The Big Sort (12 page)

Americans' political lives are baffling. Reconciling the narrowness of recent national elections with the lopsidedness of local results produces mass cognitive dissonance. The facts we see on television—a nearly fifty-fifty Congress, a teetering Electoral College, and presidential elections decided by teaspoons of votes—simply don't square with the overwhelming majorities we experience in our neighborhoods.

In focus groups held in Omaha, University of Nebraska political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse revealed how confused people are by the consensus they see in their neighborhoods versus the conflict they see at large in the nation. "People said many times, 'Eighty percent of us agree,"' Theiss-Morse said. '"We all want the same thing ... It's those 20 percent who are just a bunch of extremists out there.' It didn't matter what their political views were. They really saw it as us against this fringe. The American people versus them, the fringe."

And in this age of political segregation, that "us" versus "the fringe" is often based on geography. The Nebraskans all agreed, Theiss-Morse said: "Those people in California are really weird."

T
HE
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MERICAN AFFLICTION
of the 1950s wasn't partisanship. It was indifference. The country fretted about bland men in gray flannel suits, little boxes on suburban hillsides, mass marketing, and artless consumption. David Riesman wrote about the "suburban sadness," William Whyte about the "organization man." "We hope for nonconformists among you, for your sake, for the sake of the nation and for the sake of humanity," theologian Paul Tillich told a class of college graduates.
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"By the end of the 1950s," wrote cultural historian Thomas Frank, "there could have been very few literate Americans indeed who were not familiar with the term with which these problems were summarized: 'conformity.'"
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Americans weren't just uninformed about politics; they were tragically indifferent. "They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary," C. Wright Mills wrote in 1953, "they are inactionary; they are out of it."
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Arthur Schlesinger had observed four years earlier that most people "prefer to flee choice, to flee anxiety, to flee freedom."
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Historian Robert Wiebe wrote that voters in the 1950s "were construed as essentially passive consumers, waiting inertly to receive messages, then choosing between more or less trivial alternatives."
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Americans were woefully ignorant of issues and lethargic when it came to politics. In the 1958 congressional campaign, only 24 percent of voters had read or heard anything about both the Republican and Democratic candidates in their district; nearly half the voters had heard or seen nothing about either candidate. Studies in the 1950s consistently found that only one-third of voters could differentiate between the two parties on the most contentious issues of the day. People voted faithfully for a particular party, but their allegiance wasn't based on knowledge or belief. Only 11.5 percent of the population in 1960 had political beliefs that could be defined as ideological. Issues weren't linked in the minds of most voters. What one thought about labor unions had little relationship to one's opinions about Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist witch-hunt. Only half the people knew how "liberal" and "conservative" were used in contemporary politics.
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The American ideal was to get along. The national goal was moderation and consensus. Given the trauma of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II, these were reasonable objectives. "The dream of American consensus was conceived against a backdrop of dictatorships and death camps, paralyzing internal divisions and the devastations of war," wrote Wiebe.
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Contrary to today, there was no relationship between church attendance and party. Regular churchgoers voted both Democratic and Republican. Liberal churchgoers tended to vote Democratic, it's true, and conservative churchgoers tended to vote Republican. But politics weren't defined in moral terms. In 1962, a review of political ideology could conclude that "one reason for the low political tension ... in the United States [is that] politics has not been moralized; the parties have not been invested with strong moral feeling; the issues are not seen as moral issues; the political leaders have not been made moral heroes or villains."
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In Congress, members visited, talked across party boundaries. They hung out at the gym, socialized at receptions, and formed friendships that had nothing to do with party or ideology. (After all, members had been elected more on their personal connections at home—what V. O. Key called "friends and neighbors" politics—than by the force of party or policy.)
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The national calm was pervasive, and so in Congress, "this era, from roughly 1948 to the mid 1960s, was the most bi-partisan period in the history of the modern Congress."
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Bipartisanship to this degree, some thought, had put the nation into a dangerous kind of democratic coma. (The parties were weak. They had only opened permanent national headquarters in the late 1930s and early 1940s.) Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. Four years later, the committee published a lengthy (and alarmed) report calling for the return of ideologically distinct and powerful political parties. Parties ought to stand for distinct sets of policies, the political scientists urged. Voters should be presented with clear choices. And after an election, the winning party should be held responsible for enacting its platform. The political scientists' hope was that the parties would become more ideological, so that voters could have a "true choice in reaching public decisions." The committee of political scientists issued a list of recommendations: House terms should be longer, there should be more frequent national conventions, and party platforms and caucuses should be more powerful.
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A call for greater partisanship appeared to be a grand lesson in the downside of wish fulfillment during the presidential campaign of 2004. Somehow, Americans went from an indifferent society whose greatest concern was an epidemic of conformity to one with political parties so ideological that Republicans and Democrats in Congress can barely speak to one another. We've gone from lacking ideology to lacking moderation—from a period when people from different parties mixed to thirty years of increasing political segregation.

The events of the 1960s were so vivid and so dramatic (at least for those Americans who had lived through them) that they became the common explanation for everything that came after. We all like a nice narrative—a beginning, middle, and end—and chronologically the sixties provided the perfect rationale for what came after. But life doesn't always move linearly, A to B to C. Although the events of the sixties appeared to have knocked the country out of its heterogeneous complacency, underneath these events—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—a slower, deeper, and largely invisible shift was changing how people went about their lives. The lasting imprint of the fifties wasn't the conformity of men in gray flannel suits, but a new and widespread economic prosperity. Abundance changed the culture in ways less evident than the upheaval of the sixties, but in a manner more profound.

In the early 1970s, Professor Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan proposed a theory for why all industrialized countries appeared to be undergoing similar changes in their cultures and politics. Inglehart hypothesized that when people grew up in relative abundance, their social values—what they wanted out of life—changed. People who knew that their basic needs were satisfied would gradually adopt different values from those who lived with scarcity. Hungry people cared about survival, Inglehart said. But those who grew up in abundance would be more concerned with self-expression.
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Those who lived in times of depression or joblessness esteemed economic growth. Those who knew plenty were more concerned about the environment and individual choice.

Inglehart's theory of social change rested on psychiatrist Abraham Maslow's theory that people act according to a "hierarchy of needs."
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Maslow's list was specific—individuals seek to satisfy thirst before hunger, for example. In his model of human behavior, after basic physical demands are satisfied, new needs arise: survival is followed by security, then social connections, and eventually self-fulfillment. Inglehart applied Maslow's concepts about individual psychology to society and culture. He theorized that rapid economic development had produced a "new worldview" that was "gradually replacing the outlook that has dominated industrializing societies since the Industrial Revolution." The fulfillment of material needs would generally be taken for granted, and education levels would rise along with incomes, he surmised. And all that material progress, he found, "brings unforeseen changes—change in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics."
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Inglehart's theory made predictions for these "post-materialist" societies: People would lose interest in traditional religion. They would become increasingly involved with notions of personal spirituality. Class, economic growth, and military security would decline in political importance, replaced by issues of personal freedom, abortion rights, gay rights, and the environment. Material goods would lose cachet as people sought to fill their lives with unique experiences. People would be less inclined to obey central authority and would lose trust in traditional hierarchical institutions—the big organizations that had created America's modern, industrial society: the federal government, broad-based civic groups, and traditional church denominations.

Furthermore, people wouldn't participate in politics in the same old ways, Inglehart hypothesized. Instead of being "elite-directed," they would engage in "elite-challenging" activities. They would vote less but be more likely to join a boycott or sign a petition. People wouldn't become disengaged from politics, even though voting percentages would decline. Rather, they would adopt a politics of self-expression. Postmaterialists wouldn't settle for picking between two candidates. They would want to make decisions themselves, acting more directly on their political choices instead of following the orders of leaders.
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Inglehart predicted one more aspect of this post-materialist phenomenon: since the cultural transformation would happen at a generational pace, it would be in a sense a "silent revolution."
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People would assume that the "erosion of confidence" in government, religion, and social institutions was because these institutions were singularly corrupt or inefficient. But the decline of trust wouldn't be peculiar to a place or government, Inglehart wrote. "We are witnessing a downward trend in trust in government and confidence in leaders across most industrial societies."
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Inglehart then tested his theory. Beginning in 1970, he conducted surveys around the globe, looking for signs of a culture shift. His first poll studied a half-dozen countries. Now his World Values Survey includes eighty societies that encompass more than 75 percent of the world's population. Inglehart has found that not all cultures change as fast or as much as others. The Nordic cultures are the most "post-materialist," while Americans are stubbornly traditional. (Here Inglehart diverges somewhat from Maslow, who proposed that his hierarchy of needs would operate cross-culturally. Inglehart has found that local culture alters the order of importance of social needs—a fact, as we will see, that is particularly evident in the United States.) But Inglehart's post-materialist trend has been true for every country: the higher the level of economic development, the more widespread the values of self-expression. In 2005, Inglehart wrote, "One rarely finds such a consistent pattern in social science data: there are no exceptions to this pattern among the eighty societies for which we have data."
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The politics of industrialized countries demonstrate Inglehart's post-materialist shift. For American voters, concerns over economic growth have been equaled (sometimes surpassed) by issues of self-expression, such as abortion, gay rights, and a personal concern for the environment. People have sought to take control of political systems directly, through recalls and ballot initiatives. Abortion, divorce, and gay relationships are more accepted, especially among younger people.
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In 2007, fewer than half of Americans under age thirty believed it was their "duty as a citizen" always to vote.
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In the United States, participation in traditional religious denominations declined even as nondenominational churches boomed and people explored every back road to individual spirituality. And, as Inglehart predicted more than thirty years ago, trust in government has continued to decline.
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Inglehart contended that the change to a post-materialist culture would become more entrenched with each generation. Just as he predicted in the 1970s, each succeeding generation of Americans has been more accepting of homosexuality, more secular, and less likely to want women to play traditional roles.
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But the post-materialist culture shift has also been filtered through America's unusually strong religious traditions. So while some Americans have adopted more European styles of self-expression, others have found new meaning—what has eventually become political meaning—in fundamentalist or Evangelical Christianity. Once free from the discipline demanded by economic scarcity, people began to define themselves by their values, and that altered what it meant to be either a Democrat or a Republican.