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Gridlock's awful, especially for a nation much less polarized than its politicians
Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
Scholars have debated for years whether the United States is polarized. The minority view is that the country is not polarized.
Morris Fiornia has led the charge for that position. He and his Stanford colleague Samuel Abrams, along with Harvard's Jeremy Pope, staked out this ground in "Culture War?," a 2004 book that used polls and surveys to argue our country is not all that bitterly divided over major public policy issues.
To be sure, since the third edition came out a decade ago the country has probably become more divided — especially during the four years Donald Trump was president.
Still, we need to consider the possibility that the nation's population is not polarized, even though the politicians the people have sent to Washington are undeniably polarized.
Back in 2014, columnist Greg Sargent of The Washington Post relied on polling data to lay out the case for widespread national agreement on an array of supposed hot-button topics. There was broad support for immigration reform leading to a path for citizenship, for example, for a big public works program and for job training tax breaks offset by higher taxes on the rich. And there was broad opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare.
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Tribal tendencies have ratcheted up in the Trump years, especially on issues related to race and ethnicity. Most polls, however, still show solid majorities wanting to see a path-to-citizenship immigration policy, major infrastructure spending and the status quo for the social safety net.
But in Washington, the Democrats and Republicans are almost totally split. Only a few members on either side in the 50-50 Senate display any tendency to support positions of the opposing party. The same is true in the House, now with the narrowest Democratic majority in 76 years.
So while Americans still may disagree about many things, the claim that Capitol Hill is a microcosm of the country is manifestly untrue. Not only is there widespread agreement among the people on many top-tier policies, but also the electorate is substantially less partisan than Congress. While all 535 lawmakers have affiliated with one of the major parties, the same is true for only 60 percent of voters.
There may be plenty of visible signs and audible voices of opposition to President Biden and his fellow Democrats now in charge of Washington policymaking. But for every member of a white supremacist group, several orders of magnitude more Americans disavow such groups. And for every act of violence by a citizen on the right or the left, there are thousands who have not and would never commit violence in political protest.
It is also true that as many as 60 million Americans do not view Biden as the legitimate president. Yet it does not follow that, on policy questions, these people are polarized against the 81 million who voted to make him president — or against the 80 million who did not vote at all last fall.
Also remember, as political scientists have long reminded us, that voting is only one part of citizenship. In recent decades the nation has seemed to be positioned for something close to a civil war before every election. But while wearing their red or blue uniforms for campaign season, millions have stayed in agreement on plenty of issues. And once the voting is over, people have tended to drop their polarized postures.
In other words, our identity as "voters'' dominates for only a short time every two years, when the choices are often binary. But we are always maintaining our identities as "citizens" — people who espouse subtlety and collaboration on the issues, volunteer for myriad public causes and take pride in helping educate others. Who we vote for does not exhaust who we are as citizens.
Progressives point to "affective polarization" and "tribal identity politics" as the causes of the societal conflicts that truly divide us. Yet the question still remains whether such cultural differences also guarantee divides on public policy questions involving the poor and elderly, crumbling infrastructure, job creation, civil rights and health care.
There was 70 percent public support for Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package, including 41 percent backing from Republicans. Isn't that evidence to support the view we are not polarized?
The challenge is to seek a resolution of the tension between Washington, which has a problem of polarization, and the country, which does not. Biden probably got elected with many hoping he could lead the effort to get this done. But the responsibility also rests with the congressional leaders of both parties to help forge this new model of legislative success.
And it is up to the nonprofit leaders, media pundits, the clergy and the citizens themselves to tell Washington to stop projecting its own polarization onto the public. If the politicians can resolve their own discord, and the public can transform its understanding of itself, there is a path forward.
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President Biden and his fellow Democrats need to start their outreach by addressing those Americans who did not vote for Trump last year because they did not vote at all.
Guide to reviving the center: First, realize how half the electorate isn't polarized
Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
There were 240 million eligible voters in the United States last fall, and Joe Biden and Donald Trump each got approximately one third of their votes.
Biden got 34 percent of these people to cast a ballot for him, Trump 31 percent. But, because of the math of the Electoral College, Trump would have secured re-election had only a combined 44,000 voters switched to him in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. Moreover, millions who cast their votes for Biden did not do so with passion, and the same holds for Trump.
So it's probably fair to say that half the electorate was not passionately behind one of the 2020 presidential candidates — the 80 million who decided not to cast a ballot at all, for starters, along with perhaps 40 million who voted for one candidate because they disliked, feared or hated the other one.
The new president and his fellow Democrats newly in control of Congress need to think seriously about these figures. After the latest economic rescue package is enacted, under special rules that will allow passage along party lines, the Democrats' immediate task is to figure out how to deal with the Republican minority, especially in a Senate where 40 members can block almost all legislation and the GOP holds 50 seats. But the larger task is to figure out how to build unity in the country.
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Apart from wartime, it is always nearly impossible for the president and Congress, even if they are in the same party, to get 90 percent or even 80 percent of the country to stand for the same vision, values and policies. If Biden could get 70 percent or even 60 percent of adult Americans to approve of his leadership, that would be extraordinary.
"Here's the deal," as the president likes to say: Democrats in office need to stop assuming that they must convince Republicans across the country to agree with their proposals. Perhaps one in 10 people who identify as reliable GOP voters will be impossible to turn, because they are going to keep siding with the sorts of radicals who led the storming of the Capitol last month.
Instead, Democrats in power in Washington should start by addressing those Americans who did not vote for Trump last year because they did not vote at all. Many are moderates and independents, Most are what political scientists call "low information voters." And a good share are younger than 30.
Democrats next need to think about building support among perhaps 20 million Republicans who voted for Trump but do not buy his lies about losing only because of widespread election fraud. At the same time, the party must work to firm up commitments from those who voted for Biden not because they loved him but because they felt that they had to.The deal, in other words, is not to tell Republicans they need to get aboard the Democratic ship because it's the only boat leaving the dock. This is the wrong picture.
In short, building unity will be complicated, and therefore talking about it should not be in oversimplified terms. Indeed, it would be totally appropriate for Biden to commit to engaging those who stayed home, a solid share of Republicans who voted against him and those Democrats who voted for him without enthusiasm.
To that end, he may decide it makes sense to support election reform policies at the state or federal level. One example would be bids to end partisan gerrymandering in order to increase presidential turnout in very blue and very red states. Many voters in these places now feel their votes for Congress are meaningless because they live in districts that are a total lock for one party or the other. Similarly, they may not vote for president either, assuming their choice won't matter since their state is a sure thing for one of the candidates.
Getting Washington on the same page with the country is going to involve dealing with the people of the country using a different playbook than the one dealing with the people in Washington. Biden would do well to expand his concept of the citizens he needs to reach, and then use that vision to help orchestrate his efforts in Congress.
This can be done not only by the public policies he supports but also by the language he uses to talk to the country.
It's important to have creative policies. The key is to convince politicians, interest groups and the public that policies are needed — whether $1,400 payments to most people, federal child care subsidies, better health care, funding for vaccine distribution or jobs for young Americans.
What is needed above all is a more inclusive language — one that rejects simplistic binary distinctions pitting Democrats against Republicans, false dichotomies and master dualisms that distort the nature of the body politic.
The road ahead has immense challenges, especially as the entwined pandemic and economic crises fester. But dealing with these crises — along with our racial tension and changing climate — requires throwing out the cookie cutters that set Democratic voters against Republican voters and overstate the polarization of the country.
The polarization story the media has hyped in recent years provides the wrong framework for understanding what we need from our federal government. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer need to stop looking at politics in terms of Democratic vs. Republican voters and Democratic vs. Republican politicians.
It's time for a more complex, realistic framework for creating a just society.
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'Polarized' doesn't describe us accurately, because there's a third force to reckon with
The disgraceful storming of the Capitol has led House Democrats to ready a vote Wednesday impeaching President Trump for inciting the mob, and polling shows most Americans want him removed before his time expires next week. But the vast majority of Republicans oppose impeachment, and many still believe Trump's baseless assertion that he's being denied another term because of election fraud.
So there is undeniably deep division between Democrats and Republicans. But self-described independents, who account for two-fifths of the electorate, are currently siding with the Democrats by 2-to-1. They are hardly evenly divided on impeachment — and it's similarly impossible to prove the leanings of these 100 million are evenly divided between the two parties.
As a result, it is misleading to say we are a nation divided into two opposing groups. In reality, there are three groups, and you can appreciate this by considering three images of the country.
One is for Trump's backers. The next is for President-elect Joe Biden's supporters. The last is for those who either didn't vote, or voted for either Biden or Trump even though they were not passionately committed to either candidate.
Here is the Trump supporter picture, taken before the end of last week: He is at the White House sitting in bed and tweeting away. We see citizens reading his posts; they are either smiling or cheering, or locking their doors, or grabbing their guns, or checking their investment portfolios on their phones. We see them in churches. Others are at car races and horse races wearing MAGA hats. They are also in their small businesses and at assembly lines, with their hats, assembling machines or working at personal computers. They are predominantly white, and a good number are in rural areas.
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Here is the Biden supporter picture: Citizens are marching in the streets of several cities, protesting Trump and protesting the establishment. They are Blacks, women, environmentalists and members of the LGBTQ community. Others are praying in churches and synagogues, holding pictures of loved ones hospitalized with Covid-19. We see the poor and working-class Americans, on foot or in their cars, waiting at food banks. We see others telling their therapists and internists how relieved they are that their candidate won. They are teachers and professors, nurses and bus drivers. Half are white, but most are living in cities or suburbs.
Here is the third picture: It's dark and you can't see any people, but you can see captions of what they are saying: "I'm a moderate, and I voted for Biden because I don't like Trump." "I'm a moderate and I voted for Trump, but I don't love him." "I don't vote. The parties are the same. They both screw the middle class." "I don't vote either. And no one ever calls me to ask me why." "I stopped voting in 1976 after Richard Nixon was thrown out of office. I don't follow politics anymore." "I'm an independent, and I don't like either major party. I ignore them both. I vote in some elections." "I'm an independent, and I do follow politics. I usually vote for the Republican." "I'm an independent, and I also follow politics, and I usually vote for the Democrat."
The curious thing about this picture is that we can't see whether these people are living in the country, in cities or in suburbia — in a row house or a big new Colonial. And we cannot see their race or gender. Indeed, we know very little about them other than that about half are what political scientists call "low information voters." This group makes up about 40 percent of Americans old enough to cast a ballot.
What we don't have, then, is one image of America where everyone is rowing the same boat with their own oar. What we don't have is a massive blue army fighting a massive red army as though it were a battle in the Civil War.
There are really three Americas, and they cut across all of the most popular categories. We know a great deal about the pure Democrats and the pure Republicans. We know very little about the moderates and independents who vote for both sides and those citizens who don't vote at all. Independents alone account for two of every five adults eligible to vote. And about 80 million of that group, many millions of them unaffiliated with either party, didn't even vote at all this year.
The media insists that there are two categories, the D's and the R's. Our Washington politicians, who are deeply polarized, also act as though these are the only two options.
In the years ahead we need to recover from Trump, support Biden because he is going to be the president at a very difficult time — and give voice to those who are not part of the polarization drama. Only 51 percent of the 158 million people who voted cast their votes for Biden, while 47 percent went with Trump.
But these figures convey the misleading impression that we are a country divided between two sides. We are not.
Last week's awful assault on Congress should not only cause some Trump supporters to question their allegiance to the Trump Republican Party; it should also throw light on the fact that there are tens of millions of Americans who do not identify with the bitter polarization battles of Washington in the first place.
The new president, and the new Democratic Congress, need to represent all Americans. Not just those who voted for Biden with enthusiasm, or Trump with enthusiasm, but those who voted for Biden and Trump without enthusiasm and those who did not vote at all.
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