That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [134]
The movies of the Marx Brothers, the funniest comedy team America has ever produced, satirize respectable but stuffy institutions such as grand opera and the medical and legal professions. In Horse Feathers their target is academia, but a song that Groucho Marx sings applies all too well to today’s Republicans and Democrats:
Your proposition may be good,
But let’s have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it.
The Great Disjunction
It would be logical to assume that America’s two main political parties, and the public officials who belong to them, have become polarized because the country itself has become polarized. It would be logical to assume that a polarized political system rests on an equally polarized society, in which, as in the Gilbert and Sullivan song,
Every boy and every gal
Who’s born into this world alive
Is either a little liberal
Or else a little conservative.
In fact, that is not the case. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, a careful 2004 study of the subject by the political scientist Morris Fiorina (with the assistance of Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), demonstrates that while the political views of Republican and Democratic activists have pulled apart, those of Americans in general have not changed much, and that the public’s views skew closer to the center of the political spectrum than the beliefs and preferences of the officials they elect. Americans are closely divided, Fiorina explains, but they are not deeply divided. “We are closely divided because many of us are ambivalent and uncertain, and consequently reluctant to make firm commitments to parties, politicians or policies,” he writes. “We divide evenly in elections or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center, while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes.”
More support for this finding comes from the way the successful presidential candidates of the last two decades presented themselves to the electorate. Each signaled during the campaign that he would govern in moderate fashion and lower the level of partisan rancor in the country, although none has had any discernible success in actually reducing partisanship. George H. W. Bush promised to preside over a “kinder, gentler” America, suggesting that his policies would be less harsh than those of his Republican predecessor, Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton styled himself a “different kind of Democrat”—that is, a less liberal figure than most other members of his party. Acknowledging the country’s distaste for the partisan warfare of the Clinton years, George W. Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” He promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative.” When the Bush years proved to be, if anything, even more divisive than the Clinton ones, the American people turned to a first-term senator who had introduced himself to them in 2004 with a speech to the Democratic convention featuring the memorable line “There isn’t a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.”
The difference between the opinions of politically active Americans and those of the electorate as a whole, between what the wider public apparently wants from its government and the kind of polarized governance that it gets, means that a serious disjunction exists between the American people and the government they elect. It means that representative government in America today does not accurately represent Americans.
Writing in the journal Hoover Digest (October 30, 2004), Fiorina, who is a political scientist