Krugman has a good column this morning arguing that bipartisanship will be a result of fixing the nation's big problems, not the avenue by which we'll do it.
[Barack Obama says] that partisanship is why “we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions. And that's what we have to change first.” Um, no. If history is any guide, what we need are political leaders willing to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition. If all goes well, we'll eventually have a new era of bipartisanship — but that will be the end of the story, not the beginning.[...]
You see, the nastiness of modern American politics isn't the result of a random outbreak of bad manners. It's a symptom of deeper factors — mainly the growing polarization of our economy. And history says that we'll see a return to bipartisanship only if and when that economic polarization is reversed.
Krugman buttresses his point through a quick analysis of the political climate fostered by the New Deal. But this argument is rife within the academic literature too. Take Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal's "Political Polarization and Income Inequality," which found:
Since the early 1970s, American society has undergone two important parallel transformations, one political and one economic. Following a period with mild partisan divisions, post-1970s politics is increasingly characterized by an ideologically polarized party system. Similarly, the 1970s mark an end to several decades of increasing economic equality and the beginning of a trend towards greater inequality of wealth and income...We find that over this period of time partisanship has become more stratified by income. We argue that this trend is the consequence both of polarization of the parties on economic issues and increased economic inequality.
In other words, the two parties have become more stratified by class. Income and wealth, which used to be relatively weak predictors of political behavior, have consolidated their hold, and the "haves" have clustered in the GOP's camp, while the "have-nots" have turned to the Democrats. This, naturally, has created a more polarized era, if for no other reason than the two camps perceive themselves as having legitimately different economic interests (tax cuts vs. health care, say). Under such conditions, polarization is predictable.
Were the economy somewhat more equal, Americans would, theoretically, be less divided over their economic interest, and thus the political scene would be less polarized, at least so far as policy goes. On the other hand, there's certainly a very large tribal component pitting Limbaugh listeners against, say, tree-huggers, and I don't really expect that to lift. The polarization of substantive views might easy, and that would probably make the republic work better, but I don't know that it'd make us any nicer.
