How did Americans become politically divided on culture war topics like guns, abortion, women’s role, gay rights, and environmentalism? The common story is that it took polarizers from the top: politicians and activists associated with each party moved the public to their respective sides. But Neil O’Brian finds that the culture war followed America’s racial realignment because racial attitudes were always tied to other cultural issue views in the American public, well before they were emphasized by the parties. Once the parties divided on race, they brought culturally liberal voters to the Democrats and culturally conservative voters to the Republicans. And that combination of issue attitudes and alignments largely mirrors patterns across the democratic world.
Guest: Neil O’Brian, University of Oregon
Study: Roots of Polarization
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How racial realignment ignited the culture war, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman.
How did Americans become politically divided on culture war topics like guns, abortion, women’s role, gay rights, and environmentalism? The common story is that it took polarizers from the top. Politicians and activists associated with each party moved the public to their respective sides, but the initial mover in the US was racial politics. Civil rights actions of the Democratic Party changed the party coalitions.
This week I talked to Neil O’Brien of the University of Oregon about his new Chicago book, Roots of Polarization. He finds that America’s racial realignment is the root of today’s polarization over cultural war issues, but that’s because racial attitudes were always tied to other cultural issue views in the American public well before they were emphasized by the parties. Once the parties divided on race, they brought either culturally liberal or culturally conservative constituents with them, and that combination of issue attitudes and constituencies largely mirrors patterns across the democratic world.
This is a thoughtful book that will change how you see American political evolution, tying together a lot of historical loose ends. I think you’ll enjoy our wide-ranging conversation.
So tell us about the biggest findings and takeaways from Roots of Polarization.
Neil O’Brian: So the big question that I’m trying to answer to that other academics and journalists and folks sitting around the dinner table have talked about is why did the parties, which once held overlapping and diverse views or no views on issues like abortion, gun control or civil rights, become so polarized by these issues in the latter part of the 20th century?
And perhaps your listeners know this, but just as a little bit of primer, but going back to the 1950s or 1960s, the national parties had overlapping views on issues of civil rights or no views on abortion or gun control, and my central argument is that the parties when they divided by civil rights in the 1960s, that this propelled the parties to divide on issues like abortion or gun control when they became salient in the 1970s and the 1980s.
And the stylized fact that underpins this argument is that if you look at public opinion, not just today or in the 1980s, but going back to the first polls in the 1930s and 1940s, people who are more conservative on issues of civil rights or race are also more conservative on issues like abortion or gun control.
And so when, for example, you have the South, the white South move from the Democratic to the Republican Party initially on account of civil rights, they’re also quietly bringing their conservative issue attitudes on abortion or gun control with them. And so when the issues become salient in the 1970s, you have this ascendant conservative wing that’s rising in the party that shapes or constrains the positions the parties can take on those issues.
Matt Grossmann: So yeah, you go back a long way and find that attitudes about guns, abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, environmentalism, are all linked really before the parties were emphasizing them very much and before the parties took clear positions on that. So tell us about that journey. How did you find that? What’s the evidence for it and how should we interpret it?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so in terms of the public opinion data, I spent a ton of time going through these archives at the Roper Center, or there’s the Louis Harris data verse at UNC, just going through these old surveys, looking for questions on issues of women’s rights or abortion or gun control, and slowly piecing those together. And that was a lot of my, I think, my grad school career was perusing those data verses, but then matching that up and looking at what the national parties thought on these issues.
A first cut point that a lot of political scientists use and I use in the book is just looking at the positions they take in the National Party platform. So for example, abortion in 1976 shows up in both the Democratic and the Republican Party platform for the first time, and they’re actually, although they’ve sorted in the way that you might expect, the Republicans are maybe an inch to the right, and Democrats are an inch to the left, they’re pretty milquetoast views and kind of tracking that over time is one common way and a way that I use in the book.
But then I also supplement that with mainly newspaper archives at the national or state level, looking around and seeing, is it the case that even if the parties haven’t stated the formal position, are leading candidates or local candidates talking about these issues in some consistent way? And blending that into the book and paint this portrait of, you see this cluster of public opinion at the mass level before you see what we would call elites, meaning politicians, media figures, taking the consistently divergent positions that are common today.
Matt Grossmann: So that’s inconsistent with some of our current commonly held view that the parties at the elite level polarize and then they bring the masses along with them, but you do track the history of how this got mapped onto the partisan divide, and you do that by looking at the candidates that first took clear positions on racial issues and then once the parties did. So what do you find there?
Neil O’Brian:Yeah, so I think that’s right. A really common view in political science is that public opinion is really a function of voters kind of following along to the signals that are given out by elites. Often elites are leaders of the parties, although sometimes it includes leading activists or media figures. And then those elite divides then trickle down to the mass public.
And the argument that I make in the book is that, look, that absolutely is happening, but let’s think about it when these issues are really nascent in the political system, when it’s not clear. Abortion is becoming politically salient, gun control is becoming very politically salient, and it’s not clear what is “the right position” as you might have today. And so politicians are really churning and trying to figure out what’s going to appeal to my constituents or what is going to appeal to my prospective constituents and give me an upper hand in a primary election or give an upper hand in the general election.
So in chapter two, I walk through some formative elections, one of them being the 1976 primary election, which I think is absolutely fascinating because here you have Gerald Ford, the incumbent Republican president who is in many ways a moderate Republican that’s probably representative of the dominant national party that had, Republican Party, that had been dominant over much of the mid-century United States. And then he’s being challenged, of course, by Ronald Reagan, who at the time is this insurgent conservative.
What Reagan is doing is he’s trying to gain an upper hand by appealing to these conservative Republicans that had started entering the Republican Party, racially conservative Republicans that had started entering the Republican Party first via Goldwater, and then it accelerates under Nixon. But what he’s realizing is this conservative wing can be appealed to, not just by issues of race, but also conservative positions on abortion or the equal rights amendment. And then you have Gerald Ford realizing that he might get outflanked on the right as this conservative wing is growing, and it propels forward probably uncomfortably so move to the right to try and fend off Reagan’s challenge, which he ultimately does by a very, very narrow margin.
And so then that process develops where candidates very much learn what’s successful by looking at other races either at the national or state level, and that grows over the course of the following decades.
Matt Grossmann: So what’s the role of ideology or ideological self-identification in your story? Because it does also seem consistent with, I guess, the common Republican storyline, which is there were a bunch of mismatched people, they were conservatives, but they kept voting Democrat, and that was the opportunity that the conservative movement and the National Republican Party decided to take on. And your story says, “Yeah, they were there for the taking.”
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple, let me see, there’s a couple layers to that question. So one, it’s certainly the case. So one thing that’s going on at the time is the Republican Party is really the minority party and almost a permanent minority party. They barely hold the House of Representatives between the New Deal and the 1990s, and conservatives, even though you had Dwight Eisenhower, and then of course Richard Nixon, conservatives feel like both of those Republicans aren’t sufficiently conservative. And so there’s this very much feeling of Republicans and especially conservative Republicans are in the minority.
And so then the question is how do you break into and beat Democrats at the national stage? And something that’s swirling around activist circle and among what we might call public intellectuals is this idea that a lot of the folks who consider themselves conservative in the era aren’t necessarily conservative on the economic dimension. I favor less government intervention in economy. They’re conservative on issues of race, and then they become conservative on the change in cultural scene that emerges in the sixties and seventies around gay rights or women’s rights and so on.
And so that’s why the racial realignment is such an inroad into the Democratic coalition because it breaks off or at least makes the conservative wing of the Democratic Party up for grabs, and that offers an inroads for Goldwater or Nixon in the 1960s. But there’s also a little bit of a dilemma there, which is that, for example, if you think of Southern Democrats who are very much uncomfortable being in the Democratic Party that’s moving to the left on civil rights, they also grew up as staunch Democrats and really didn’t like the Republican Party and are probably maybe what we call liberal or at least populist on economic issues and aren’t going to go vote for Republicans on economic issues alone.
And so what you see Nixon do and Ford do and Reagan do in these formative elections is, well, how can we finish off the racial realignment? How can we get this block of conservative Democrats to be locked into the Republican Party? And what they realized either by accident or by polls and trial and error, is that this conservative wing of the Democratic Party isn’t just conservative on race, isn’t just conservative on Vietnam, they’re also very conservative on abortion, DERA, gun control. And by taking conservative positions on those issues, they can finish the job that was started by the racial realignment.
Matt Grossmann: So you argue that elites were mostly followers rather than drivers of the sort of latter parts of the process. Once they divided on race, then there were sort of straightforward incentives from there, but this book will make historians happier than most political science books. You do go through, the particular people who are making these actions, try to figure out why they were making them. So did they really know what would happen and was anyone trying to make something different happen?
Neil O’Brian: I don’t know if I would call it straightforward, and there were certain some resistance and folks trying different things. But to go back to Nixon in ’72 is this really formative election, Nixon barely wins in 1968, and he’s really worried about if George Wallace voters go back to the Democratic Party, that’s probably not going to be good for his campaign because he just barely beats Hubert Humphrey, and he’s looking to expand the Republican coalition. And you go to the left, or you do go to the right, and-
Do you go to the left or do you do go to the right? And the National Republican Party, including Nixon, if you look back to his 1960 campaign, for example, is looking really to expand the Republican Party by attacking to the left, adhering to the new deal consensus or attacking to the left on civil rights, which Nixon did in 1960. But because you have this racial realignment, you have in 1964, white racial liberals or African-Americans who perhaps were somewhat up for grabs in the 1950s or the early 1960s are taken off the table. At the same time, the racial realignment, going back to the prior question, had split the Democratic Party down the middle. And so it was this strategy of, I don’t know if politicians necessarily liked it, but it did offer a clear way forward of these are the voters up for grabs and we need to find tools to go pursue them.
I think one part of the story here that’s lost in terms of were politicians or activists or these other elite actors happy about it, or were they resistant, is, one, politicians themselves, and you see this in the archives a lot, themselves aren’t terribly, in most cases, ideological folks. Will take the positions that they think will win them votes and are quite flexible in that way. Interest groups are, I think this is kind of lost a little bit, are also flexible, but in a little bit of a different way. They often have a set of positions or a single position that they care deeply about, but they’re kind of, and you saw this in the 1960s and 1970s, they’re indifferent to which party they’ll join. So again, thinking that parties don’t have clear positions, an issue like abortion has just become salient and they’re happy to join either party and express that they would like to join either party. Or in some very prominent cases were reluctant to join the party that they ended up joining.
So just one example being leading figures of the religious right who we think is so tied to the Republican Party today, it’s so essential for pushing the Republican Party to the right, many of them would’ve preferred to join the Democratic Party because they thought the Democrats were just more organized. They viewed Republicans as these disorganized minority party folks that often lost elections. And so the fact they got cordoned off into the Republican Party was more of a broader sea change than active choices that they made. But just going back to the original question of politicians following voters, the core point is that in these periods of change, we often think of politicians as price makers, but in these periods of change, they’re often price takers. They’re trying to figure things out, they’re trying to win elections and they’ll follow the votes. And then when the system calcifies and becomes clear, that’s when I think you have a lot more of parties driving mass opinion than vice versa. But that initial phase is really the cyclical process that plays out over these formative elections that then becomes institutionalized, I would say.
Matt Grossmann: So one of the most interesting parts of your book is the cross national piece where you’re able to show that these cultural issue attitudes were linked across most democracies. And it is interesting in today’s world where the US is seeming kind of less exceptional in kind of the nature of the culture war. We used to talk about it as a more exceptional American story because of America’s religious history and America’s, especially America’s racial history. But this makes it seem a little bit more inevitable that it would also come to look like European culture war debates as well, that this was about the linkage of economic policy with cultural policy on the left and the right. How much is the US exceptional in this case, and is it just exceptional in how elites responded, or is the public different in some way?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think about this from a couple different angles. So the one point in the book where I look at how racial views are tied with views around gay rights or abortion or women’s rights across different national contexts is to make this point exactly that this cluster of opinion that we see in the contemporary United States isn’t just exclusive to the contemporary United States. If you go back decades, you see that as well. It seems like the party system caught up with public opinion on that dimension. But then if you look across many different national contexts, you see a similar cluster of attitudes. So yeah, suggesting that it’s not something specific to the United States that we have these parties that are fighting over this group of issues, because if you look at party systems as well across many different contexts, parties that are more conservative on and more hostile to ethnic minorities tend to be more conservative on issues with the environment, gay rights and abortion as well. And so I think that’s right, that it’s not an exceptional case.
And so the point I try and hit home in the book is that, yeah, when the national parties here split on civil rights, just like in many other parts of the world where you saw that happen, you get these clusters of opinion on the polls as well. And that’s different than parties that are divided on economic issues. If you look at party platforms across Western Europe, parties that are really conservative on economic issues hold cross-cutting views on a suite of cultural issues, and same with economically liberal parties. But if you look at racially conservative parties, they tend to be conservative on this whole other host of cultural views. And liberal parties tend to be much more liberal on a whole host of cultural views. So there is something broader happening that’s outside of just United States. And so thinking about, well, what role then do activists or politicians have in shaping this process, I think is an important implication or consequence of understanding that trend.
Matt Grossmann: So this might be beyond the scope a little bit, but it is interesting that one story we tell is that parties are able to assemble coalitions of different issue positions. And so you’re pushing back against that a little bit in at least this group of issues. But there’s the broader question of why we ended up with the left and the right that we do when economic policy attitudes were not necessarily grouped with this whole group of cultural attitudes. But I guess I wonder if that leaves it more open than it should given your international data. Yes, there are parties that take divergent positions, but we’ve ended up with a pretty similar left and right around the world despite that.
Neil O’Brian: Yeah. So I think that’s what makes this racial axis so constraining because you’re right, and other folks have made this point of, if you look at the relationship at the mass level between economic views and abortion attitudes in the ’70s or ’80s, there’s no relationship. And perhaps the parties could have had flexibility in which way they could go. So in a pre racial realignment party system, it’s entirely plausible, and folks have made this point, that the Republican Party would be the more what we would call pro-choice party, and the Democrats possibly could have been a little bit more of the pro-life party. But by introducing that racial axis, because public opinion is bound along that racial axis, it creates a set of constraints that would’ve been absent in that racial realignment. So I think you’re absolutely right. If the dominant cleavage is economic issues and the parties are cross-cutting on racial issues, it’s probably a little bit more open-ended. Introducing that racial cleavage, I argue, closes the space that the parties can compete on or sets that space a little bit more firmly.
Matt Grossmann: So talk a little bit about the methods behind your book and your integration of qualitative and quantitative research because we haven’t had a lot of proper names so far, but I know that there are in your book and you spent some time in archive. So what role does that play in your story?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think when I was first thinking about this project and looking at some of this older public opinion and thinking about what was happening with interest groups or politicians, not in the 2000s, but in the 1970s when they were first grappling over these issues, what were they talking about? How did they see the political landscape and what were the opportunities or constraints facing them? And that pushed me to go to a variety of archives largely on the right. So for example, went to Ford’s presidential library, parts of Reagan’s presidential library, also a series of activists that were very prominent in what’s called the early pro-life movement, or activists that were very prominent in what is called the religious right movement to understand how they viewed the political system. And to me that was important because, for example, there’s really great scholarship that argues interest groups are very essential to pushing the parties apart on these issues.
But I had a question of, well, how do, especially a new interest group, choose to enter one party over another? Catherine Carmel has a piece in studies where she frames it as understanding how interest groups enter one party over the other rather than being a solution is another side of the puzzle. And I was sort of thinking of how do these pro-life activists end up in the Republican Party, given many of them were otherwise liberal democrats and wanted to align with the Democratic Party, and they just kind of ran into a wall and found a lot more friends over on the Republican side. And understanding that process and what was happening on the ground was really important to me. And also I just found it fascinating. And so that pushed me to go into archives to sort of contextualize what’s happening with, at the mass level, with what’s happening at a more fine grain level among activists and politicians at the time.
Matt Grossmann: So I want to get a little bit more to where your story differs from other conventional stories. So I guess if I think of the canonical version of this, of how we started with the racial realignment and got to a broader culture war, there’s a lot more about protest movements, about the expansion of civil rights from African-Americans to other social groups, about the rise of activism, and especially how all of this was covered by the media. So where are you similar to and different from that story?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think one way is to, again, maybe build off the answer I just gave, is thinking of interest groups, social movements, activists, whatever you want to call them, are absolutely essential to the story. But I think there’s been an under development of understanding. For example, you have the pro-choice movement or the pro-life movement end up in the respective parties and not fully understanding how they ended up in those respective parties. And then once they’re there, they play this very important role that’s been well documented.
And I think my divergence is understanding what pushed them one way versus the other. Was it a choice or was it a reaction to opinion on the ground? And so maybe one anecdote that speaks to this, there’s this woman, Marjory Mecklenburg, who founds one of the earliest and most prominent what we would call pro-life groups. And she’s otherwise a Liberal Democrat. And in her notes she’s thinking, who am I going to get to join this movement? And she thinks it’s going to be women’s rights activists and Vietnam peace activists that are going to be the foot soldiers for this social movement. And she really struggles to build that coalition where a lot of the support ends up being and grows is on what we might call the political right. And she eventually kind of distance herself or gets pushed out of that pro-life movement. So I think that’s one really key difference.
I think the other key difference, and maybe this is just reiterating this in a different way, is to say, “Yes, the Civil Rights Movement then, or the Women’s Rights Movement is an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement.” That’s absolutely right, but that cluster of interests at the mezzo level reflects a cluster of attitudes that existed at the mass level for a long time. And so it’s really thinking of this as an outgrowth of opinion on the ground is rather than being abstracted from it, or from moving in the opposite direction.
Matt Grossmann: So the international data got me thinking about how central race was to this story. On the one hand, that’s the main contribution is that this was started by the racial realignment, but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem inevitable. It seems like in other countries with less of a Black-white racial history, it could have been started by something to do with religion or immigration, and any of those things would have brought along the other issues; what do you think?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think a core point is you have this cluster of attitudes, and then the racial realignment really helps you understand how this cluster of issue attitudes that exist in the mass public works its way into the party system. And so similarly, if you look at just party positions across Europe, as I do in the book, you do see this divide where across party systems, parties that are more conservative on race are also what we would call more conservative on abortions, or guns, or gay rights. And you see that across the globe.
I think coming back to the United States case, I think one version of this question is, so what happened is the parties split on civil rights and then all these other things fall into line, what if they split on abortion first? Or what if they split on gun control first? And I think really what makes race central to the story in the United States at least, is to have this cascading effect, to have this realignment, you need to have some issue that a large number of people care intensely about, forces them to move between parties, and civil rights fits the bill.
And in the book I track Gallup data of Gallup asks people, “What do you think is the most important issue in the U.S. right now?” And in the early 1960s, civil rights, I think it’s 70% of respondents said civil rights is the most important issue to them. If you look at most important issues for abortion, at the time that the book was in press and the data set I was using was a little bit before Dobbs, but the pre-Dobbs max out for abortion was 3%. So to think if the party split on abortion first, is it going to create this huge shift of voters that’s going to create this cascading effect? I argue that it wouldn’t, or even in context of Dobbs, I think in terms of the percent of people saying abortion was the most important issue maxed out right after Dobbs, and it was just 8%.
And we often think of abortion, and it is this incredibly important issue in politics, but race in U.S. politics, it’s just been so, so salient and so divisive in ways that maybe other issues haven’t been is one reason why we think of race as being at the center of the story.
Now, thinking about that in context of other countries, I think certainly the contours of the racial story are unique to the U.S. But in Australia or Canada, the ethnic divisions aren’t Black-white, it’s fights over Aboriginal rights or lands, or I use the case of Sweden, or you could think of other parts in Western Europe where it’s really around massive changes to immigration and trying to incorporate a multiracial democracy in that sense. And so I do think you see those patterns, not exactly as you see in the United States, but you do see it in other parts of the globe and thinking about similar processes that play out in those contexts as well. But there’s certainly differences on the ground.
Matt Grossmann: So let me ask it in the reverse direction a little bit, and isn’t this all about race, that we’ve grouped… some of these aren’t traditionally necessarily linked like environmentalism, but a lot of them are just the product of the fact that discrimination against one group is going to be correlated with discrimination against all other minority groups, or lots of other minority groups. And a lot of the change that happened here wasn’t just people with different attitudes moving, but an actual group change, the fact that African-Americans became a key constituency in the Democratic Party, and that made the Democratic coalition untenable. So what about that more race-centric story?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think you could think, and I guess I’m a little bit fluid about this in the book, of thinking about this maybe as prejudices more generally versus policy. And I would say those two correspond with each other. But I think you’re absolutely right. And in the process of writing this book, and I would say this describes my general view today, is I just think people are incredibly groupie, and they tend to the policies that help the in-group, whether that’s their own group or another group that they like, and they tend to dislike policies that help the out-group or help groups of people that they don’t like.
So I think that’s exactly right. And while it has a different flavor, I think it’s consistent with the patterns and trends that you see and we would expect similar outcomes.
Matt Grossmann: So one sort of left unanswered question in this book is kind of why these attitudes were all put together in the first place. So we sort of talked about one potential explanation, which is that these are really group-based attitudes, but some of the other attitudes that are linked, like environmentalism, might suggest a different set of things driving the values. In political behavior we often talk about core values like egalitarianism and social traditionalism as being associated with these kinds of policy views. There’s even been studies that try to relate genetic information to attitudes that do find that these kinds of cultural issue attitudes are, for example, more commonly shared between identical twins than other twins.
So yeah, I know you don’t have to have a firm position on that, but if that’s the starting point here, why are these issues grouped together, and does that matter for our interpretation?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think the core… That’s a great question that I’ve grappled with. I think that the core contribution is making this point that this cluster of attitudes is pre-political, pre-political in the sense that it existed at the mass level before you see it in elite circles. And that has this really important contribution for understanding how parties and the mass public interact.
But I think it does leave open this question of, because elite-driven explanations seem so parsimonious, it’s like, “Well, what then is grouping these things together?”
So in the book, I do spend some time talking about exactly these things, and using some of this literature that you mentioned, that it is core values, or it is egalitarianism, or it is traditionalism that binds these things together. It’s not a terribly radical move to say discrimination towards one group is probably going to just lead to discrimination or prejudice towards other out-groups. And I think that’s exactly what’s going on.
And in fact, in the book I talk, I use some of the archival research of folks who are talking on the religious right, who are talking very much in… kind of are proof points of these academic theories and articles that emerge later. It’s very, very driven by, “Our society is changing, our values are slipping away. This is happening around race, it’s happening around reproductive rights, it’s happening around gay rights, and we need to stop it.” And so thinking of that as one core organizing principle, I think is a useful way to think about it. And I think you’re absolutely right to suggest that is one explanation.
I think another explanation is, again, I guess this overlaps with the view of groups, but it’s just very group-based, thinking about race as a very first-order group division in U.S. political history, people who are prejudice towards people of color are then going to dislike policies that they think are going to help people of color, and vice versa. And I think that’s another really core way to understand why some of these things group together, especially when you think about connections between race and some of the economic issues that became tightly interlinked over the course of the New Deal and our contemporary politics.
Matt Grossmann: Is this a story about Americans or white people? So because even today there’s more diversity within the Black, and Hispanic, and Asian American communities around these issue positions, even among democratic identifiers. So there’s been less sorting, but obviously it’s an open question with the last couple of elections, how long that will last. So it seems pretty important to figure out if this is just something that occurred among whites, or if it’s just a delayed reaction among other groups.
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think especially when you think about it in terms of fights in the party system and thinking about Paul Farmer’s work, for example, because African-Americans are locked into the Democratic Party, a lot of the party competition that ensues is over these white swing-voters maybe. And one way to conceptualize that is conservative white southern Democrats or conservative Catholic Democrats in the Northeast. And so I think at least the initial part of the story is very much about the fights over these white constituencies.
A couple other points. One, you see this cluster of attitudes, it’s harder to measure and think about a little bit, but you see this similar cluster of attitudes by the 1970s and 1980s among African-Americans. And then thinking about it today, you make a good point of in this incredibly polarizing era around race, the parties have become more racially… or the Republican Party become more racially diverse.
And I forgot who said it, I think that the saying was the party’s… “Conflict has become more polarized around race, but less polarized by race.” And it’s not quite clear how to think about that in context of broader trends, but there’s always going to be in-groups and out-groups, and politicians are going to seize on that. And it’s not always between white and non-white as we see in the last several cycles.
Matt Grossmann: So you treat this as people have overall positions on these issues and they move their way into the political parties, but viewed over this long of a period it certainly seems like the nation as a whole has moved dramatically leftward on this whole series of issues.
If you look at people’s attitudes toward just interracial marriage, for example, huge moves over this period that you’re talking about, and they’re mirrored in lots of other racial attitudes, lots of gender attitudes, to some extent gay rights attitudes, and even environmentalism you are seeing moves leftward from the 1960s, although bumpy moves.
So what does that mean for your story? Are we polarizing over what direction to take or just the sort of speed of change?
Neil O’Brian: Oh yeah, that’s a good question and that I’ve thought about. So it is the case… So I think one way to answer this question is attitudes around race and immigration have just changed remarkably in the last 10 or 15 years. And I think as you know, what’s especially remarkable is that that seems to be almost entirely around the left. The left has moved much further… or among Democrats. Democrats have moved much further left on immigration or on questions of racial equality.
And it hasn’t happened as much on the right. So Dan Hopkins and some co-authors, I think that the sides of Babrick and Tesler set of articles on this have shown that immigration attitudes or racial attitudes among Trump voters have remained quite stable, and themselves have maybe in some periods, at least into the early 2020s, have ticked left a little bit. And so it’s hard to quite understand that other than to say, I think what we’ve seen in the last 15 years has been incredibly… has been remarkable in many ways, and to understand the consequences of that is a little bit of an open-ended question.
I think the rapid move to the left on race or immigration in the early 2010s, I think does contextualize the rise of Donald Trump. On the other hand, Donald Trump is using a playbook that had been used by Republicans for decades to expand the coalition and to win the primary, appealing to these culturally-conservative Democrats in the general election, and appealing to the conservative wing of the GOP instead of using abortion as much as just using issues like immigration a lot more.
So that’s a great question. I don’t have a full answer for you other than it’s just absolutely been a remarkable transformation, and we’ll see what continues to happen.
Matt Grossmann: So one thing that is unique about the American system is the strictness of the two-party system. And as you mentioned, there are in other places, parties that can arise with an anti-immigration position, but have very economically-liberal positions and not necessarily take positions across the whole spectrum. And similarly on the other side, like green parties take positions on some cultural issues but not necessarily bring along the rest of the left with them. So how unique does the two-party system make this pattern in the U.S.?
Neil O’Brian: So I think going back to the earlier question is you see this pattern on left-right along this racial axis in a lot of different countries. So it’s not unique in that dimension. But if you think for example of Sweden, which for a long time there was a series of articles of why isn’t there a right-wing populist party in Sweden? In the 2010s, you see the rise of the Sweden Democrats in reaction to rapid increases in immigration in the country.
And in that case, it’s the formation of a new party to absorb this anti-immigrant sentiment, where in the United States that anti-immigrant sentiment needs to be absorbed by really one of the two major parties that have just been so stable over the last 150 years.
One interesting little part of the story, that going back to the 1970s is leaders of the new right or the religious right that eventually worked their way into the Republican Party, even if they didn’t want to, really thought that they were going to form their own new third party led by George Wallace or Ronald Reagan that would host this suite of cultural issues, and that just fizzled out and they became Republicans.
And so I do think the two-party system in a way puts a set of constraints on how it adapts to these changes. But I think a lot of the patterns that you see are consistent, whether it’s a two-party system or a multi-party system, at least if you’re looking at policy positions along this racial axis.
Matt Grossmann: So I know we want to reach the broadest audience with the Roots of Polarization title, but it will grab some people as very different than the story we normally tell that polarization is the fault of members of Congress and party leaders moving apart.
So I guess I want to know how much you want to push that side. One story really is like everything else, we looked to the 1950s as the beginning just because when we had a lot of studies and survey data, but actually it was an extremely abnormal period and polarization should be considered the norm. But on the other hand, lots of people are looking to, say things happening at the elite level, and seeing things really different than they have been in the past and not wanting to kind of see that as just a product of vote preferences. So how far should we take this view?
Neil O’Brian: For sure, elites are fanning polarization. I don’t contend with that. But also thinking about the constraints that exist in the party system, there have been instances where you see politicians try and work across the aisle and they really struggle. Immigration is a great example of that.
As recently as the mid-2010s, you had leading figures in the conservative media, leading Republican donors, leading Republican politicians, try to move to the left on immigration because they think, “We need to win the Latino vote or else we’re just going to continue to lose elections.” And those efforts at the top really ran into this wall.
And of course you have 2016 where instead of the Republican Party packing leftward, you have the leading Republican candidate and then those that are campaigning against him, including Marco Rubio, who was leading immigration reform just a few years later, moving to the right and trying to chase conservative voters on immigration. Why? Because in this case, the Republican Primary is quite, quite conservative on immigration, had been for a long time, and Trump was able to exploit that. And that’s a very powerful force that’s hard to undo.
Matt Grossmann: So why did this take so long? We’re condensing a lot of history here, but the parties were divided on race from the late-1960s at least. And some of the religious-oriented cultural war issues really didn’t reach their prime until the late-80s, early-90s. We’ve talked about the immigration story as reaching its prime in 2010s. So if all these issues were bundled together and once you made one position, you got the whole bundle, why did this take so long?
Neil O’Brian: Yeah, so I think change takes time. I think a certain amount of this happens by turnover in Congress where an older generation that operated differently retires or is slowly unceded. And so these processes take time to build up.
I think one thing about immigration that makes it so [inaudible 00:43:18]… two, making two points on immigration, because it does seem like there’s this elite consensus that operates for a long time that only recently broke. So one thing there is you do have these countervailing forces. You do have these very business groups in the Republican Party that are more liberal on immigration, or you have religious groups that really play a fundamental role in some of the liberal immigration reform in the 1980s or 1990s that are pushing the party almost left.
And in the Democratic Party, you have unions that are what we would consider almost pushing… not almost, are pushing the party to the right on immigration. So some of it is that you have these countervailing forces with immigration that are pushing against this growing trends in public opinion. And so that does, I think in the case of immigration, slow that collapse.
The other point on immigration is you see these divides among members of Congress before you see it at the presidential level. And so one story to this point is 1986, there’s massive immigration reform, it’s signed by Ronald Reagan among other things, provides amnesty for immigrants that have been… undocumented immigrants in the United States. And folks look at that bill as, “Well Democrats and Republicans were brought together and voted on it, it’s signed by a Republican president,” but that sort of masks some of the divides that had been emerging at the surface.
So if you look at amendment votes on providing amnesty for undocumented immigration, already in the 1980s, it’s not polarized as if you had that vote today, but it’s much more polarized than when you package all that reform together and have all the log rolls put together that you see at the top line bill.
So I think some of it’s working its way through the system in that it’s happening at the state or the congressional level, and then it slowly builds up to the national level or the presidential level. And so I think that certainly… it gives the illusion of slowness, but these processes are already underway, and they themselves might be constraining what political… not political leaders, but the national candidates can do.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossman.
If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website: The Roots of the Party’s Racial Switch, Racial Protest, Violence and Backlash, Did American’s Racial Attitudes Elect Trump? Class, Race, Gender in the 2024 Election, and U.S. Democratic Decline in Comparative Perspective?
Thanks to Neil O’Brian for joining me. Please check out Roots of Polarization, and then listen in next time.