Abstract
It is trite to assert America’s major parties have polarized, with Democrats moving to the left and Republicans to the right. Numerous quantitative treatments of congressional roll-call votes and survey research data, as well as textual analyses of party platforms and presidential speeches have determined this. But Sam Rosenfeld’s new book brings a freshness to the story. Synthesizing extensive archival material with other important sources the author leads us through the process of polarization, pointing out several important features we had not previously noticed along the way.
The principal of these is his central thesis. Polarization is, or at least was, purposive. Since the 1950s, sizable and influential groups of leaders, activists, and thinkers in both parties have made the case America should have two disciplined, programmatic, doctrinally divergent, and organizationally centralized but responsive parties locked in intense competition for power. First proposed in 1950 by the American Political Science Association’s Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, the argument was adopted by the issue-based Democratic Party activists James Q Wilson called “amateurs” in the ensuing decade and then made passionately by the Democratic National Committee and liberal Democrats in Congress, especially the Democratic Study Group, after the 1958 elections. Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign and the resultant McGovern-Fraser reforms to the nomination process intensified the polarization, as did 1970s liberal groups like Citizen Action and the Progressive Alliance. Rejecting the “me-tooism” of the country’s pragmatic consensus politics, as well as the proximate threat of Eisenhower’s “modern Republicanism,” conservatives like William F Buckley Jr, Robert A Taft, and Barry Goldwater advocated for the same kind of system. In the mid-1970s, Republican senator Jesse Helms called for the parties to give the American people “an honest choice” between two contrasting “honest philosophies” (p. 180).
This did not go unchallenged. Rosenfeld reveals many other prominent figures, including most Presidents of the era, subscribed to a proposition that party politics should provide the stability and consensus necessary to integrate a large and diverse country and bring incremental and undisruptive change. Parochial machine Democrats like George Meany of the AFL-CIO and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and patrician Republicans such as Senator Charles Percy and Governor Nelson Rockefeller began to feel vindicated, if a little unnerved, by an apparent de-alignment of the electorate. Rosenfeld’s careful and meticulously chronicled case explains how and why they lost the argument.
He might, however, make it a little too strongly. I think the “architects of our partisan era,” as Rosenfeld calls them, were less interested in the broader system and considerably more concerned with the trajectory of their own parties. They were ideologues rather than polarizers, guided by an expediency shaped by exogenous events and electoral considerations. They were committed to a set of policies rather than a conviction the country would be better-off if the opposition too was internally coherent and ideologically extreme. Rosenfeld implies he overstates in places. Cross-party cooperation for the cause—such as Republican Senator Karl Mundt’s conservative coalition with southern Democrats—was ephemeral and meager. Several covert projects to move the parties toward the British-style centralized and programmatic ideal were quickly abandoned. Still, I agree that the era’s most important and genuine effort to reorient the entire system, the Republicans’ use of race and social issues to make inroads in the South, is important enough to justify the underlying argument. The work to give, as Phyllis Schlafly put it, the American people “a choice not an echo” was sufficient for us to consider today’s polarization as something more than accidental.
A second novel feature is that elected officials were not the most important characters. The book focuses on the national committees, activists, and academics. The discussion of Kennedy and Johnson’s efforts as President to maintain a bipartisan (or, as LBJ called it, “transpartisan”) consensus while moving American policy to the left is illuminating. Rosenfeld describes it as a triumph of technocracy and political strategy, not ideology. But it is people like national chairs Paul Butler of the Democrats and Bill Brock of the Republicans, agitators Neil Staebler and Clif White, and political scientists Samuel Beer, Austin Ranney and EE Schattschneider who are presented as vital to the polarization.
The process of polarization also began earlier than thought. Scholars often view the quarter century following World War II as a period of ideological mush, but it disguises significant developments. Rosenfeld is wise to walk quickly through the 1980s, a period given extensive treatment by political scientists and historians, particularly with regard to conservatives and the Republicans. Instead, he focuses on the 1950s and 1960s as the key era and, by doing so, does us great service. The comprehensive bibliographic essay at the end of the book appropriately lists other work that focuses on party building and ideological divergence at the time, and Rosenfeld’s first four chapters are an especially useful and original contribution to the larger story of polarization.
Like most political scientists, Rosenfeld believes that the polarization has been asymmetric and the Republicans have become more ideological than the Democrats. The tone is not as accusatory as in other work, but the reader gets the sense this is bad. Rosenfeld does not, but should, countenance competing arguments, notably that the Republicans’ journey tracked the American median voter and that the social and cultural churn they exploited was set in motion by left-of-center politics.
Nevertheless, here is an important work of recent American political history, enhanced by Rosenfeld’s skillful wordsmithing and silvery prose. It is not surprising he was a journalist before joining the academy. Would that all political scientists had such apprenticeships.