As the parties’ agendas have diverged, so, too, have the parties’ views of each other. Earlier I mentioned the “feelings thermometer” results showing sharp drops in evaluations of the opposing party. That data, if anything, understates the change. Politics is driven by the most committed activists with the most intense opinions. And more telling than the drop in average assessments of the other party is the rise in panicked assessments of the other party. In 2014, Pew found that 37 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats viewed the other party as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.” By 2016, that was up to 45 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats.24
But that, too, makes perfect sense: if you’re a Republican who believes the government spends too much on social programs, is too soft on unauthorized immigrants, and is too captured by radical environmentalists, the Democratic Party really has become scarier to you. If your concern with Democratic governance hasn’t risen over the past few decades, you haven’t been paying attention.
The question isn’t why voters have become more reliably partisan as the parties have become more obviously different. Of course they did. It’s why the parties have become so different.
That’s a story, as so many are in American life, that revolves around race.
I. In her remarkable history of congressional violence, The Field of Blood, historian Joanne Freeman found that “between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds.” And she assures me this is a substantial undercount.
II. It would be reasonable to keep this warning in mind when you read the solutions found in the concluding chapter of this book.
III. It’s important to note that not all political scientists agreed with this argument. J. Austin Ranney, for instance, published a prophetic dissent, arguing that “unified, disciplined and responsible parties are appropriate only to a government which seeks to locate full public power in the hands of popular majorities.” America’s political system, by contrast, was built to frustrate political majorities and required constant compromise. For that sort of system, Ranney said, polarized parties were “quite inappropriate.” He was right.
IV. This speaks to perhaps the biggest chicken-or-the-egg question in the polarization literature: Are political elites polarizing and the public is simply following along? Is the public polarizing and political elites are responding? My synthesis, which will become clearer over the course of the book, is that everyone engaged in American politics is subject to the broader forces of polarization. The more engaged you are, the more polarized you become. So yes, political elites are polarizing more and faster than the public at large, but as the public tunes in, it becomes more polarized, too. And since politicians are most responsive to the part of the public that is most polarized, we’re all living in a hyper-polarized system and being faced with polarizing choices, whatever our personal level of polarization.
V. Like the now-controversial individual mandate—more on that later.
Chapter 2 The Dixiecrat Dilemma
On Wednesday, August 28, 1957, during the Senate’s consideration of a watered-down civil rights bill, Strom Thurmond walked onto the Senate floor and kicked off the most famous filibuster in American history. He began by reading the election statutes of all forty-eight states. Then he read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, George Washington’s farewell address, and much else besides. He got one bathroom break, when Barry Goldwater took the floor on his behalf. He ate cold sirloin steak and pumpernickel bread his wife had packed him and sucked on throat lozenges. At times, his voice became too weak to hear. He finished twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes later by saying he intended to vote against the legislation. His annoyed and exhausted colleagues were not surprised.
Thurmond’s filibuster was the longest in American history. It fills ninety-six pages in the Congressional Record. It was also one of the least effective. As Joseph Crespino recounts in Strom Thurmond’s America, southern senators had spent months gutting the bill. They killed section 3, which permitted the attorney general to bring lawsuits against discrimination in public areas. They kneecapped the voting-rights provisions by guaranteeing a jury trial in cases of voter obstruction; no southern jury would ever convict a white election official for stopping African Americans from voting. Thurmond himself celebrated the achievements. He said they’d pulled “the most venomous teeth from the so-called civil rights bill,” and he praised Democratic senators Richard Russell and Lyndon Johnson, the leaders of the effort, for “a magnificent job.” Then he decided to make their job harder.
The deal Russell and Johnson had cut was that if Republicans and moderate Democrats allowed them to weaken the legislation, they would persuade their fellow southerners to permit it to pass. In the clubby Senate of the 1950s, word was bond. Keeping your end of the deal was necessary to being able to make any future pacts. If southerners killed the bill, a Johnson staffer warned, the South could lose “not only the ability to have any impact on civil rights legislation but any influence it has in Congress at all.” So the southern senators agreed: there would be no filibuster. Time magazine reported that Thurmond was “among the first to agree with the non-filibuster decision.”1
But then the telegrams and the letters from outraged segregationists began. Thurmond asked Russell to reconsider an organized filibuster. Russell refused. So Thurmond filibustered on his own. He didn’t imperil the bill, but he made his fellow southerners look bad. They were keeping quiet in order to sustain segregation. He went loud to further his career. He made it seem like he was the only senator with the courage to speak out and defend the South’s racial hierarchy. “Oh God, the venomous hatred of his Southern colleagues,” recalled an aide to Johnson. The courtly Russell condemned Thurmond’s filibuster as an act of “personal political aggrandizement.” The bill passed over Thurmond’s objections.
The solitary, arguably counterproductive stand against the civil rights bill is Thurmond’s most famous filibuster, but not his most consequential. That came in 1965, after President Johnson won reelection in a landslide and Democrats managed a remarkable two-thirds majority in the Senate. Democrats saw an opportunity to shore themselves up for decades by eliminating the Taft-Hartley provision that permits state right-to-work laws, which cripple organized labor’s ability to unionize workplaces. If the bill passed, unions, freed from their most binding constraint, could organize more workers and muster more votes for Democrats.
It was supposed to be easy. With sixty-eight Democrats in the Senate, everything was supposed to be easy. But Thurmond led a group of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in a business-backed filibuster of the legislation. That time, his filibuster lasted barely more than five hours. But then, it didn’t have to be any longer. Unlike Thurmond’s filibuster of the civil rights bill, this time he had allies—enough of them to kill legislation that otherwise would have passed. That filibuster drove a sharp nail deep into labor’s coffin—and weakened the Democratic Party.
Thurmond typically received a zero on the Americans for Democratic Action scorecard, which is a rough measure of how liberal a senator is. He was Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s second most reliable ally in the Senate. He was one of Goldwater’s closest confederates. Thurmond wasn’t just a conservative on race. As his antilabor filibuster suggests, he was a conservative on everything. Crespino argues, convincingly, that Thurmond should be seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. “In 1948, when Goldwater was still a year away from running for the Phoenix City council and Reagan was still an actor, Thurmond was a presidential candidate denouncing federal meddling in private business, the growing socialist impulse in American politics, and the dangers of statism,” he writes. But until a few months prior to that 1965 filibuster, Thurmond had been a Democrat. He was elected to the Senate as a Democrat in 1954, and he wouldn’t switch to the Republican Party until 1964.