The Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution investigated the issue of polarization in American politics, culminating in two volumes entitled Red and Blue Nation? edited by Pietro S. Nivola of Brookings and David W. Brady of Stanford University. Nivola presented the findings of Red and Blue Nation? in a forum which included Brady and contributing volume authors William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, and Peter Beinart, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Transcript
Pietro Nivola:
"This is undoubtedly one of the most historic and riveting elections in my lifetime. Let’s start with Senator John McCain. The comeback story here is a saga for all times, he was flat broke and he’s managed to work his way into very close range of the Republican nomination. This is the most interesting Republican maverick, I think, since Teddy Roosevelt. He’s also, in many ways, the first GOP centrist since, perhaps, Eisenhower. This is really historic stuff. On the Democratic side--two extremely worthy candidates have moved to the top. But let me say a word about Senator Obama, this is really a pretty astonishing story as well.
"A little known African American politician from the state of Illinois within reach of the presidential nomination. I can only think of one other presidential candidate from Illinois who started out with so little name recognition and actually so little experience in high office and who catapulted to the top. His name was Abraham Lincoln. Now, Senator Obama up till now has been more centrist in style and than in substance and I think Hillary is right about that. But he’s also a very smart and supple politician and I think he’s going to make adjustments. If Obama turns out to be the nominee, he’s not going to let himself be caught way out there on a limb--on the far left--that McCain will easily saw off. So, all of this actually raises an important basic question for our study and that is: have events passed us by, is the era of partisanship over, are we at the dawn, as is being said, of a post-partisan age? Trust me, we’re not.
"The differences between Democrats and Republicans run very deep on certain key issues. And the differences are not just at the level of political elites, but they actually drop all the way down to the level of the mass electorate or to a considerable segment of it. But, keep this in mind—this is the first point that I really want to emphasize—our partisan divide in 2008 pales in comparison to other historical periods in the history of this country and it pales with the partisan disputes--the intensity of partisan disputes that go on in various other democracies.
"No one in this room is going to tell me that we’re quarreling more than this country did back in the mid-19th century over slavery, for example when members of Congress caned each other, literally, caned each other and then we wound up, eventually, with a civil war. No one is even going to tell me that our partisan conflicts exceed those of the first decades of our Republic. Just remember the election of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, for example. The supporters of those two candidates hurled at slurs and insults, that as Bill Clinton colorfully put it, 'would have blistered the hairs off a dog’s back.' He was absolutely right.
"Partisanship actually gets a pretty bad rap and it’s silly to give it a bad rap. I have a lot of respect, for example, for former Senator Bob Graham of Florida. He wrote in the Post recently an article in which he spoke about the need to, quote, 'cut out the cancer of partisanship.' Well, partisanship is not a cancer, I don’t think. Parties are essential to a viable democracy. Without them you cannot organize politics…a democracy does not function without partisanship. And, the more distinct the parties are, in some ways, the better. When there was, quote, 'not a dime's worth of difference,' as we used to say, between Democratic and Republican candidates it actually had a negative effect on political participation. Voters got bored by two parties that were too much alike. With the parties more polarized, they’ve been energized, they’re engaged and they’re turning out in much bigger numbers."
William Galston:
"The issue before us is not just polarization. It’s polarization that is mapped onto the party system such that the two parties systematically become bearers of these differences on central public policy issues. And so one of the questions before us is is it a good thing or a bad thing that, of the likely nominees of the two parties, one has said publicly that we should remain in Iraq for 200 years and one has said we should get out in 16 months? Is it a good thing for the polity that the two political parities are so starkly divided on an issue of such central significance? And there are many others. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for the country that one party fervently believes that the tax cuts pay for themselves and the other does not?
"It was Richard Nixon who famously declared that we’re all Keynesians now at precisely the moment when that was ceasing to be the case…I could go on about Hegel if I wanted to, but I won’t. Now, let me just say very briefly what I prepared to say this morning. In our study, stepping back from the details, we explored four principal explanations for increased partisan polarization. If you want an easy mnemonic, you can think of them as the four 'Ds'. Divisive leaders, I will say no more about that. Divided followers, that’s the second. Demographic change is the third. And dysfunctional institutions. Those are the big four, there are others, but those are first and foremost.
"Our project suggested, analytically, that there was some truth to all of those hypotheses and scholars argued about the weight to be attached to those four. In our concluding chapter for this volume, Pietro Nivola and I focused on the dimension most amenable to intentional change: namely the role of institutions and therefore the possibilities for institutional reform. And we offered a long laundry list of suggestions concerning the following six institutional areas of American government: electoral processes, first; second: Congressional rules—how Congress does its business; third: how the president of the United States conducts him or herself and the executive branch; fourth: the judiciary; fifth: federalism, an important institutional feature of our institutions; and finally the media, which we do treat as a quasi-public and quasi governmental institution."