Political Polarization No Longer the Sole Province of Elites

by Shawn P. Healy, PhD, Democracy Program Director

A decade ago, political scientists were deep in the throes of a debate over the extent to which political polarization was elite driven, or also represented throughout the population. The former argument acknowledged that the two political parties in Congress moved more decisively to the left and right, respectively, leaving a largely centrist public to choose between two polar choices.

Indeed, a young Illinois Senate candidate named Barack Obama dismissed the artificial divisions of “red” and “blue America” in the 2004 keynote at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Elected president four years later, Obama soon came to grips with conservative Republican opposition committed to limiting him to a single term in office. And this opposition was backed by the grass roots activism of the Tea Party. The left had its own counterpunch in the form of Occupy Wall Street, and the elite-only political polarization hypothesis has since been disproven.

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a report that challenged age-old assumptions of the forces that shape our political views. Education and income were once decisive predictors, and a decade ago religiosity, or the frequency by which we worship, was correlated with partisan choice. More recently, race has been at the forefront of political debates with perhaps the second coming of the Civil Rights Movement paired with the politics of resentment of the white working class.

While these variables partly predict our political views, our party affiliation stands first and foremost.

This conclusion is a product of a survey capturing partisan views on ten selected economic and social issues.

Over the course of a 23-year period, significant, yet comparatively shallow partisan divides have become cavernous. Even on issues like the value of immigration to the country and tolerance for homosexuality where overall views have trended progressive, the gap between Democrats and Republicans have widened. And Republicans mistrust of government as a partner in resolving societal problems stands in stark contrast with Democrats’ more optimistic view.

These alarming data points affirm what many of us witness in daily debates that smack of tribalism. The question is where we go from here. We’ll have more to say about this in future posts, but it underlines once more the critical roles that teachers and schools play in students’ civic development.

As a citizenry we must understand where our beliefs lie on the political spectrum and the values that underlie them. We must also avoid caricatures of our “opponents,” seeking to understand the values that underlie often deeply personal contrasting beliefs. This can be achieved through deliberative dialogue, with a commitment to identifying areas of agreement. The latter can be the basis of seemingly elusive political compromise. Nothing less than the future of our republic depends on it.