Going to extremes: Why both parties are failing America

Since 2016, the proportion who say they would never vote for Donald Trump has risen, especially among independents. Picture: AFP

In 1950, a blue-ribbon panel of the American Political Science Association produced a landmark report on the state of America’s political parties.

The fundamental problem, the report argued, was that the Democrats and the Republicans were far too similar. Hewing to the middle ground, they didn’t ­advance “policy alternatives on matters of close interest to the whole country”, but were instead cloaking their positions in a “fog of ambiguity”.

Greater clarity on party platforms, and an increased distance between the parties, was needed to sustain a “more reasonable ­discussion of public affairs” in which genuinely different stances would contend, enhancing policy formation and political accountability.

Yes, the report recognised, starker differentiation would sharpen party divisions; but there was no reason to think it would “cause the parties to erect between themselves an ideological wall”, much less provoke intractable conflict.

Viewed from today’s perspective, the report may seem a textbook case of being careless about one’s wishes. It is, after all, un­deniable that the parties have moved sharply apart, exactly as the report recommended – with results that are everywhere decried.

Thus, in 1976, the American National Election Study found that just half the electorate thought the Republicans were more conservative than the ­Democrats; by the 2010s, voters overwhelmingly believed the ­parties were separated by an ideological gulf.

Nor were voters’ perceptions inaccurate. In the 1960s, the average congressional Democrat was just 25 percentage points more likely to support a “liberal” legislative proposal than the average Republican. Now that gap has ­become an 80-percentage-point chasm.

As the parties have diverged, so have voters, moving to the party that best reflects their views. In 1972, barely a quarter of Democrats were liberals; by 2012, that share had doubled. Meanwhile, the conservative ranks in the ­Republican Party grew from less than half the party in 1972 to three-quarters.

With both those proportions rising since then, there are virtually no conservatives left among the Democrats and no liberals among the Republicans.

Little wonder then that the media constantly laments the “polarisation” of American politics, and more broadly of American society.

But those reports should be ­interpreted with caution.

To begin with, as Stanford’s Morris Fiorina has argued, the preferences of American voters, when arrayed on a left-right scale, remain heavily concentrated at the centre, with the spread scarcely budging over the decades.

The average American has therefore not become more intensely ideological; rather, the electorate has, in Fiorina’s celebrated phrase, become better “sorted”, with conservative voters identifying with one party and ­liberal voters with another – much as happens in other two-party systems, including our own.

Joe Biden and the Democrats enjoyed a better than expected performance in the midterms. Picture: AFP

Moreover, as that process has unfolded, the share of self-­declared “independents” in the electorate has nearly doubled, going from 20 per cent in 1980 to 40 per cent today.

Viewed as a whole, those trends mean that election outcomes continue to be determined in the electorate’s middle ground. In effect, with Republicans and Democrats each accounting for only 30 per cent of the electorate, neither party can prevail without significant support from the voters who describe themselves as “moderates”.

And as US elections have become increasingly competitive – the 2016 electoral college outcome hinged on less than 3/5000ths of the vote – small shifts in those voters’ preferences can prove decisive.

But while the middle ground still determines which party prevails, it is not the middle ground that determines the parties’ positioning. Rather, unlike other two-party systems, where party organ­isations exercise some control over nominations, the exceptionally open nature of US political parties effectively vests much of that power in the serried ranks of committed partisans.

Preferring purity to power, those partisans – who account for less than 15 per cent of electorate – have pushed the parties progressively further away from the centrist voters they need to woo.

Trump supporters celebrate the former president's announcement that he will run again in 2024. Picture: AFP.

Last week’s midterms starkly brought home the costs of that disconnect – and not just for the Republicans.

Between the 2018 midterms and those last week, the Democrats lost some 12 million votes, with their midterm vote share falling to levels not seen since the “red waves” of the Obama years. That should have been terrific news for the Republicans; but unlike the 2010 midterms, when they secured a 19 percentage points plurality among independents, very few of the voters who abandoned the Democrats moved their way, particularly in marginal districts.

Looking forward, it is difficult to believe those moderates could be lured to the Grand Old Party by Donald Trump. In 2016, just 15 per cent of the electorate liked him a lot and nearly half disliked him – but Hillary Clinton’s figures were marginally worse, with Trump at least promising change.

Even so, he decisively lost the popular vote, only prevailing by falling an inch over the line in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And since then, the proportion who say they would never vote for Trump has risen, especially among independents, while what he promises is not change but a return to the past.

As for the Democrats, their better than expected performance in the midterms, along with the prospect of the GOP descending into chaos as Trump’s campaign gets under way, may induce activists to push the party further to the left, alienating an even greater number of moderates.

There is consequently a risk that both parties will veer to the extremes as 2024 approaches. And as they do so, neither party will be in a mood to compromise – which, in a system of government that makes it uniquely difficult for policy proposals to live and uniquely easy for them to die, could readily result in gridlock.

Gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore and US President Joe Biden pose for pictures with supporters during a rally on the eve of the US midterm elections. Picture: AFP.

Adding to the problems, the Supreme Court’s renewed crackdown on delegated powers – that is, on the ability of the administration and of administrative agencies to act in the absence of clear legislative authority – could prevent the executive from “muddling through”, as successive presidents did in the 2000s when congressional gridlock paralysed decision-making.

That shouldn’t have much ­effect on foreign policy; but the failure to address pressing domestic concerns can only exacerbate the public’s disenchantment with the political process.

What the American Political Science Association’s blue-­ribbon panel would make of all this is hard to say. Perhaps they would pine, remorsefully, for the days when the comedian Mort Sahl could joke that the tough choice Americans faced was between the “extremes” of Republican “gradualism” and Democrat “moderation”.

Or more realistically, they might note that the US has always been a difficult country to govern but that those difficulties neither stymied its rise to greatness nor undermined its role as the arsenal of democracy and defender of freedom. With a threatening future, let’s hope that in saying that, they would, this time, be right.