Polarization Myths and Realities

Our two parties tell themselves flattering falsehoods; the reality is less-flattering to either

I was reading Nate Cohn’s latest piece about Biden’s weakening support among Black and Hispanic voters (his Asian-American support is even weaker), when I found myself thinking: why is this bad news? Obviously, it’s not good news for Biden (though, as Cohn delineates in a follow-up, it may not be quite as bad as it appears at first glance); no politician can be happy to see a core part of his coalition cool on him. But all else being equal, if voting preference is becoming somewhat less polarized by race, that’s a good thing.

If you doubt that, consider the opposite possibility, that the GOP might win by racking up an ever-larger percentage of the White vote while the Democrats retain massive majorities among all non-White groups. That would strongly suggest that the GOP’s appeal was primarily race-based, that White voters were increasingly motivated by questions of race—that, in the immortal words of George Wallace, “the whole United States is Southern!” That’s exactly what a lot of progressives have thought—and said—was happening in the Trump era, in part because it’s a self-flattering read of tea leaves for them to make, but also because it was a far-from-crazy read. But if racial polarization is actually dropping—albeit from a very high base—then it isn’t really true, or certainly isn’t the whole truth.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who tell themselves a self-flattering story about the nature of their coalition, of course. The GOP has increasingly been telling itself a dubious tale about how they are the real “workers’ party,” the real champions of the working class. This is also self-flattering, putting the GOP on the side of the deserving by left-wingers’ own ostensible definition of desert. But it’s only true if you denude the word “class” of its proper meaning and replace it with a spurious and largely tautological alternative according to which Donald Trump himself isn’t part of the ruling class. Democrats continue to win more votes than Republicans from voters in households that earn less than $50,000 per year, and Republicans continue to do very well among the wealthy.

Nonetheless, there is something to the contention that something has happened between the parties on class, perhaps not a realignment but a dealignment or a complication of class alignments. The “mass upper-middle-class” that resides in the top 20% but not the top 2% is now majority Democratic, which seriously limits Democratic ambitions to build a European-style welfare state (since that would require raising taxes on this class and not merely on the wealthy). Equally notable is the fact that Republicans now represent nearly two-thirds of the congressional districts with median incomes below the national median. But within those districts, the Republican vote skews wealthier. As this piece by Chris Maisano from Jacobin relates, these differences are largely downstream of the deeper divide between the parties: education. Education, meanwhile, is a less reliable guide to economic class than it used to be as the ranks of college graduates have swelled and the education premium has shrunk. Increasingly, the core Republican voter is someone who is doing reasonably well economically, a property owner and perhaps a small business owner, but whose success is largely unrelated to education, while the core Democratic voter is someone with substantial education credentials but at best a middle-class job.

Inasmuch as there is a dealignment in terms of class, though, is that a good thing? I’m not sure. I tend to think that class is actually the best basis upon which the parties could be divided—far better than race or region or religion. Material interests lend themselves far better to compromise, for one thing, and democratic politics is a good mechanism for providing an egalitarian check on the natural tendencies toward inequality and concentration in capitalism—hence the enduring appeal of the so-called “mixed economy.”

On the other hand, it’s probably a good thing if we don’t have a purely class-based politics, one that feels existential for those on either side of a rigid class divide. That’s how you get a potentially revolutionary situation. So I could tell myself a story that having a country party versus a city party, or a business proprietor party versus a managerial party, or a manufacturing economy party versus a service economy party, or however one might divide parties in a way that cuts across class lines—those divisions might be equally amenable to compromise and run less risk of escalation to existential levels than a truly class-based political divide would.

We are, in fact, seeing more compromise than you might expect, at least legislatively, and perhaps this class dealignment is the reason. But we’re not seeing a deescalation or a reduced sense that the stakes are existential. Far from it. I suspect that’s in part an artifact of polarization on the basis of education, and points to how that axis of polarization is less than ideal for political stability.

I’ve written before in this space about the inherent conflict between the meritocratic idea and the democratic one, and the way in which meritocracy has evolved in our minds from a means of avoiding corruption and maximizing performance to a deeper set of convictions about personal worth and even the right to rule. It’s that latter, deeper idea that runs profoundly counter to the core idea of democratic self-government—but it’s also understandable. It is in some sense natural for those who have advanced in their lives through education—or who have pursued education in the belief that it is the way to advance in one’s life, whether or not it has worked out that way for them personally—to believe that because of their education they simply know better, and that therefore they should be deferred to, even though this is a profoundly undemocratic attitude.

But there’s a similar deformation taking place on what we might call the populist side of that divide, a deformation in epistemology. Any monarch is subject to being flattered that they, by virtue of their position as God’s anointed steward, are possessed of a portion of His infallibility. In a democracy, the people occupy that place, and it’s the natural behavior of politicians to flatter the people in precisely this way. “The people” is supposed to be every member of the polity, but education polarization scrambles this collective conception. If the more-educated segment of “the people” effectively self-identifies as something other than and above the people, it’s not surprising that the rest of “the people” would reject this pretension, and increasingly come to view the pretenders as alien rather than superior. But to oppose their pretensions, they would have to deny that the educated have any knowledge or expertise of value. They might well to come to believe, in fact, that knowledge springs from their own sovereignty as “the people” rather than from the objective world, just as any other flattered monarch might.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that the better-educated are always right—far from it. Even if they do have particular expertise, experts get things wrong all the time, particularly in areas of inherent uncertainty. Moreover, I’m fully aware that there are certain kinds of stupidity that you have to be very educated to embrace. Finally, nobody is immune to institutional bias and group pressures toward conformity. Many of the most popular writers on this platform—themselves generally well-educated—have made their careers exposing precisely these faults. Experts in a host of fields have amply earned a large measure of skepticism for their high-profile screw ups and their blindness to same.

But skepticism is different from outright rejection, and it needs to be applied fairly and not selectively. Instead, what we’ve seen is a rise in an exceedingly foolish heuristic whereby anything that flouts the views of experts gets the benefit of the doubt—even, at times, a kind of unshakable faith. There’s a top-down confidence game element to this development, but con artists go where the marks are, so the ground must already be prepared before they can work their mesmeric arts. In any event, this phenomenon has always existed, but the fact that it now has political valence means that we no longer merely disagree about the nature of the common good, or recognize that we have conflicting interests. We increasingly fail to inhabit a shared reality. I suspect that educational polarization is a cause as well as a consequence of this trend.

The rise of a mass educated class may also have altered the relationship of the educated to the people as a whole, from being a class to being a tribe, which in turn has fostered the conditions for polarization. When fewer than 10% of Americans went to college, representing “the educated” wasn’t a plausible political stance, and educated elites who wanted democratic legitimacy perforce understood that this depended on convincing normal people that they actually knew what they were talking about (whether they actually did or they didn’t). Now that nearly 38% of Americans have college degrees, you actually do have a mass of people with acculturation to a particular worldview—at a minimum, a worldview that values education—large enough to be politically significant, and to expect representation that looks, culturally, like themselves. That fact itself may be a driver of educational polarization, and of the epistemic and political deformations that the polarization engenders.

I’m tempted, given this comparison to tribal division, to analogize polarization over education to polarization over religion. In fact, the education divide overlaps substantially with a religious divide which is also growing. White evangelical Protestants make up roughly one-third of the GOP electorate, while their percentage representation in the Democratic coalition has declined monotonically with each election to 5%. Not coincidentally, I suspect, average educational attainment is much lower among this group than other White religious groups. By contrast, self-described atheist or agnostic voters make up roughly 20% of the Democratic coalition, while their representation among the ranks of Republicans has shrunk monotonically with each election to a nearly-nonexistent 3%. (“Nones” who have no religious affiliation are significantly better-represented in the Democratic coalition, as are those who affiliate with a non-Christian religion, but their ranks are growing within the GOP, not shrinking). Again, not coincidentally I suspect, this group has substantially higher average educational attainment than most (but not all) other religious categories.

To be clear, I don’t want to suggest anything about the direction of any arrow of causation in the above, or even that there is an arrow of causation involved. I just want to highlight an effect of this overlap, which is that the deep commitments of religion come to be associated with these epistemic divisions as well as related divisions over the basis of political legitimacy. That, in turn, is bound to entrench those divisions more deeply, make them seem more existential than they might otherwise have seemed.

I don’t have any particularly good ideas about how to get out of this new basis for political polarization, which, I should note, is hardly a uniquely American phenomenon, but something playing out across the Western world and even beyond. All I want to suggest is that people on both sides of the divide should be aware of the deformations that they are prone to, and sit up and give notice when a leader tries, rhetorically and substantively, to transcend these particular divisions, as it is incumbent upon leaders who care about the stability of the political system to do. Before we can transcend them, though, we have to see where they really are.