Trickle-Down Polarization

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

It’s hardly news any longer that we live in an era marked by the worst political polarization in at least a century and a half. Despite the data supporting this, however, a growing skepticism prevails among certain progressives, who adhere to the notion that there’s little disagreement within the “duopoly,” whose opposition they call a distinction without a difference. Thus, while hopes for solutions to the injustices besetting us would seem to depend on whether they’re correct in their shame-ful notion, it raises another critical question: If it is real, is this polarization a bottom-up or a top-down proposition? Does it, in other words, spring from us commoners or from a source somewhere above?

A key authority for the first question was the American National Election Studies project — until losing its funding last March under the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program, which sponsored research in “citizenship, government, and politics.” Project scholars compiled data from between 1789 and 2004 (over 14 million roll-call decisions by the US House and Senate) and, according to New Yorker writer Jill Lepore (“Long Division,” 12/2/13), after analyzing “election results, interviews with voters, and congressional roll-call records,” concluded that “voters and legislators alike are more polarized today than…any time since the Confederacy seceded.”

When the Senate de-funded the program, Tom Coburn (R-OK) said, “Americans interested in electoral politics can turn to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the Internet,” to which Lepore remarked, “This is a little like saying, when your kitchen is on fire, that it’s O.K. because in a cupboard above the stove, you keep fifty boxes of matches.”

A Harvard historian, Lepore sees the polarization not just as a pyrotechnical given, but as a conflagration fueled primarily by the Republican Party. She cites studies by Barbara Sinclair (“Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making,” 2006) and others showing that since the fifties — when most voters were hard-pressed to tell which of the parties was conservative and which was liberal, or what the terms even meant — it is the GOP that has enflamed the growing polarization. Reminding us of landmarks in recent history, she traces four increasingly incendiary shifts to the right: from Goldwater in 1964, to Reagan in 1980, to Gingrich in 1994, and finally to Romney in 2012 — who “ran to the right of the breakdown lane.”

Over the same span of time, the timidity of Democratic corrections toward the left implicates the GOP further as perpetrators of our polarized political and cultural climate. A far cry from the antitrust Dems of the 1890s, New-Deal Dems of the ‘30s, or Great Society Dems of the ‘60s, Democrats of today have diluted the definitions of liberalism — to where rightwing accusations of socialism and welfare government are far more unfair than are the complaints of disenchanted progressives. Yet, untruths aside, GOP exaggerations persist, causing political scholars to ask: Is the polarization being generated by ordinary voters or by Congress? If it has risen from the people, suggests Lepore, it could be called “representation.” But if it originates in the Congress, or “especially if it’s a consequence of legislators answering to special interests and campaign contributors rather than to voters, polarization in some instances might be more aptly called ‘corruption.’”

Sinclair, emeritus political scientist at UCLA and an authority on the filibuster, addresses this question by narrating in Party Wars the systematic undoing since the 70s of a moderate electorate and a collegial legislature. A telling moment in the book, sub-titled “Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making” and readable on-line, occurred in the late 1980s, when Burt Pines, vice-president of the Heritage Foundation, announced: “Our targets are the policy makers and the opinion-making elite. Not the public. The public gets it from them.”

Heritage was founded in ’73, as a right-wing think tank by Paul Weyrich, who in 1980 announced (see You-Tube), “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections aren’t won by a majority of the people. Our leverage in elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Also founder of “the Moral Majority,” Weyrich was an innovator of super PACs now influencing (read “hijacking”) elections — with help from Supreme Court rulings that money is speech, corporations are people, and it’s time to relax voter suppression laws.

Another weapon in Weyrich’s arsenal against cooperative government and a civil electorate is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is arguably the ultra-Trojan horse of the enemies of individual rights and public well-being. Instead of a trickle-down effect, though, ALEC’s approach exhibits the stealth of a jackhammer — by which member corporations draft laws, which are dutifully enacted by state legislators, so that voters’ preferences are subverted or disregarded altogether. An on-line search shows ALEC’s national legislative membership to be almost 100 percent Republicans. So if there’s no essential difference between the parties, the Democrats haven’t gotten the message.

Yet it doesn’t hurt the cause of the .001 percenters to have progressives think that it’s true, any more than it hurts to have Tea Partiers and other “cognitive dissonants” buy into the polarizing labels trickling down around them. Labels withhold complexity from the labeled and the labelers, while polarizing labels are the tools of pernicious degradation. Another easy web search yields a recent Washington Post article (with mind-boggling chart) on the Koch brothers’ multi-layered network of organizations dedicated solely to polarized label-peddling. If anyone denigrates the term “environmentalist” long enough, it means “enemy of jobs” to them, instead of “friend of the long-term health and rights of nature and the worker.” This is why politics are ultimately local: so are semantics.

Trickle-downs aren’t just vertical processes; they’re horizontal, too. They radiate insidiously outward from corporate board rooms and lobbies to national and state capitals and county seats, into individual homes where folks are desperate to know who to trust, or who not to. But if somebody wants to divide and conquer us — and if they stand to profit obscenely from the polarization — it behooves us to question them and their name-calling devices. Otherwise, who but our own polarized selves can we hold responsible?

Just thinking …