The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era

326 Pages·2017·3.38 MB·English

by  Sam Rosenfeld

The Polarizers
The Polarizers
Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era
Sam Rosenfeld
University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more
information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-22640725-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-22640739-5 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226407395.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rosenfeld, Sam (Political scientist), author.
Title: The polarizers : postwar architects of our partisan era / Sam Rosenfeld.
Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009027 | ISBN 9780226407258 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226407395 (e-
book) Subjects: LCSH: Political parties—United States. | Polarization (Social sciences)—United States.
| United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. | United States—Politics and government—
1989–.
Classification: LCC JK2265 .R67 2017 | DDC 324.273/13—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009027
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Erica
Contents
Introduction
1 The Idea of Responsible Partisanship, 1945–1952
2 Democrats and the Politics of Principle, 1952–1960
3 A Choice, Not an Echo, 1948–1964
4 Power in Movement, 1961–1968
5 The Age of Party Reform, 1968–1975
6 The Making of a Vanguard Party, 1969–1980
7 Liberal Alliance-Building for Lean Times, 1972–1980
8 Dawn of a New Party Period, 1980–2000
Conclusion: Polarization without Responsibility, 2000–2016
Bibliographic Essay
Bibliography of Archival Sources
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
In America, nationally successful politicians tend to be a practical sort. By
necessity, they tackle the political constraints of the moment pragmatically. But
on occasion, such politicians have been prompted to take the long view about
how the political system functions, and how they think the two major parties
should behave. During the middle of the twentieth century, a particular set of
questions about the parties came up again and again—questions that, from our
own age of hyperpartisanship, might seem difficult to take seriously. Should the
two major parties reflect distinctive philosophies and agendas? If the parties held
many of the same beliefs, was that good or bad for democracy? Public officials
disagreed over the answers.
In 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt turned to an aide and declared, “We
ought to have two real parties—one liberal, and the other conservative.” This
was a provocative claim at the time given the ample number of Democrats who
were more conservative than many Republicans. Roosevelt made that remark
while pursuing secret inquiries into orchestrating a top-down party realignment,
by forging an alliance with his moderate, internationalist Republican opponent
of 1940, Wendell Willkie, on behalf of a new party that would combine the
liberal wings of the existing Democratic and Republican parties. Such a
configuration would have pushed conservative Republicans and the large
minority of conservative Democrats to ally in a single new party as well. Willkie
responded favorably to the idea, lamenting the current state of affairs in which
“both parties are hybrids.”1
Fifteen years later, in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon took the opposite
tack. “It would be a great tragedy,” he told a California audience, “if we had our
two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal
line.” This would be a tragedy because “one of the attributes of our political
system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in
Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided
that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”2
Four years after that, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—then embroiled in
a conflict pitting his brother’s administration against fellow Democratic leaders
in the South over segregation—expressed a sentiment similar to Nixon’s in a
discussion with the journalist Godfrey Hodgson. “With some vehemence,”
Hodgson later recalled, Kennedy insisted that, since “the country was already
split vertically, between sections, races, and ethnic groups,” it would be
“dangerous to split it horizontally, too, between liberals and conservatives.”
Down that path “lay the rift between haves and have-nots, and the ideological
politics of Europe.”3 The jumble of crosscutting partisan and ideological
alliances helped to ensure national stability and political inclusion, he argued.
Just a few years later, South Dakota senator George McGovern disagreed with
Nixon and Kennedy, and agreed with Roosevelt and Willkie. In 1969 a journalist
asked him what he thought about “a realignment of American parties to
something a little closer to the British system, with conservatives in one party
and liberals in another.” He responded that, “on balance, it would serve the
national interest and serve the interests of our party.”4 Demonstrating that this
view itself crossed ideological lines, a fellow senator with radically different
politics, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, later concurred with McGovern by
calling for “a general realignment into Conservative and Liberal parties, by
whatever names.”5
Politicians were not the only ones with views on this subject. “It is now time,”
an Arkansas man wrote to California senator William F. Knowland in 1956, “to
get all the right-wingers on one side, and all the left-wingers on the other.”6
Many ordinary midcentury Americans agreed—but many more did not. Between
the 1930s and the 1970s, George Gallup’s polling firm periodically surveyed
Americans, posing questions like this: “It has been suggested that we give up the
present Republican and Democratic Parties and have two new parties, one for
the Liberals and one for the Conservatives. Would you favor this idea?”7 Across
four decades, those who said yes never reached even one-third of the total.
Gallup has long since stopped asking Americans that question, just as
contemporary politicians rarely opine in public about its subject. That is because
what had been a matter of speculation is now reality. By the end of the twentieth
century, Franklin Roosevelt and George McGovern and Jesse Helms had gotten
their wish, while Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy and, it seems, consistent
majorities of Americans did not. The two major American political parties are
now sorted quite clearly along ideological lines. The most liberal Republican
member of Congress has amassed a voting record that is consistently to the right
of the most conservative Democrat.8 And when politicians and the public alike
now speak out about parties and their role in politics, they are much more likely
to lament incivility, gridlock, and dysfunction. They attribute those qualities to
“polarization.”9 But polarization runs deeper than rude behavior and hostile
politicking. It’s rooted in ideology.
A slew of institutional changes have accompanied the ideological sorting of
the parties. Contemporary parties are not only more cohesive and distinct than at
midcentury. They are also more disciplined when in power, and more centralized
in their internal authority at the national level. These developments have helped
to give contemporary politics the distinctive character of high-stakes warfare.
Indeed, much of what Americans bemoan about their polarized politics, from
increasing “extremism” to seemingly pointless partisan bickering to the
breakdown of norms of cooperation and civility across the aisle, are largely
secondary consequences of one key development: the parties are now chiefly
distinguished from each other by their contrasting agendas and worldviews. The
parties’ increasing internal cohesion makes them more disciplined and
oppositional, and the forces of ideological zeal and partisan team spirit now
reinforce each other. The days when politicians and voters belonged to “hybrid”
parties and were pulled in varying directions at once are long gone.
This book shows how an ideologically defined two-party system took hold in
the United States. National politics in the middle of the twentieth century
involved historically high levels of bipartisanship in government, weak and
balkanized party structures, and partisan attachments that were defined more by
ties of tradition and communal affiliation than by policy issues and ideology. But
the dawn of the twenty-first century saw levels of partisan discipline in Congress
unseen since the Gilded Age, the emergence of robust national party
organizations, and an electorate that was sorted into two parties defined by
ideology. In this shift, American party politics gained a programmatic cast and
logic long considered alien to the country’s political traditions. That change in
the relationship between partisan and ideological politics lies at the root of
modern party polarization.
But this is not something that just happened. Individuals brought this change
about deliberately. The party system we have today is not simply the byproduct
of structural developments like mass demographic shifts or technological
change; it was a political project carried out by specific people—men and
women who had reasons to think that forging disciplined, programmatically
distinct parties would solve endemic problems they saw in American politics. A
wide variety of people, from small-town citizens to presidents, played roles in
this change. But at the heart of the emergence of our polarized party system were
ideologically driven thinkers, activists, and politicians in the middle ranks of
American politics. They were the men and women, sometimes pursuing short-
range goals, sometimes explicitly seeking long-range systemic change, who
worked over the course of decades to remake the parties in their image.
Ultimately, they succeeded.
Today’s pundits wring their hands about polarization and yearn for the
halcyon days of bipartisan comity. Yet pundits of the mid-twentieth century saw
that very bipartisanship as the key problem in American politics. They argued
that the lack of clarity between the parties stifled progress while blurring
accountability to the voters. Polarization was their solution to this problem. They
thought making parties “real” in the sense that Roosevelt had meant—unified
behind distinct policy agendas that were clear to voters—would invigorate
democracy and improve policymaking. Their ideas influenced the views of key
political actors on both the left and right in the ensuing decades.
An ascendant postwar generation of educated, issue-driven liberal activists,
thrilling to Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns and powering the stormy
tenure of national Democratic chairman Paul Butler, battled to wrest control of
Democratic Party organizations from traditional political machines. They also
fought with national party leaders they deemed overly beholden to conservative
southerners. At the same time, conservatives ranging from North Dakota senator
Karl Mundt to South Carolina politico Greg Shorey advocated a partisan
realignment that would formalize an ideological coalition of southern whites and
northern Republicans. Later, congressional and party reformers worked to make
the political system more permeable and responsive to ideological activism.
Capitalizing on those institutional reforms, left-liberal movement activists like
Michael Harrington and Heather Booth struggled in the 1970s to create a
coalition between the cultural Left and a reconstituted labor movement. At the
same time, New Right architects within the GOP such as Paul Weyrich and
Phyllis Schlafly brokered a lasting alliance of social and economic
conservatives. By effectively drawing new party lines across a wide array of
issues, those activists helped in turn to catalyze a partisan resurgence over the
last two decades of the century and beyond—a resurgence that took many
political observers utterly by surprise.
Today, the party system offers voters genuinely meaningful programmatic
choices, but the constitutional reality of separated powers all but guarantees
frequent gridlock and occasional crisis. Voters lament the ill effects of polarized
parties operating in a fragmented political system, even as their own political
behavior grows ever more predictably defined by partisan and ideological
loyalties. New issues, as they become salient, swiftly turn into grist for the mill
of partisan conflict. Think of how technical legislative provisions like, say, an
individual mandate to buy private health insurance, or obscure government
institutions like the Import-Export Bank, turned from sleepy bipartisan policies
to ideological lightning rods seemingly overnight. The system’s relentless logic