Tag: polarization
Like And Dislike In These Polarizing Times

Like And Dislike In These Polarizing Times

This is for Gigi, who can’t figure out why I don’t like Bill Maher.

Gigi, a reader in West Palm Beach, wrote me last week noting that I agree with the star of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on most political issues. Yet I have, on previous occasions in this space, expressed distaste for him. “I just don’t understand,” wrote Gigi, “why you profess to dislike someone who is so like minded. It baffles me.”

Me, I don’t see the contradiction. To whatever admittedly imperfect degree you can judge character from a television performance, I find Maher smarmy, self-satisfied, condescending and just plain nasty. Besides which, his use of coarse, sexist vulgarisms to describe Sarah Palin and of an offensive term to describe her special-needs child a few years ago strike me as far beyond the pale, whether as comedy or as political analysis.

That said, Gigi’s letter intrigues me less for its unspoken assumption that we should flock toward people with whom we agree than for the obvious, albeit equally unspoken, corollary: We should avoid those with whom we disagree.

Her bafflement tracks with the findings of a 2014 Pew Research Center study. It found that partisan animosity has increased significantly in the past 20 years, the right moving further right, the left, further left, with the result that people now largely prefer to make their lives in echo chambers where their beliefs reverberate without challenge. Half of all “consistently conservative” respondents told Pew it’s important for them to live in a place where most people think like them. Forty-nine percent of their liberal counterparts said most of their friends share their views.

Indeed, to a great degree, political identity now serves the same function in the public mind as racial identity — namely, as a fundamental and immutable marker of character and worth. To put that another way: Would you want your daughter to marry one? Twenty-three percent of consistent liberals say no, they would not want to see an immediate family member marry a Republican. Thirty percent of consistent conservatives feel the same about the idea of a Democrat in the family.

Look, I get it: we argue — and we have to, and we should — over momentous things. This is not a call to paper over critical political differences with false harmonies of Kumbaya. For the record, I doubt I could share a bus shelter in the rain with such conservative icons as Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. Drenching would be much preferable to five minutes with any one of them. But, as with Maher, that represents a judgment less of politics than of perceived character.

In this era, unfortunately, that’s a distinction without a difference. My problem is that I came of age in another era, that I remember the likes of Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, men with whom I could — and did — have sharp political disagreements without feeling obliged to personally dislike them or to disparage their patriotism or decency.

Having been shaped by that era, I persist in believing party does not equal character, nor ideology, identity. I feel no imperative to like you because I agree with you. Or to dislike you because I don’t.

Granted, that is an outdated and minority view, but I hold to it, largely because I can’t see how the alternative solves anything except the need to argue. If a political opponent is defined as unalterably misanthropic and irredeemably evil, then all politics is doomed to fail. Politics, after all, is the art of compromise. You don’t compromise with monsters.

No, you compromise with people like yourself, who have wants, needs and fears like yourself, though they see the world through a different lens. That’s a truth lost to this loud and polarized time. As is this:

Disagreement is not a reason to stop talking. Truth to tell, it’s a reason to start.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Photo: Fibonacci Blue via Flickr

Weekend Reader: ‘Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong With The U.S. Congress’

Weekend Reader: ‘Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong With The U.S. Congress’

Tom Allen has a unique understanding of congressional dysfunction and the challenges of bipartisan governing. As a U.S. representative from Maine’s 1st district, for over a decade Allen was on the front lines of debates over the federal budget, the invasion of Iraq, and health care reform, among other key issues. 

In his new book, Dangerous ConvictionsAllen details how both Democrats and Republicans struggle to understand opposing views, which often makes compromise nearly impossible. In the excerpt below, Allen uses the battle over health care reform to illustrate our broken political system. 

You can purchase the book here.

The congressional debates over health care reform during the Bush and Obama administrations exposed the underlying clash of ideas and values that breeds the polarization about which the press and public complain. I spoke to countless rooms of people about the crisis in the American health care system. Often, the room was divided between those who believed health care should be available to everyone, regardless of wealth, and a smaller number who believed they should not be required to share the costs of illnesses or accidents suffered by others. It’s not that the latter group was cruel-hearted; many undoubtedly gave generously to churches, temples, and charitable efforts. But many also harbored the view that the poor brought on their own misfortune. The factions had fundamentally different moral views.

This dichotomy mirrored the various perspectives on the role of government: one believed that only the federal government could expand coverage and contain the excesses of the health insurers, and the other believed in “free markets,” even in health care. Advocates for comprehensive reform typically found it intolerable that millions of Americans lacked both adequate insurance and health care. Opponents typically preferred to do nothing rather than to expand the role of the federal government.

It is harder to understand that attitude among members of Congress, who meet thousands of their constituents every year. I visited subsidized housing facilities whose residents, mostly women, lived on $700 a month and were unable to pay for their prescriptions. I talked with students forced to leave college because of health issues, who then lost their health insurance when they left. My staff dealt with hundreds of constituents struggling with inadequate care and no insurance. The thought often ran through my mind, “How do Republican congressmen respond to these personal stories of neglect and lack of care?” I don’t know.

In short, each side finds the position of the other incomprehensible. That’s why my Democratic colleagues concluded that Republicans must be completely beholden to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and Republicans concluded that Democrats wanted to expand the power of government for their own political purposes. The bottom line is that compromise on major reform, even the Affordable Care Act in 2009–10, was never realistic.

Before that bill passed the House I ran into a Republican colleague in Washington. He complained that the minority had been denied the opportunity to offer amendments. But when I suggested that even if given that chance and the amendments passed, he still couldn’t vote for the bill, he agreed. When the congressional minority party, Republican or Democratic, complains about being denied the opportunity to amend a bill, extend the debate, or a similar process issue, the real objection is almost always about the substance. The mainstream media typically gives too much credibility to the red herring of abuse of process claims and not enough to the decisive conflict of values and ideas.

A sign at a Tea Party rally in 2010 read: “Big Government Means Less Individual Freedom.” President Obama told a town hall audience: “I got a letter the other day from a woman. She said, ‘I don’t want government-run health care. I don’t want socialized medicine. And don’t touch my Medicare.’” That’s the level at which major political issues are fought today. The concept that better (or even some) health care, or more education, or improved services for children can create opportunity for Americans rather than limit them, or that government services need not make beneficiaries “dependent” is rarely debated in specifics—where evidence might matter.

When one side will only debate vital public issues in terms of “big government” and “individual freedom” instead of the nuts and bolts of policy, no amount of evidence can stop our slide to intensifying polarization. Meanwhile, the people without adequate care and the businessmen and women struggling to provide coverage for their employees could only wait—and wonder when relief might come. That question for millions is now tied to whether the systemic changes signed into law by President Obama can survive the continued relentless attack from the Right during the next few years.

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The full-throated Republican opposition to the ACA, including the appeal to the Supreme Court, masked the underlying reality that they had no alternative proposal to expand coverage to the more than thirty million (of the fifty million now uninsured) projected to gain coverage under the ACA. I believe that if the Republican leadership had somehow been forced to produce a plan for comparable coverage, they would have relied on a somewhat less regulatory, competitive private insurance market with either an individual mandate or tax penalties or inducements to achieve the same result. In other words, they would have adopted legislation much like the bill they condemned. They had no free-market option that could expand coverage to millions of Americans for whom the current free market was impossibly expensive.

In the last two decades, despite the increasing saliency of health care concerns, no national Republican leader offered a plausible plan to expand coverage. There were, I believe, two reasons: (1) politically it wasn’t necessary to respond to their base, and (2) conceptually they could not escape the confinement of “smaller government, lower taxes.” Those core principles and the absence of any countervailing conservative principles took Republicans out of the health care coverage debate—except to say no to Democratic proposals. In that effort, they isolated the part of the ACA that by its very name would in America arouse intense opposition: the “individual mandate.” For a party sliding down a road of ever-increasing hostility to government, there could hardly have been a more inviting rhetorical target.

The equally troubling conclusion is that the combination of forty million to fifty million uninsured Americans and the financial consequences for American businesses large and small was not enough to make health care reform a pressing issue for both parties. In every congressional district there were thousands of people struggling with the costs and consequences of an inadequate health care system, and hundreds of businesses burdened by rapidly increasing insurance premiums. But that was not enough for Republican congressional leaders to develop an updated version of the 1989 Heritage Plan. The party’s fierce opposition to government action in health care ensured that their only viable political choices were small-bore proposals allowing insurance companies to sell policies across state lines medical malpractice limitations, and health savings accounts. In the end the ACA, although it included significant conservative ideas, attracted only Democratic support.

The legal challenges to the ACA reached the Supreme Court in March 2012. After listening to conservatives on the Supreme Court repeatedly describe the issue as “freedom,” one commentator wrote, “It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another . . . the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril . . . the freedom to be left alone . . . the freedom to live like it’s 1804.” The clash of worldviews that played out in the political, legislative, and courtroom debates over Obamacare was intense and irreconcilable primarily because it was so abstract.

In the two years after its enactment Republicans had frequently claimed that they would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” After the Court upheld the law, Sen. Mitch McConnell was pressed three times by Chris Wallace on Fox News to explain how Republicans proposed to cover the thirty million Americans who would be covered under the ACA. McConnell’s response was, “That’s not the issue.”

WALLACE: You don’t think the thirty million people who are uninsured is an issue?

MCCONNELL: Let me tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to turn the American health care system into a western European system.

It would be hard to find a clearer contemporary example of how ideological principles devalue people. Tens of millions of uninsured are “not the issue” because a libertarian ideology has no room for their problems and no respect for “western European” systems that provide near-universal coverage at lower cost and with better health outcomes than our own system. At some point, there is a moral equivalence between leaving millions of Americans stranded with the health and financial risks of being uninsured, and walking by a stranger lying bleeding in the street. And at nearly fifty million insured, we have long passed that point.

In NFIB v. Sebelius the Supreme Court upheld the central components of the ACA, including the individual mandate, although under the taxing power of Congress, not the Commerce Clause. Justice Roberts’s opinion protected the Court from being perceived as an institution driven entirely by conservative politics and yet confined the reach of the Commerce Clause for potential future cases. The Court’s resolution of the constitutionality of the ACA, passed by Congress without a single Republican vote—despite its conservative roots—will leave health care reform as another example of how deep-seated convictions about dependency, liberty, and the role of government can render nearly impossible the bipartisan congressional engagement that our largest, most complicated and pressing challenges require.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

Reprinted from Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress by Tom Allen with permission from Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2013 by Oxford University Press.

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The Vital Incoherent Center

The Vital Incoherent Center

WASHINGTON — Here’s one political paradox: A substantial majority of Americans do not fit neatly into the conventional “liberal” and “conservative” boxes, yet there is no coherent political center. Those who dream of a middle-of-the-road third party are destined to be disappointed.

Here’s another: Groups broadly sympathetic to the Democratic Party significantly outnumber those sympathetic to the Republican Party. But in the smaller but influential universe of the ideologically committed, conservative Republicans outnumber liberal Democrats. The larger Democratic coalition has mixed convictions while the smaller Republican core is filled with passionate intensity.

Every decade or so, the Pew Research Center sorts the American electorate into discrete groupings with interesting names. Pioneered by the legendary pollster Andrew Kohut in 1987, the political typology helps clarify reality by making the complexity of public opinion understandable. Voters aren’t “inconsistent.” They just don’t conform to a prefabricated left-center-right world.

Pew’s latest map of public opinion finds the electorate divided into eight groups. One of them, “Bystanders,” consists of Americans simply disconnected from politics. Three groups are the “anchors” of partisanship: “Steadfast Conservatives” and “Business Conservatives” are the bedrock of the Republican Party, while “Solid Liberals” are staunch Democrats.

The Republican “anchors” reflect the fundamental split in the GOP. The Steadfast group is conservative across the board, while the Business group is more pro-immigration and pro-Wall Street. This split does not overlap with the conflict over the Tea Party, since both groups are about equally partial to the movement. At the other end, Solid Liberals are, as their name suggests, “liberal across the board” on major issues.

The two conservative groups constitute 22 percent of the general public (12 percent in the Steadfast category, 10 percent in the Business camp) while Solid Liberals account for 15 percent. The conservative lead widens (27 percent versus 17 percent) among registered voters, and it’s wider still among politically engaged Americans — 36 percent of them belong to the conservative groups, only 21 percent to the liberal one.

So if you wonder why Republicans have a hard time being moderate or conciliatory, the answer is clear enough: The bulk of their support comes from tuned-in, ideological conservatives. In the Democratic coalition, liberals are important but not dominant.

So why aren’t Republicans sweeping the country? The explanation can be found in the political center, and Pew has bad news for those searching for a vital middle-ground politics. The center, the report finds, is “fragmented” because “there are many distinct voices in the center, often with as little in common with each other as with those who are on the left and the right.”

And it’s in the center where Democrats enjoy a major advantage. Of the four “less partisan, less predictable” groups, three lean Democratic.

The “Faith and Family Left” (15 percent of the electorate) is racially diverse, religious, pro-government and tilts socially conservative. The “Hard-Pressed Skeptics” (13 percent) are financially stressed pessimists who believe in government programs, preferred President Obama by a 40-point margin in 2012, but now lean Democratic in this fall’s congressional races by only 14 points. The “Next Generation Left” (12 percent) is made up of younger social liberals who support an activist government but worry about the cost of social programs.

The “Young Outsiders,” the sole Republican-leaning center group, have conservative views on government and economics but not on social issues and constitute 14 percent of the public.

Combining all of Pew’s categories, the pro-Republican groups add up to only 36 percent of the public, the pro-Democratic groups to 55 percent. (The rest are Bystanders.) Among registered voters, the Democratic-leaning groups have an edge of about 3-to-2 over the Republicans.

So why don’t Democrats win every election? We are back to intensity and to the fact that middle-ground Democratic groups have qualms about the party they lean toward. For 2014, the GOP groups are mobilized and largely united. Democrats, the survey found, are suffering a fall-off from their 2012 margins, particularly among the Hard-Pressed Skeptics and the Faith and Family crowd.

These numbers suggest that the outcome in November will depend in large part on the Democrats’ ability to strengthen themselves among voters still hurting economically — one reason Obama is having so many town halls in the heartland this summer — and to boost both turnout and support among the Faith and Family voters.

The bottom line: Republicans are prisoners of an older, deeply conservative base. The Democrats are hostage to a politically diverse but easily splintered coalition. And good luck to those trying to find a viable center.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan

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Americans Increasingly See Opposing Party As ‘Threat’ To Nation

Americans Increasingly See Opposing Party As ‘Threat’ To Nation

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — More than one-third of Republicans and just over a quarter of Democrats see the other party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being,” reflecting a widening partisan division in the country that has congealed into animosity and distrust.

Through two decades of political battling across the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the ideological divisions among Americans have deepened. The percentage of Americans who hold consistently liberal or conservative views has sharply increased, and the antipathy between the two groups has shot upward.

Among those with a high level of political engagement — consistently voting in elections and following government and politics carefully — nearly half say they would go so far as to describe the other side as a threat to the country.

Although a majority of Americans do not hold such consistent ideological views, those who do have a disproportionate influence on elections. They engage much more in politics, vote more consistently, especially in primaries, and give much more money to candidates.

They also increasingly live cut off from adherents of the opposite party, choosing friends and picking places to live that reinforce their political outlooks.

Those findings come from an unusually extensive survey of more than 10,000 adults conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The results show how the partisan divisions that have gridlocked Congress reflect an increasingly deep and often bitter division at the grass roots. And although Americans overall express frustration with Congress and say they want to see lawmakers compromise more, the most politically engaged on both sides define a successful compromise as a deal in which their side gets most of what it wants.

A decade ago, only about 10 percent Americans held consistent liberal or conservative views across a broad range of issues on which Pew has repeatedly polled. The issues include the role of government, attitudes toward the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, environmental policies and the use of military force overseas.

Today, that share has doubled, to 20 percent. An additional 40 percent of Americans hold mostly consistent views.

As the number of ideologically consistent people has increased, they have become more clearly sorted by party: Many more Democrats are consistently liberal and more Republicans consistently conservative.

As a result, the two parties are more ideologically separate than they have been for decades, with less and less overlap between their backers. That’s true even though Pew included people who identify as independents in its survey. The vast majority of self-described independents, this survey and others show, lean toward one party or the other, and their views are nearly indistinguishable from those who openly espouse a partisan affiliation.

Overall, 34 percent of the adults surveyed held consistent or mostly consistent liberal views and 27 percent held consistent or mostly consistent conservative opinions. That contrasts somewhat with Americans’ self-descriptions of their ideologies. When asked, 23 percent of those surveyed called themselves liberal and 36 percent conservative. The reason for the disparity is largely that more than one-third of those who hold consistently or mostly liberal views self-identify as moderates.

Personal preferences beyond politics reinforce those divisions. More than three-quarters of consistently liberal Americans say they would prefer to live in a place where houses are “smaller and closer together, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.” A similar percentage of consistent conservatives say they would prefer a place where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.”

Reality bears out those preferences: The survey showed what election results have demonstrated, that Democrats are an urban party while Republicans dominate in rural areas.

Liberals, regardless of their race, say that ethnic and racial diversity in their neighborhoods are important to them. They also express a strong preference for living in a place that has museums and theaters. Conservatives express little interest in either of those factors in a neighborhood, but more than half say it is important to them to live in a place where many share their religious faith.

Just under four in ten Americans held mixed views in the survey. Their views are not necessarily more moderate than the ideologically consistent voters. Instead, what stands out about them is their relative disengagement from politics. They’re less likely to register to vote, don’t show up at the polls as frequently even when they do register, and don’t pay as much attention to politics and government.

By contrast, those with the greatest ideological consistency report talking about politics much more often than other Americans.

They mostly seem to have those conversations with like-minded people. Among consistent conservatives, more than six in ten say most of their close friends share their political views. About half of consistent liberals say the same.

That’s no accident. The most politically engaged voters on both sides increasingly hold deeply unfavorable views of the other side. The level of antipathy has increased markedly over two decades, and dislike of the other side has become a major motivator for political engagement.

Just under four in ten Democrats and just over four in ten Republicans report holding “very unfavorable” views of the other party, a level that has more than doubled since the early years of Clinton’s tenure. The dislike deepens among the most ideological, with nearly three-quarters of consistent conservatives saying they hold a “very unfavorable” view of the Democrats and just over half of consistent liberals saying the same about the GOP.

Among those with very unfavorable views of the other side, more than one-third say it is important to them to live in “a place where most people share my political views.” Just about three in ten in both groups say they would be unhappy if someone in their families married a person from the other party.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr