backlash was swift. Republican federal and state legislators introduced over 1,000 provisions curtailing women’s health and reproductive rights, adding nearly another 1,000 the following year. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker repealed the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act that allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek redress in the courts. Plus, California Representative Darrel Issa’s infamous congressional panel on birth control and contraceptive coverage had no female participants.
The battle lines had been drawn, and by the 2020 presidential election Americans’ binary thinking had gone into overdrive, subsequently thrusting the nation into an all-out cultural war. Whatever common ground there was has all but disappeared, and disagreement has become disapproval, distrust, and disdain. Yet, the antagonism isn’t balanced, and the two sides are unequal in their size or hostility. And the potential outcome is something the Founding Fathers truly feared.
Part two explores the current state of American polarization.
