Yesterday, Vox published its interview with President Obama, in which Ezra Klein asked him about partisan polarization and whether any president can bridge the divide between the parties. While few deny the existence of polarization, Republicans often assert that it is Obama's fault: the politician who came into office pledging to be a uniter has instead forced Americans further apart with his radical presidency and high-handed tactics. If he had governed differently, we might not be so divided.
Before we get to Obama's view on this, at the end of last week, Gallup noted that last year was one of the most polarized in history in presidential approval (defined as the difference between the president's approval among his own party's voters and the other party's voters). Here's the top ten:
One of two things is going on here. Either George W. Bush and Barack Obama produced this effect with their actions - more so than any presidents before them, or at least those from the last 60 years for which we have data - or the political context has evolved to the point that this kind of thing is inevitable.
For his part, Obama believes it's the second. Is that self-serving? Sure. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Here's what he had to say about it:
...a lot of it has to do with the fact that a) the balkanization of the media means that we just don't have a common place where we get common facts and a common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago. And that just keeps on accelerating, you know. And I'm not the first to observe this, but you've got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you've got the MSNBC folks and the - I don't know where Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types. But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view. That's contributed to it.
Gerrymandering contributes to it. There's no incentive for most members of Congress, on the House side at least, in congressional districts, to even bother trying to appeal. And a lot of it has to do with just unlimited money. So people are absorbing an entirely different reality when it comes to politics, even though the way they're living their lives and interacting with each other isn't that polarizing.
Obama has part of the story right. The balkanization of media has an impact-particularly the conservative media, which is much more comprehensive and influential than the liberal media-but it may be more to intensify the feelings of people who were already partisan than it is to hollow out the independent middle. The polarization of Congress that has occurred in recent years is extremely important, but it is only partly a result of gerrymandering. The part that Obama leaves out is the way the civil rights battles of the 1960s began a process of partisan sorting, where the conservative white southerners who had been Democrats moved to the GOP, making the two parties more ideologically distinct. Every step down that road makes the next step easier to take-the fewer liberal Republicans there are left, the harder it is for someone who 30 years ago might have been a liberal Republican to feel comfortable in the GOP, and something similar happens on the Democratic side.
I also think that we can put the media and elected officials together into something we could call the visible elite. The character of that elite-who they are, what positions they take, how they argue, and how they characterize the other side-are apparent to people whether they actually use partisan media or not. Whether you listen to Rush Limbaugh or just read your local paper, you're going to see Republicans saying day after day that whatever Barack Obama is doing is the worst thing any president has ever done, and that he's dismantling our liberties in his effort to turn America into a socialist dystopia. If you're a Republican, the idea of expressing a general approval of Obama becomes almost impossible to contemplate.
It's a cyclical process: More cohesive districts lead to the election of more extreme lawmakers, who not only make substantive compromise less likely but also make the national debate more vituperative, leading partisans to be more emphatic in their dislike of the other party, which makes the election of more extreme lawmakers in cohesive districts more likely, and around we go.
And there's very little this or any president can do about it. Barack Obama has given up trying to compromise with Republicans, but opinions of him were extremely polarized even when he was bending over backwards to try to work with them. Even in his second year in office, when he was still in that let's-all-get-together-and-talk-this-out mode, his approval among Republicans was only 12 percent. What he does is almost irrelevant, and the same is going to be true of his successor.
So is that such a bad thing? Is a president who polarizes necessarily worse than one who doesn't? That's a complex question we may have to answer on another day. But you know who was really polarizing? Abraham Lincoln. Huge polarizer.