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Fall 2004
For nearly a decade now, control of both Houses of Congress has rested on single-digit margins, the longest period of such near-parity in the nation's history. The most recent presidential election in 2000 was, famously, "the closest in American history," producing razor-thin margins in both the popular vote (Vice President Al Gore by 0.5%) and the Electoral College (George W. Bush, with one vote more than needed), as well as in an unusually large number of individual states: Besides the historic and disputed Florida count that left Bush with a 537-vote margin out of nearly 6 million cast, Bush lost four other states by margins substantially less than 0.5% - including New Mexico, by a 366-vote spread even smaller than Florida's - and barely won New Hampshire, historically one of the most Republican states in the nation, by a single percentage point. Once again in 2004, America seems poised for another evenly matched contest between the two parties. At the time this journal went to press - as they have all year- opinion polls portray consistently an almost-evenly split electorate with roughly fifteen states too close to call. All of this, it is
said, is proof of what many have taken to calling "a 50-50 nation," One might think that simply offering this description - which I have scarcely exaggerated - is enough to refute it, but it is widely believed. Yet "Occam's Razor," a hoary axiom of logical analysis, tells us that the most likely explanation for any phenomenon is the simplest, and there's a much simpler explanation for why, over an extended period of time, the United States has produced a series of basically 50-50 political outcomes: The choice between the two parties is, to most Americans, a "Hobson's Choice" - a choice that's no choice at all. When it comes to picking between the political options, most Americans are essentially flipping a coin. E PLURIBUS UNUM First of all, the common portrayal of a politically and ideologically polarized America is simply false. Take, for instance, the highly emotional and deeply divisive issue du jour, gay marriage. A national poll in May by America's premier polling outfit, the Gallup Organization, found what is, for political purposes, a pretty evenly split America, with 51% favoring a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and 45% opposed. Of course, what exactly you ask helps determine what you're told: An ABC News/Washington Post poll a few weeks earlier found that only 44% of Americans supported a constitutional amendment when given the alternative "or should each state make its own laws on homosexual marriage?" (The latter was favored by 53%.) American opinion on gay marriage is, in fact, even more nuanced than that. In a March survey, the Pew Research Center found gay marriage opponents themselves substantially split over a constitutional amendment: While a clear majority thought a constitutional amendment was a good idea, roughly 40% did not (a sizeable 28% of gay-marriage opponents said we should simply "leave the Constitution alone"). This meant that only 36% of respondents opposed gay marriage and wanted to amend the Constitution to ban it, while 21% of Americans opposed gay marriage but also opposed constitutionally prohibiting it. And a USA TODAY/CNN/ Gallup Poll in January found that while 53 percent opposed same-sex marriage, only 41 percent opposed offering gay couples the same rights as marriage - just as long as it isn't called "marriage" - with 34 percent favoring "civil union" for gays. American opinion on this issue is very much in flux, but there is no doubt that the country can hardly be divided into two near-equal camps of diametrically opposed views. Essentially the same can be said about Americans' attitudes toward abortion - perhaps the most politically divisive issue in the country for several decades now. The question, "On the issue of abortion, would you say you are more pro-life or more pro-choice?" elicits support for the theory of a 50-50 nation: When asked this in a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll this past April, 44% of Americans responded pro-choice and 47% pro-life, a statistical dead-heat. (The previous time the question had been asked, in summer 2003, the split was 44-44.) But when Americans are presented with broader options, the picture of the country becomes considerably more nuanced. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in May 2004 produced the following results:
A CBS News poll conducted over the very same four-day period asked, "Which of these comes closest to your view? Abortion should be generally available to those who want it. Abortion should be available, but under stricter limits than it is now. OR, Abortion should not be permitted." This poll produced a 36% - 37% - 25% split. In short, Americans will divide themselves over abortion in roughly equal proportions into however many different options are offered, with most collecting in a vague sort of "sometimes yes, sometimes no" category. It is safe to say that the vast majority of Americans oppose abortions, and the vast majority support a woman's right to choose; most Americans would restrict abortion, and most would allow it. This may be frustrating for politicians who want cleanly to divide the public - but it appears to be even more frustrating for average Americans who, in the aggregate, reflect, far better than those who claim to lead them, the subtlety, complexity and often ambiguity of important issues. Even on abortion, Americans are not polarized. Rather, they are "spectrumized": As with the nation's motto, E pluribus unum, a general national consensus can be espied on the vast majority of issues, although it is arrayed across a broad spectrum of "micro-opinions." Of course, it is the dynamic of the two-party system to attempt to split this spectrum into two (hopefully slightly unequal) parts, but such attempted polarizing divisions are, in fact, artificial and unreflective of the underlying, both diverse and generally homogenized, public opinion. Which is why, as the parties' respective agendas have grown increasingly detached from the concerns and realities of the vast majority of Americans, voter participation has plummeted to the lowest levels in the industrialized world and those who profess no party affiliation at all essentially equal voters who identify with either of the major parties. THE POLITICAL BEACHFRONT Public opinion as a broad and continuous spectrum echoes another analogy: In the classic economic theory of political party behavior - to quote a popular American advertising tag-line - life's a beach. The political parties are competing vendors of cool comforts. Their sunbathing, potential soft-drink customers, like America's voters, are distributed more-or-less evenly across a wide swath of territory, with somewhat more piled close together in the beach's main areas but thinning toward the extremes. The vendors - in America, unlike at European beaches, they generally sell from fixed booths - start out hawking their wares at opposite ends of the strand, catering to widely separated clientele. After all, one might generally suspect that the two vendors could best carve up the territory by positioning themselves about half a beach apart. But economic logic
says that one vendor will eventually realize that he can pick off some
of his competitor's customers by moving a little closer to those bathers
in the middle - and what can those at the far end of his clientele do
if he makes them walk a little further? The other vendor is still much
further away! Eventually, each vendor inexorably moves his soft-drink
stand toward the exact center of the distribution of bathers spread from
north to south - or, if one prefers, left to right - along the beach,
because that is the way for each to maximize his sales. In the end, both
are positioned side-by-side, smack dab in the middle, selling identical
products. THE SHIFTING TIDES And that is because something else has been happening while the purveyors of political confection have been jockeying for the same spot along the shoreline, moving left or right as they perceived necessary to tap the largest market share: The tide has been moving not left or right, but forward. The old two-dimensional line they have fought along for 50 years, and their hard-won positions - whether left, right or centrist - are increasingly behind the advancing tide and more-or-less washed out. No wonder most Americans not only find the choice unmeaningful but also have been withdrawing up the littoral and away from the political for some time. Imagine making modern Americans choose between Jacksonians and Whigs (the political divisions of the early 19th Century and forerunners respectively of today's Democrats and Republicans - more recent but about as penetrable today as the distinction between Guelphs and Ghibellines). It's not that the differences aren't deep and real - it's that they are increasingly irrelevant to today's world. Of course, it is extreme to equate today's candidates with William Henry Harrison and James Knox Polk (presidents in the 1840s) - but only as to degree. In fact, the point is that both parties are essentially still espousing the agendas (which were hardly fresh even then) of the 1964 candidates, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, who are both as dead as Harrison and Polk and (while it will break the heart of partisans on both sides to hear it - which is sort of the point) arguably little more relevant today. The election of 2004 is still being fought over the terrain of 1964, not that of 2024. Last year, Karl Rove, President Bush's political svengali, said as much in the course of a lengthy interview. Likening America's two political parties to boxers in a ring who had punched themselves to a standstill, Rove asserted that both Democrats and Republicans had completely exhausted their governing ideologies and had little left to offer the future. There is little new in the assertion that Democrats haven't had anything different to say about government since the "Great Society" of President Lyndon Johnson - but it is new to hear the architect of much of the Republicans' current success admit not only that they are essentially Johnny-One-Notes ("cut government") but also that that one note is played out. Most Americans have sensed this, and have been seeking something that the two parties currently aren't selling, for some time. This is especially true of younger Americans - and thus increasingly true of the society as a whole. Several years ago, I taught a graduate class on public policy - focusing on the future of our Social Security system - to a group of young people from the post-Baby Boom generation (known in America as "Generation Xers") at the same time that my wife was conducting research for the US Social Security Administration on Generation X attitudes toward that same program. We found largely the same thing: a new generation of Americans who did not accept the shibboleths of either party. Younger Americans have grown up in a world in which all institutions are questionable - whereas Baby Boomers watched Americans overtake Sputnik and land on the moon, Gen Xers watched in their classrooms as the Space Shuttle exploded and killed the first teacher in space. They also didn't come home to 1950s TV ideal-mom June Cleaver - they let themselves into the house after school and fended for themselves until their (as often as not) single parent arrived home. Those young people today save and invest at higher rates than any previous generation at a similar age - Taco Bell, an inexpensive fast-food chain, began years ago to attract young low-wage workers by offering them "401k plans" (a tax-advantaged retirement savings system) - and they want control over their own Social Security accounts. But they also crave a sense of community and connection that most felt lacking from their early lives - it's why the TV show Friends resonated so strongly, and why Taco Bell sold itself not just as a place with 401k's but also a fun (perhaps outrageously fun) place to work. These beliefs do not fit easily within the agendas of either party: On Social Security, for instance, the evidence of my wife's systematic (and my anecdotal) research is that the next generation of Americans want far more individual control over their retirement investments than even President Bush or conservative think tanks have dared to propose - but they also strongly want to ensure that there is a "social safety net" adequate for all their fellow Americans. The Republican Revolution of the last decade with its iconoclastic approach to all public policies since 1929 - what they label with the catch-all epithet "liberal" - far overshoots where America's voters are headed. But Democrats' unwillingness to let go of the welfare state they so painstakingly erected in the mid-20th Century has left them far behind the electorate's onward march. A
NEW LANDSCAPE For 200 years, the Democratic Party has been an inconsistent mix of left and right, with one oft-overlooked constant: From the 19th Century battles over the Bank of the United States and Free Silver, to the Wagner Act to the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century, it has represented those left behind by what was then the New Economy. Now there's a new New Economy, and it has produced a different set of problems that demand different solutions. Just as no one would argue today over whether Democrats need to move "left" or "right" from the Party's historic positions on the Bank of the United States or free coinage of silver - we have simply moved on - left-or-right, liberal-or-conservative, has little to do with moving past the Progressive Era (early 1900s), the New Deal (1930s) and the Great Society (1960s), either. The economy against which these movements reacted is passing into history. One result is the growing strength of markets, the intangibility and statelessness of wealth and its wielders, and the concomitant weakening of government's ability to extract wealth from the wealthy and engage in other forms of economic regulation. In the last twenty years, Republicans (in fact, conservatives worldwide) have successfully shifted government subsidies to the rich from the poor - and now they're going after middleclass transfers like Social Security - while shifting the burden of payment from the rich to the middleclass. That power gravitates to the hands of the powerful is scarcely surprising - and hardly argues for further strengthening government's power to redistribute. Meanwhile, the reality of the Democrats' core historic concern - those on the short end of the economic stick - has changed. Whatever the growing levels of relative inequality in the New Economy, the absolute poverty of workers in our country has so diminished that to speak of most Americans as "working class" is hopelessly outdated: They are the "consuming class." Other than through an increasingly regressive government, the major way in which most Americans today pay a premium to those whom President Franklin Roosevelt denounced as the "malefactors of great wealth" is not as members of an exploited urban proletariat, but as suburban consumers. From regulation to redistribution - including the seemingly sacred Social Security - Democrats had better get used to the idea that, in the US at least, government as we knew it in the 20th Century is dead. But even as government is decreasingly regulating the market for its citizens, it is increasingly entering the market on behalf of its consumers. The Democrats' Number One issue of 2002, in fact - prescription drugs - centered on using government not to regulate drug manufacturers, but to aggregate consumer purchasing to drive down prices. The one Democratic idea in this area involving old-fashioned government regulation is to repeal it, ending the drug companies' use of the government to enforce market segmentation by allowing re-importation of drugs from Canada. Democrats do not seem to notice that, in all this, they are replacing the notion of government as cop with government as co-op - in initiatives ranging from tying government procurement to wage and labor standards (rather than broadening statutory requirements imposed on employers) to using police department gun purchases to bootstrap a market for gun-safety measures (rather than legislating them). Meanwhile, it is the Republicans who fight for government dictates, in areas from bankruptcy to copyright, that employ the full power of the state to carry out the modern fencing of the commons. (The growing Republican penchant for Big Government solutions on issues involving personal liberties is so well-noted at this point as to require little further comment.) Democrats are thus actually groping toward what government could be in the 21st Century - a bulwark of freedom, choice and egalitarianism in and through the decentralized and fluid networks of the modern world - rather than an old-fashioned, heavy-handed restrictor of freedom and promoter of entrenched interests. It is therefore ironic that the Party's "left" finds such policies insufficiently expansive of government while its "right" finds them unsettlingly threatening to major economic interests. What needs to change in the American political debate to reflect the underlying change in reality is our idea of government - and this is not a matter of moving left or right on a one-dimensional beachfront or a flat page: It is a matter of turning the page on the calendar. Until Democrats understand that, neither end of the Party's spectrum is going to present a relevant alternative message to the increasingly Hobbesian message of the Republicans. And Americans will keep looking at their choices and flipping a coin. |
The author is president of Public Works LLC, a public policy consulting firm advising state and local governments across America. He has served as a speechwriter or policy director for several Democratic presidential candidates and as a policy advisor to governors, US Senators, and Members of Congress nationwide, including tenure as a gubernatorial chief of staff. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Brown University, a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University, and a law degree from Columbia University, and has taught public policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
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The
conventional wisdom holds that the United States is a deeply riven society,
equally divided between two very different types of people.