Self-segregated America—at least along political lines

ARTICLE: "Vote Like Thy Neighbor: Why the American electorate is more politically polarized than ever," by William A. Galston and Pietro S. Nivola, New York Times Magazine, 11 May 2008, p. 12.

This, to me, sounds suspicious as causal analysis, but I'm not sure how to counter the argument, even as I suspect it's an oddity of the Boomers.

But here it is: "In 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such counties."

The Boomer age is a weird one, politically, marked, as expert Ron Brownstein argues in his book, The Second Civil War, by a deeply and closely divided electorate, meaning big differences between the parties, but they attract similar levels of popular support. So the Dems and Republicans are less willing and less able to compromise, yielding the Boomers' pathetic record as legislators.

So if you accept the Brownstein argument, and I do, then this one by Galston and Nivola indicates that the Boomer age has resulted in a sort of political segregation: we naturally move to counties where we feel politically comfortable.

I'm not willing to describe this phenomenon as a permanent hardening of the social arteries of our democracy. People move a lot in this day and age, so the whole thing may be gone in a couple of decades as the Boomers move into their old age.

Or maybe not.

Comments

[Tom Mull]

I think that there is some truth to the article concerning the Baby Boom Generation and Polarizing politics. BUT! I think that the nature of our First Past The Post, Winner Take All, Single Member Voting System is more the problem. Our Two Party System (really a one party system at the district and county level) could be opened up with Proportional Representation Voting like the kind they use in Ireland and Austrailia (Choice Voting). Dr. Tom knows how it is being a Democrat in a Republican state (and a Republican County and District?). Check out this web site on PR by another of my favorite Political Scientist PhD's (Doug Amy): http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/prlib.htm =)

[stuart abrams]

America was in a sharp partisan divide for most of the 19th Century. Slavery was the dominant issue before the Civil War, but the parties tried to avoid it and coalesced around other issues (tariffs, the bank, internal improvements), resulting in a virtual tie. After the Civil War, the parties continued in a virtual tie, as the modern American capitalist economy began to take shape, and politics became largely irrelevant. Since then, there have been 3 transformative elections: (1) 1896 McKinley established Republican dominance as the Democrats embraced populism and most of the country rejected it (TR adding a little progressive flavoring to spice up the Republican appeal); (2) 1932 FDR restructured and revived the Democratic Party by embracing activist government and later internationalism (defined by Truman and Acheson), incorporating the new immigrant voters who had come to the US in the late 19th/early 20th Century; (3) 1968 Nixon revived the Republican Party by taking advantage of racial divisions and divisions over social issues, coupled with the worldwide economic collapse of socialism in both its authoritarian and democratic versions (new Republican program reinforced by Reagan). This is the phase we have been in for the past 40 years, but voting support actually breaks down fairly evenly, so for most of the past 40 years, although the Republicans have won more Presidential elections, many of those elections have been very close and we have generally had divided government. This period reminds me a lot of the pre-Civil War period, with Jackson and Reagan playing similar roles in defining the divide. The question now is whether we can have another transformation, which will be based on the building of a national consensus around a mature approach to the impact of globalization, which would require the Democrats to reject neo-populism and would require the Republicans to reject militarist unilateralism (as well as xenophobia). Don't know if either party can make these things happen, in which case we remain stuck.

[Louis Heberlein]

This is an unfortunate situation just when we are trying to encourage other countries to risk democratic processes to heal their conflicted divisions.

What could the true wise mentors of our Democratic and Republican parties do to overcome our irrational divisions and provide an inspiring example to those other nations?

Perhaps they could start with a poll to identify individuals that could be accepted by most Americans as potential inspirational leaders that could transcend lesser issues to focus on important measures. Tsk! Just a dream.

[Mike Nelson]

Tom:

I suspect that election polarization is largely an artifact of district gerrymandering. Check out this interactive map of congressional districts and if you zoom in on the dense urban areas you will see that bizarre geometries are the rule, not the exception:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp

Our communities ARE integrated. It is simply that our politicians don't let that get in their way and create a polarized world through congressional district mapping.

Mike Nelson

PS I first saw you on the C-SPAN clip in 2004. I've been a big fan since, am anxiously awaiting your next book, and hope to high heaven that more (even some???) of our leadership will start paying attention.

PPS On a con note I think you are giving too much attention/credence to Global Warming alarmism. I'm not saying things aren't changing some, I simply believe the science really is far from settled and nowhere near sound enough to base regulatory policy on. It took 50 years for engineers and scientists to develop (and validate through parallel wind tunnel testing, something that is EXTREMELY problematic to do for climate models) computer codes that can accurately predict how airplanes will fly. But even today they can't model how a parachute will work. That's turbulent flow and WAY to complicated. My sense is that climate is even more complex, and thus simply beyond the means of accurate modeling given the state of our technology. Of course it IS a political reality today, but it bothers me to see grand strategy bent to argueably questionable science. IMHO.

[stuart abrams]

An addendum to my earlier post. One similarity between recent history and the post-Civil War period is the relative absence of top-quality people from politics. In the second half of the 19th Century, the most talented Americans pursued careers in business, not politics. Similarly for the Boomers: the most talented people have gone into business or the arts, not politics.