Andrew Wroe, University of Kent
The Culture War: Is America Polarizing?
American society is at war with itself. Arrayed on one side of the battlefield are culturally orthodox conservatives, who view the world through a morally traditionalist and religious lens. On the other side are the culturally progressive, liberal in values and secular in spirit. On the day’s most pressing cultural and social issues—abortion, contraception, stem-cell research, same-sex partnerships and marriage, the role and importance of family, drugs, immigration, even healthcare, the economy and the constitution—the two sides are engaged in a battle of ideas, unwilling, indeed unable, to compromise, each certain of the supreme rightness and morality of its own position. The fight is for the heart and soul of America. Or so the argument goes. The goal of this chapter is to strip away the hyperbolic, and frequently hysterical, language, to examine whether the United States has indeed polarized ideologically or is in a process of polarization.
The analysis is divided into two main parts. The first explores whether there could be said to be a culture war among America’s elites. Are its politicians, office seekers, opinion formers, commentators and self-appointed guardians of the public interest at war with each other? The answer is a resounding yes. On nearly every indicator, the divide between liberals and conservatives is wide and deep and getting more so. On this, nearly all academic observers are in agreement. However, there is much disagreement in the academy over the extent to which ordinary Americans could be said to be engaged in a culture war. The second part of this chapter explores the arguments of scholars who contend that the American public is polarized on cultural issues and of those who dismiss the idea that such a deep and fundamental divide exists among ordinary citizens. The chapter attempts to resolve the differences of the two sides by bringing new evidence to bear regarding the extent to which Americans feel strongly about cultural issues. In short, while there is little evidence to suggest that people’s positions on the key culture war issues are changing and becoming more polarized, those same issues are becoming more important to Americans. They are increasingly at the forefront of people’s minds, to be discussed, argued and fought over. This finding lends support to the argument that there exists a culture war at the mass level, even while other data demonstrate that issue polarization has not occurred. The chapter ends with a brief examination of the causes of polarization and what can be done about it.
ELITE POLARIZATION
There is no absolute agreement about where one should look for evidence of a culture war, nor what type or level of evidence is necessary to establish its veracity or not, but nearly all scholars agree that the facts stack heavily in favour of the proposition that America’s elites are very deeply divided and getting more so.
Polarization in Congress
The most compelling evidence of elite polarization comes from the US Congress, the highest lawmaking body in the United States. In the middle of the twentieth century, bipartisanship—where members of both parties worked together to achieve common goals and voted together on the same side of an issue—was much more common than it is today. Ideologically, there was considerable overlap between the two main parties. The Republican caucus included many members of a liberal persuasion, especially on social issues, and the Democratic caucus many conservatives. Today, however, conservative Democrats and, especially, liberal Republicans are an endangered species. The 2010 midterm elections saw Tea Party candidates oust sitting liberal Republicans in several primary contests. The few remaining liberal Republicans faced hostile criticism from within their own party and were challenged by more conservative Republicans in the run-up to the 2012 elections. For example, Indiana’s Richard Lugar, the joint-longest serving Republican in the Senate, was defeated in the GOP primary by Richard Mourdock, and Utah’s Orrin Hatch, the other joint-longest serving Senate Republican, had to fight off a tough primary challenge from former state senator Dan Liljenquist. Hatch had in 2010 seen Bob Bennett, his fellow Republican Utah senator, defeated by Tea Party favourite Mike Lee. Moreover, the upper chamber’s most liberal Republican member—three-term senator, Olympia Snowe—said in February 2012 that she would not seek reelection in November, specifically blaming the decline in bipartisanship for her decision: “I do find it frustrating that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies have become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions… I see a vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us. It is time for change in the way we govern.”[1] With Snowe’s retirement, the number of Senate Republicans supporting abortion rights can be counted on one hand. On the other side, the Democratic Party’s most conservative member, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, also announced his retirement in 2012. Other prominent moderate senators—James Jeffords, Lincoln Chaffee, Arlen Specter, Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh—had already made their exits from the chamber, replaced by more radical members. The result is a “dysfunctional and paralysed” Congress, divided by ideology and party.[2]
Figures 1 and 2 place the contemporary congressional polarization in its historical perspective. Constructed by Keith Poole and based on Poole and Rosenthal’s influential DW-Nominate scores, the figures show the positions of the most moderate and conservative Republicans (at the 10th and 90th percentiles, respectively) and moderate and liberal Democrats (again at the 10th and 90th percentiles, respectively) over time.[3] While polarized parties were the norm in the pre-second world war period, from the end of the war until the late 1960s there was a considerable ideological overlap between the parties in the House of Representatives (where ten percent of Democrats were actually more moderate than ten percent of Republicans). From the 1970s onwards, however, the parties began to diverge, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s and beyond. While the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party (measured at the 90th percentile) has not become especially more liberal, the most conservative wing of the Republican Party (90th percentile) has veered sharply to the right. Moreover, the moderate wing (measured at the 10th percentile) of the Democratic Party has grown noticeably more liberal while the GOP’s moderate wing (10th percentile) has become considerably more conservative. Today, there is no ideological overlap between the parties in the House. The gap between the parties’ moderate wings is much larger than during the bipartisan post-war years and as large as it was at the start of the twentieth century. The gap between their more radical wings has never been as large. The trends in the Senate are not quite so stark, but they are in the same direction, especially in the centre of the ideological spectrum.
[Figures 1 and 2 about here]
Extra-Legislative Elite Polarization
It is more difficult to uncover robust data on elite polarization outside the US Congress, but many academics argue the phenomenon is nonetheless real. Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican Party convention is perhaps the best quoted and most notorious—in which he claimed that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war...[in which the Clintons are trying to impose] abortion on demand..., homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat.... [which ]is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country”—but there are many other examples. Newt Gingrich’s career, from young congressman, to Speaker and his recent attempt to win the GOP presidential nomination, was built on incendiary, polarized language. His claim on 10th February 2012 that the Obama “administration is waging war on religion” is a notable example, which none of the other 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls disowned.
Polarization is also reflected in the many books of political commentators on both sides of the divide. The titles capture the contempt, anger and suspicion directed towards the other side. Liberal-leaning, pro-Democratic ones include Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right; James Carville’s We’re Right, They’re Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives; Daniel Kurtzman’s How to Win a Fight with a Conservative; Thomas Franks’ The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule; Charles Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free; Chris Hedges’ American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America; Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, and so on ad infinitum.
On the conservative side, the list includes Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government; Bill O’Reilly’s Pinheads and Patriots: Where you Stand in the Age of Obama; Ann Coulter’s Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America and her How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must); David Limbaugh’s Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama; Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President; Aaron Klein’s Red Army: The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America; and, perhaps most unpleasantly, David Freddoso’s Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy.
What is remarkable about these tomes, apart from their hyperbolic titles, is the absolute belief in the rightness of their own side and the unwavering certainty in the wrongness of the other. Indeed, there can be no room for compromise because the other side is not just wrong, but actually evil and very likely involved in a grand conspiracy against the United States of America. The “paranoid style”, first noted by Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s, is particularly prominent among, but not restricted to, conservative commentators. Obama’s presidency has generated a publishing boom on the right, with no argument as to his motives, objectives and lineage too outlandish to print.
The hysterical, compromise-free tone of the printed word is mirrored in the electronic sphere, where websites publish stories in which balance is an alien concept and conservative and liberal bloggers write in apocalyptic terms. The battle also rages on the airwaves after the Federal Communication Commission repealed its Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which had required balance in programming. Talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck attract millions of listeners each week with their particular brands of anti-liberal rhetoric and baiting. Limbaugh, for example, felt obliged in March 2012 to call Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University student and reproductive rights campaigner, a “slut” and a “prostitute” in response to her attempt to require her Jesuit university to provide contraception on its healthcare plan. Conservative viewers are also well served by cable television, particularly Fox News. While talk radio is dominated by conservative hosts and listeners, MSNBC views the world via a liberal lens and is an antidote to Fox News. Because conservatives and liberals tend to watch and listen to conservative and liberal shows, respectively, such programming has the effect of reinforcing Americans’ ideological positions.
The evidence presented above, and the view of most observers and academics, is quite clear. There is a culture war raging among America’s elites. There is, however, no similar agreement on whether the elite-level conflict is reflected at the level of ordinary Americans. In the following section, we present and critique the arguments of both sides, and bring new data to bear.
THE MASS PUBLIC
As noted in the introduction, academic opinion is divided on whether ordinary Americans are engaged in a culture war. To illuminate this debate, this section presents and critiques the work of two scholars, Morris Fiorina and Alan Abramowitz, who with their various co-authors have taken opposite positions. On the one hand, Abramowitz concludes that his “evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public.”[4] On the other, Fiorina argues “the simple truth is that no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.... The myth of the culture war rests on misinterpretation of election returns, lack of hard examination of polling data, systematic and self-serving misinterpretation by issue activists, and selective coverage by an uncritical media more concerned with news value than getting the story right.”[5]
Geographic Polarization
Abramowitz’s and Fiorina’s first dispute regards the issue of geographic polarization. The basic idea is that red (Republican) states are getting redder (more Republican) as native residents become increasingly conservative and/or liberals leave and are replaced by conservative newcomers. The process in blue (Democratic) states is the said to be the same. Contrary to many media reports and popular stereotypes, Fiorina holds that America is not clearly and deeply divided into red and blue states. Inter-state differences—in party identification, ideology, religion, beliefs and attitudes—are frequently small and often statistically insignificant. For example, large and equal numbers of red state residents and blue state residents identify themselves as ideological moderates (about 30%), while small and equal numbers identify themselves as extremely liberal (3-4%) and extremely conservative (4-5%). Moreover, the two parties were closely matched in half the states in the 2000 presidential election (defined by less than 55% of the electorate voting for either one of the two parties). The evidence is clear, claims Fiorini: American political parties may occupy the ideological poles, but the voters and states do not.[6]