The Big Sort (33 page)

People certainly change parties when their beliefs conflict with party platforms or leaders. But Layman and Carsey have found the opposite happening as well. People are changing their minds to align with their parties' positions. "Even on issues as divisive and emotion-laden as abortion and racial equality," they wrote, "there is evidence of individuals bringing their attitudes into line with their party ties."
¹⁹
People don't methodically take an inventory of their political beliefs and then cast about for the political party that best matches their ideology. Carsey and Layman have found that people at times change their beliefs to conform to the positions of their party. "When party leaders, candidates, and platforms take distinct stands on these issues, it signals to citizens which views on these issues go with each party," Layman and Carsey wrote. "This creates pressure for citizens to bring their party identification and views on these issues closer together."
²⁰
Party membership is not simply an affiliation. It's a screen that filters and shapes the way people perceive the world. Again, politics is working both top-down, as people pick up and follow signals from party activists, and bottom-up, as growing majorities in legislative districts push elected officials to the extremes.

In the early 1990s, Bill Bellamy, a Republican county commissioner in Jefferson County, Oregon, began to see a change in the way his constituents posed questions. They were linking issues. People would ask Bellamy about property rights, and once he'd answered, they would then assume that they knew his views on abortion, taxes, and gun control. "The interesting thing is because of my position on land use, they didn't have to ask me about the others," Bellamy told me. "The religious right has gotten very good about asking questions other than the direct one. If they ask[ed] you about land use and property rights, they would walk away feeling very comfortable about what your position was about abortion and gun control, without you having to say what it is."

No wonder the ranchers at the Southwest Landowner Conference saw a connection between the United Nations, private property rights, gay marriage, and party politics. They
were
connected. Over the past thirty years, the parties have cultivated more areas of disagreement, and people have allied themselves more tightly with their parties, either by changing parties or by changing their minds. As new issues have cropped up—the war in Iraq, telephone spying by the government, a Spanish version of the national anthem—Americans have divided neatly by party. And all this has taken place as people have sorted themselves into more like-minded churches and communities, all social networks that tend to enforce uniformity of beliefs. In 1972, the democratic theorist Robert A. Dahl warned that a sign of extreme political polarization was when two sides "posed two alternative ways of life, two kinds of society, two visions of man's fate and man's hope."
²¹
Today the division in the country isn't about party allegiance. It's about how we choose to live. And as the parties have come to represent lifestyle—and as lifestyle has defined communities—everything seems divisible, Republican or Democratic.

• The top-ten-grossing theaters for Michael Moore's film
  Fahrenheit 9/11
  were all in heavily Democratic cities: Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. The best theaters for Mel Gibson's
  The Passion of the Christ
  were in deeply Republican Mesquite, Texas; Houston; Morrow, Georgia; and Orange, California.
  ^{*
  22}
  
• Republicans withdrew from a thirty-seven-year-old Capitol Hill softball league for Senate and House staff members in 2006 because they claimed that the Democratic commissioner of the league had introduced a "socialist" playoff system. Republicans charged that the new system favored teams with poor records. One Republican staffer wrote in an e-mail message: "The commissioner has a long-standing policy of punishing success and rewarding failure. He's a Democrat. Waddya' expect?"
  ²³
  
• Seven out of ten conservative Republicans think Wal-Mart has a good effect on the country, but only four out of ten liberal Democrats agree.
  ²⁴
  By August 2006, six Democratic presidential candidates had appeared at anti—Wal-Mart rallies.
  ²⁵
  
• Democrats flock to taverns in local chapters of Drinking Liberally, an organization that "gives like-minded, left-leaning individuals a place to talk politics." On the other hand, there is a "Christian alternative to yoga." Scores of people have been trained to teach PraiseMoves, a combination of "deep stretching, gentle movement and
  strong
  Scripture."
  
• Democrats are more protective of plant life than Republicans (who are more apt to restrict their environmental concerns to the impact on fur-bearing creatures). Democrats more than Republicans say that laws ought to be passed to limit consumption of natural resources—especially by the rich.
  ²⁶
  
• In a poll taken eight days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, three-quarters of Democrats said that the reaction by federal authorities had been fair or poor. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans said that the federal response had been good or excellent.
  ²⁷
  
• In the spring of 2006, just days after
  USA Today
  revealed that the National Security Agency had been collecting phone records of U.S. citizens, 73 percent of Democrats said that this was an invasion of people's privacy, while 69 percent of Republicans said that it was a necessary tool to fight terrorism.
  ²⁸
  
• The Cook County, Illinois, Republican Party felt the need to take a position on junk food. In 2006, it sent out a news release asking the media to attend a book signing by
  Fast Food Nation
  author Eric Schlosser and to "ask a challenging question or two."
  ²⁹
  
• Just days before the 2006 midterm elections, the Pew Research Center released a poll finding a "vast divide" between Democrats and Republicans. The poll confirmed that only 10 percent of the public was truly independent. Seven out of ten Republicans said that the economy was doing just fine. Three-quarters of Democrats said the opposite. Six out of ten Republicans said that the war in Iraq was going at least fairly well. Eight out of ten Democrats thought that the war was going poorly. Democrats and Republicans, Pew found, "see the world quite differently."
  ³⁰
  

"Hey, Sheila, it's time for you to be a true independent." With that, Minnesota senate minority leader Dick Day told state senator Sheila Kisca den that she would have to vacate her office, the one she had shared for twelve years with other Republican state senators. Day called a sergeant at arms, and Kiscaden was escorted out of her office and out of the Republican Party.

Kiscaden recounted the story as she slid a pan of bran muffins from the oven at her house in Rochester, Minnesota. There's butter, thick coffee, and a conversation about how a three-term state senator could be ushered from her office because she failed to color within the lines prescribed by the Republican Party. In today's politics, Kiscaden is an unlikely Republican. She's a former board member of Planned Parenthood. A book by liberal theologian Jim Wallis rests under her reading lamp. In 1994, she voted to protect gay, lesbian, and transsexual state employees from discrimination. She is pro-choice and is open to the idea of gun control.

Kiscaden ran as a Republican for the state senate in 1992 for what is now an old-fashioned reason. Democrats "weren't being fiscally responsible," she said. But Republican Party ideology was narrowing, soon to the exclusion of mere fiscal conservatives. In Minnesota, where local conventions make party endorsements, several right-wing groups banded together against Kiscaden. After ten years of her moderate partisanship, they'd had enough. In 2002, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a conservative education organization jammed the local nominating caucus in Rochester. "I went to the endorsing convention, and the gun guys were out," Kiscaden recalled. "Some came up and said, 'We gotcha. We've got rid of you."'

They nearly did. The Republican Party successfully denied Kiscaden an endorsement and an automatic place on the ballot. She acknowledged that she wasn't alone; these purges had been taking place all over the state. The party had rejected moderate Republican state senator Martha Robertson two years earlier, replacing her with a conservative football coach. Twice censured by his local party for supporting gay rights and statewide education standards, state senator Dean Johnson, a Lutheran minister and National Guard chaplain, left the Republican Party in 2000 after two decades in office.
³¹
It wasn't simply district-level extremists who were eager to purify the Minnesota GOP. It was the state party's leaders. The Republican executive committee said that it would withhold funds from the local party organizations if they nominated either Kiscaden or Robertson. Kiscaden ran in 2002 as a member of the Independence Party and won. She caucused with Republicans until 2004, when the minority leader grew convinced that Kiscaden had disclosed the party's secret strategy on a spending bill to some people in Rochester. Basically, Kiscaden just didn't fit in. Dick Day told her to move her office and promised to spend $200,000 to beat her if she ran again in 2006.
³²

Kiscaden was born just after World War II in St. Paul. Her father was a house painter, and her mother was a nurse's aide. She was the oldest of four children growing up in a two-bedroom house. She paid her way through college, married, worked, and volunteered with an international development group. She drove a battered Mercury Sable around her district, and the bran muffin recipe was her grandmother's. Her troubles began when the Republican Party concluded, Kiscaden said, that "I wasn't pure enough." She didn't mean that in a Joan of Arc kind of way. "It's not about Sheila Kiscaden. It's not about me," she explained. "It's about big political forces that are going on in our country. And I just got caught up in it."

Sandy Maisel, chair of the government department at Colby College, studies Congress. In the 1990s, Maisel set out to understand why some people decide to become candidates for political office and others don't. He picked a random set of congressional districts and asked prominent residents of these communities—labor leaders, party officials, chamber of commerce presidents—to name people who would be good members of Congress. Maisel and his colleagues then interviewed 1,500 of these prominent, well-thought-of citizens about the pros and cons of running for the U.S. House of Representatives. Most of the objections to entering politics were expected. Running meant interrupting careers, leaving families, and losing free time. Few of these good citizens wanted to raise money. They weren't naive, however, and most said that they could put up with the fundraising calls and the time on the road, even if the process was hard and, at times, distasteful. There was something more fundamental that bothered these potential candidates, however: the politically lopsided nature of most congressional districts.

Single-minded districts deterred those in the minority party, which made sense. These potential candidates had slim chances of winning. But one-sided districts put off people in the majority party, too. They simply "didn't like the kind of campaigns they would have to run to get the nomination," Maisel told me. The prospective candidates understood that a primary campaign in a homogeneous district would likely be "bitter and acerbic," Maisel found. They sensed the campaign "would be extreme, and most of the issues these people were concerned with were not at the extreme."

The prominent citizens Maisel interviewed were right about the narrow limits of what the parties will accept in a candidate. Back in Oregon, Bill Bellamy calculated the ideological boundaries of today's politics. "On a scale of one to ten from conservative to liberal, the Republican Party starts at one and stops at three," Bellamy told me. "There is just no such thing as a liberal Republican. Now, if you get to three or four, then the ones and twos start claiming you're a liberal." As a Republican, either you get back to three (or, better, two) or you don't run.

When Sheila Kiscaden went to her party caucus in 2002, she expected to see twenty or so constituents and neighbors. She was greeted by more than two hundred people rounded up by the NRA and a conservative education group. To win the nomination, Kiscaden had to please those "ones and twos"—something she was not willing to do. As Maisel said, "you get people who are interested in issues at the extreme." Those are your candidates.

Congress had given up governing by the summer of 2006. And not a whole lot had been happening before. Nelson Polsby, a congressional scholar, calculated that the federal government had been largely deadlocked since the late 1960s. It was as if Americans had lost the ability to speak a common civic tongue. Polsby wrote, "In important respects the U.S. population resembles the population that attempted to build the Tower of Babel."
³³
By 2006, even the slow-moving wheels of government had seized up. In June, Charles Babington wrote in the
Washington Post,
"Congress seems to be struggling lately to carry out its most basic mission: passing legislation."
³⁴
Whatever the issue—the minimum wage, immigration reform, bankrupt pensions, global warming, energy policy, stem cell research, inquiries into domestic surveillance, resolutions on the war in Iraq—it slipped under the surface of Congress's deepening pool of discord. In early July, former House Republican leader Dick Armey said bluntly, "I'm not sure what this Congress has accomplished."
³⁵
So Congress quit pretending and just stopped meeting. In 2006, the House met nine fewer days than it had in 1948, the year President Harry Truman dubbed the legislature the "do-nothing Congress."