By Dayo Benson Editor Politics,Law/Human Rights New York
Professor Robert Shapiro, is a former chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and he served as acting director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, ISERP, from 2008 to 2009. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2012, and in 2010, the Outstanding Achievement Award of the New York Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Professor Shapiro specializes in American politics with research and teaching interest in public opinion, policy making, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He has taught at Columbia since 1982 after receiving his degree and serving as a study director at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.
He spoke as guest speaker at a media briefing organized by New York Foreign Press Centre, on the topic “The History and State of current Partisanship in the U.S.”
His opinions at this media encounter are not reflective of the U.S. government’s, rather they are in his capacity as an expert.
“Now I’m going to speak about basically partisanship, ideology, and conflict in the United States; that is, the history of it and the current state of it. Also, after I’ve finished speaking, I’d be happy to take questions on, of course, any aspects of the current political climate and the elections that are ongoing here in the United States”, he begins. Continuing, he posits that the current conflict in the American politics has nothing to do with the incumbent President adding that same issue would have arisen if somebody else were in the saddle.
“The main thing I want to just emphasize here that the current conflict that you see in American politics between the parties and along ideological lines and along disagreements on policy issues, they would be present even if Donald Trump were not President of the United States, if Hillary Clinton had won the election or if another Republican had won the election, which also means that that conflict is here to stay to an extensive degree once President Trump has left office either in 2020 or 2024.”
He situates the conflict within an historical context that gave rise to political ideologies. “Now, the historical context of this is actually very interesting, especially for students of politics and political science in the United States. And people outside of the United States and probably many of you are not fully aware of the details of this, and I just want to give a very whirlwind summary of the last 90 years of American partisanship and political conflict”, he says.
“The starting point here is the nature of the political parties and where they disagreed. And during the last sort of official formal – what political scientists call political realignment that occurred in the United States, which was in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt become President. The parties then were the Republican and Democratic Party, but they were different than they are today in terms of how they aligned between each other and within the party along policy issue lines. And that’s at the level of political leadership, and we’ll also talk about the level of public opinion as well”, Professor Shapiro submits. He puts the issue in clearer perspective.
“In the 1930s, the parties were less consistently ideological and as homogenous as they are today, especially the Republican Party, but even the Democratic Party to a very great extent as well. The Democratic Party at the time Roosevelt was elected was the liberal party on issues of economic welfare, big government, ostensibly support for labor unions, and regulation, and that was basically as far as it went. That party was an uneasy alliance among northern liberals and Midwest liberals and southern conservatives, not on big government and those kinds of issues; they were perfectly happy with an expansive government to help with economic development in the South; they were perfectly happy with that – but they were a party that was conservative on economic issues.
The Republicans were conservative on economic issues, and they were the liberal – the moderate or even liberal party when it came to issues of rights and liberties. They were still the party of Abraham Lincoln, ostensibly supportive of the civil rights that were granted after the Civil War, to blacks in the United States, and they were also part of the party of rights of women. The Equal Rights Amendment is now a subject of discussion here in the United States, and they were the party where the Equal Rights Amendment originated, and it was in every Republican Party platform up until 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president.
So, the Democratic Party’s liberal predispositions were moderated by the conservatives in the South, and on the Republican side, the party was conservative on economic welfare type issues but more moderate-liberal on rights kinds of issues. “
Shapiro also contextualizes the parties’ internal ideological realignment from the prism of Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1960s. “Fast-forward to the 1960s. We’re going to bypass World War II here, but which obviously had a very transformative effect on life in the United States and the scope of government. And the next big change that occurred was – it was not the kind of political realignment that occurred in the 1930s that produced those kinds – the two kinds of parties that existed then, but rather an internal realignment that began within both parties. And the two key forces involved here, to different degrees, were the Civil Rights Movement, which raised the prominence of civil rights issues, the rights of blacks, and also the positions and politicking of Lyndon Johnson.
“The Civil Rights Movement put civil rights on the agenda. There was a big fight within the Democratic Party with regard to how to handle that issue. The northern liberal wing became ascendant, and together with Lyndon Johnson, and of course, spurred on by the Civil Rights Movement, the Democratic Party became the decisively liberal party on civil rights issues. They became the pro-civil rights party on those things.
“Key things that happened beyond the civil rights demonstrations and the consequences of that in terms of raising the salience of the issue, the big political acts that occurred, there was, of course, the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that desegregated schools, which is a big part of this and helped spur things onward. But it took a long time. That was in 1954. The big jumps then – the biggest jump then occurred in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and which was really, as they say, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which basically drove southern Democrats ballistic, so to speak.
“And that led to a slow – it wasn’t immediate. It was slow, but it was a process by which the Democratic Party became the liberal party on economic welfare and civil rights and labor issues and regulation, with civil rights becoming more prominent; and southerners, the southern leaders, either changed parties or otherwise left the party, or their seats in Congress were taken in districts where blacks had the right to vote and more liberal and black representatives were elected.
“Okay, so the South was no longer a big part of the core base of the Democratic Party, and it’s now the core part – a big part of the core base of the Republican Party.
“With regard to the Republican Party, the politicking there was basically twofold. The rationalization that the Democrats had for moving on the civil rights issue was – well, one, it was the morally right thing to do. That would be a claim that I think they would all state. But from a political calculation standpoint, there was no surprise that this would hurt them with respect to support in the South, and they thought – or at least, they concluded as an aspiration after the fact – that they could make up for their losses of white voters in the South through African American voters and possibly through – during that period there was the 1965 Immigration Act that eased things on immigration, possibly new immigrants to the United States, but they were a relatively small part of the population then.
He continues on the further realignment that attracted the South to the Republicans. “So, there was that realignment, and at the same time the Republicans seized the opportunity to attract the South. “There was Richard Nixon’s southern strategy that came into play here, and that strategy was very successful, and it worked.
He is not done. He put his finger on the consequences.“Now, that’s a great oversimplification of what happened, that it happened over a number of years, and the visible consequences of it didn’t become apparent until the 1970s. But from the ’70s forward, especially as new issues arose – there were a lot more issues than economic welfare and civil rights, issues like cultural values-oriented issues like abortion, gay rights, other regulatory issues having to do with energy, the environment.
“Part of the southern strategy was also a northern strategy by the Republicans to – basically to appeal to voters for whom law and order issues that were very important. “Now, you have to keep in mind law and order issues were very closely connected to racial issues in terms of problems in urban areas and problems of crime there and so forth, and also the welfare had a particular stigma attached to it, one of which had to do with the fact that there was the sense that the people on the welfare rolls were – the vast majorities of them were African Americans, which was not, in fact, the case, but there was that stereotype at play there as well.
“So, with regard to these new issues like abortion, gay rights that came about, law and order issues including capital punishment, the extent to which the courts should be harsher on criminals, and then also the issue of gun control came into play in a different way, more as a rights issue than as a law and order issue per se, which it used to be thought of as a law and order issue where gun control was very important in order to deal with problems of violent crime and guns. But that issue has been transformed into more of a rights issue where it’s the one area of rights where the Democrats are not the pro-rights party, but rather, the regulatory party on those kinds of issues.
“The other thing that happened, and it’s not unrelated to the fact that the Democrats lost the South, is that the parties became not only more distinctive from each other on – going to the present – basically almost every policy issue that’s emerged. In more recent years, immigration, and then in a more complicated way, the issue of trade. So, the parties became much more distinctive on everything.
“In addition, what happened during this period is that for the biggest part of the 20th century, from the 1930s going forward, the presidency went back and forth between the parties. After Roosevelt and Truman, Republicans and Democrats kind of switched off in terms of who was president.
But during that entire period, the Democrats maintained control for the most part, with a couple years of exceptions, of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which meant while the Democrats on occasion would have unified Democratic government – unified in terms of having a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, thereby giving them control of the courts as well through presidential appointments and other appointments as well – the Republicans were always, for the most part, faced with divided government. That is, a Republican president was faced with a Democratic Congress, making it difficult to pursue a uniformly conservative agenda across the board.
Despite the realignment of the 1960s that witnessed the ascendancy of the Republicans in the South, the party still found it difficult to have a uniform control of government i.e, President, Senate and House of Representatives , unlike the Democrats. This trajectory however changed in the 1980s and the 1990s. Shapiro explains: “That changed starting in 1980. When Ronald Reagan was elected, his coattails brought with him the election of a Republican Senate, and from that day forward, the Republicans have been competitive for control of the Senate. 1994, an equally and perhaps more important year, was when the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives led by Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House. And from then on, the Republicans became competitive for control of the House of Representatives.
“Now, that meant that it was possible for either party to have unified party control of government. And given that also the parties were so different from each other, the stakes in the elections became much greater. The obvious implication is that a party that has uniformity of control will enjoy the leeway to execute its agenda unhindered to a large extents. He emphasizes this and cites recent examples. “Elections have greater consequences because if a unified Democratic government were elected, they could do major liberal things, which they did when Obama was elected – first and foremost there, the Affordable Care Act. And then most recently, when Trump was elected, he was able to get a lot done upon his election: tax reform, deregulation, Supreme Court appointments; and then there were things he could do without getting congressional approval, such as dealing with changing the U.S.’s position on the Iran agreement and also the climate change agreement.
“But with a unified government and the parties different from each other on everything, it means that when the government goes from Democrat to Republican, things can change dramatically, and the same if it goes from Republican to Democratic. So, the stakes are higher. And there are a lot of emotionally charged issues involved here as well, particularly abortion, gun rights on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, but arguably more so on the conservative and Republican side as well. And then also, there’s the issue of gay rights and gay marriage and other issues related to that in terms of equal rights for gays and lesbians and equal treatment in terms of business dealings and the like that have come up as well.
“So, because the stakes have become greater and because of some of these emotional issues, politics has become more highly emotionally charged, especially with elections being very competitive. And it really can’t get any more competitive than having a presidential election. Beginning in 2000, we’ve had presidential elections in which one party won the popular vote and another party won the electoral vote. That makes things even more contentious, making the Electoral College another partisan issue here for the moment, especially because the Republicans have benefited from that. So, it’s led to emotionally charged politics.
Professor Shapiro relates the emotionally charged political atmosphere to 2016 election. “The other factor – and this kind of takes us to the 2016 election in terms of if we ask why Trump won the election. Well, a Republican won the election, in general, because it was a good year for Republicans to run. Usually, after one party is in the presidency for two terms, there’s – statistically, it’s been more likely than not that it would go to the other party. And so it was – that was actually thought to be a good year to run for election. We had 17 Republican candidates there, and it was – and you got a sense there in that race in terms of how united the party was, not necessarily about the candidate until nearer to the end, but in terms of how united they were on all of these issues taking consistently conservative positions, and also being very critical in a highly emotional way of the incumbent, Barack Obama.
“And we see this similar kind of thing going on in the current environment, although the irony here is that statistically speaking and historically speaking, this would not be a good year for a Democrat to run for president unless the president was perceived as vulnerable, and Trump has been perceived as vulnerable because of the close last election and also because of his lower – lowish popularity rating and also because of, to say the least, disagreements about his style and personality associated with his leadership, and I’ll say that in a milder way than I might normally say in another setting.
He identifies the factors that make the politics emotionally charged. “But – okay, so we have highly emotionally charged politics, and there are two theories about what’s driving the emotions. Now, one is it’s basically related to policy issues and political power and the ability to pursue a particular policy agenda. The stakes are high for that. But it’s also been highly charged and emotional having to do with the issues that played out in the 2016 election in terms of how the economy hurt certain sectors of the country, particularly white – well, it’s referred to as the white working class. It’s actually been identified in survey data as whites without college degrees who were hurt economically by policies during the Obama administration and how the economy went and in terms of jobs being lost in the United States, in particular in rural areas and small town areas especially in the Midwest, which were decisive in the election. So, there were emotional feelings attached to that economic discontent.
Related to that, or distinct from that, depending on how you prefer to think about it, is – were issues having to do with social identity in the United States related to increased immigration in the United States, illegal immigration, the “darkening of the population”, so to speak, transformations afoot that will lead the country to be evenly split and perhaps more minority than majority white going down the road. And there are a lot of emotions attached to those kinds of things as well. That might have been decisive in the last election. These things might be decisive again in the current election.
“So, we’ve got the conflict occurring both in terms of social identity and policy issues, and it’s hard to distinguish what’s the full driving force there. He predicts that 2020 promises to be more contentious than 2016 election considering the optics.“What we do know is that the outcome is highly emotionally charged politics, and if you thought the 2016 election was highly conflictual and emotional, well, we probably haven’t seen anything yet until we get to the 2020 election.
“And this has had all kinds of other consequences that we’ve seen as well. “That is, embedded in all of this is that emotions are so charged here, and disagreements are so charged, when it comes to justifying people’s political leaders and people’s positions on issues, all kinds of misperceptions and mis-assertions about reality and facts have come into play. And this level of emotional conflict has led to kind of people’s – it’s pretty clear that people see politics through partisan and ideological blinders, or blinders in terms of support for Trump or opposition to Trump.
“We have this whole – and also having a president that often misstates the nature of facts and reality has contributed to this a lot. It’s not that his supporters necessarily believe everything he says, but it’s clearly the case that their main concern is not him per se, but what he’s doing per se, and more importantly, what they think of the opposition. There’s a lot of what political scientists and political psychologists call affective polarization, affective partisanship or negative partisanship. That is, these emotions may be more of anger and dislike of the oppositions than support for the current leaders in each of the party. And we’re seeing this kind of thing play out in a visible way.
“And so, the punchline here is – and I’ll just return to where I started – even if there was a different occupant of the White House, these issue, conflicts and partisan ideological conflicts and the closeness of the parties in competing with each other, that’s here to stay. In addition to that, all of these social identity issues that have emerged that are highly emotional. Now, arguably, they’ve been driven to a new height by Trump and the Trump administration, and those kinds of thing might tone down a little bit depending on the next president. “But the fundamental conflicts are there, and the emotional level of conflict is there, and the stakes are there and very high. And there’s the big question about how to moderate this.
“Now, the one thing you have to keep in mind here is that these differences on issues first occurred – and there are political science studies of this, and I could show all kinds of slides that show this – but it began at the level – the conclusion of political scientists for the most part is that it was political leaders driving this change, although some people argue that the transformation of the Democratic Party was heavily driven by grassroots politics in the Northeast and the Midwest. So, there’s a little debate about who caused it, the elites or the voters. But the – in terms of driving it through, in terms of politics at the leadership level, it was political leaders.
Professor Shapiro explains that there is always a backlash when Republican leaders sometimes try to moderate their position on conflictual issues. “But all of this eventually penetrated, certainly by the 1990s – penetrated to the level of public opinion, that it’s the parties disagreeing on all of these issues, and increasingly so. I could show you graphs of where – in public opinion surveys, people who identify with Democrats and Republicans have split, moved in opposite directions on policy issues. It’s not the case that some political scientists and others have argued that it’s really the Republicans driving all of this, it’s really the Republicans’ fault that we have this conflict. They may – it may have originated with the Republicans, but the Democrats have really done more than their fair share in terms of splitting the parties on all of these kinds of things.
“The one area they’ve differed though is that public opinion surveys used to show, up until pretty recently, that it was Republicans more than Democrats that were less willing to compromise, which meant that even if Republican leaders wanted to moderate, they’re worried about being primaries and being opposed by voters, and opposition candidates might run against them in a primary election because they’re not sufficiently conservative or maybe not sufficiently supportive of Donald Trump.
The same bug, he observes, has eaten into the fabrics of the Democrats and it manifests in 2016. “But that’s changed. The last Pew Research Center poll on this actually has Democrats and Republicans equally unlikely to want to compromise. And we see it’s related to the split within the Democratic Party. After the 2016 election, part of the party was so disappointed that the moderate wing of the party won out and Hillary got the nomination and she was beaten, even though she got a majority of the popular vote – at this point, they thought the party needs to move further to the left and be more uncompromising in its position.
As long as the two parties are unwilling to compromise, the conflict will subsist irrespective of whoever is the president. And as long as the conflict is not toned down, there will be gridlock, and things will not be get done, he submits. “And we see this now front and center. It was clearly visible in the last presidential debate. And the big question is that – and I’ve already stated it – that no matter who the next president is, this conflict is going to still be there.
“And I’ll just conclude with the following question that political scientists have been scratching their heads about: Is there anything that could be done to tone down and moderate politics so that at least the spirit of compromise can come back and the government can kind of get things done? Because the kind of conflict that we have has been leading to gridlock. That is, the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, it’s very difficult for things to get done, with a couple noteworthy exceptions that are worth talking about. And that sets the stage for the current election. And I’m going to stop there. Thank you.”