March 2015 brought another unprecedented event, when Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and forty-six other Republican senators wrote an open letter to Iran’s leaders insisting that President Obama had no authority to negotiate a deal over Iran’s nuclear program. Opposed to the Iran deal and angered by Obama’s decision to use an “executive agreement” rather than a treaty, Senate Republicans intervened in diplomatic negotiations, long the domain of the executive branch. Florida senator Bill Nelson, a moderate Democrat, described the letter as “jaw-dropping….I couldn’t help but reflect, would I have signed such a letter under President George W. Bush? I would never even have contemplated that.” Cotton and his allies had brazenly sought to undermine the authority of a sitting president.
A third norm-breaking moment was the Senate’s refusal to take up President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. It bears repeating that not once since Reconstruction had a president been denied the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy when he nominated someone before the election of his successor. But the threat of obstruction did not end there. In the run-up to the 2016 election, when it was widely believed that Hillary Clinton would win, several Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, John McCain, and Richard Burr, vowed to block all of Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations for the next four years, effectively reducing the Court’s size to eight. Burr, a senator from North Carolina, told a private meeting of Republican volunteers that “if Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.” Although the Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court, the nine-member Court had long ago become an established tradition. Republicans and Democrats had both defended the Court’s autonomy against President Roosevelt’s overreach in 1937. This was now unimaginable. Although Ted Cruz claimed there was a long “historical precedent” for changing the size of the Supreme Court, that precedent died shortly after the Civil War. Cruz’s initiative would have broken a 147-year-old norm.
With tactics like these, the Republicans had begun to behave like an antisystem political party. By the end of the Obama presidency, democracy’s soft guardrails were becoming dangerously unmoored.
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If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.
Behind the unraveling of basic norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance lies a syndrome of intense partisan polarization. Although it began with the radicalization of the Republican Party, the consequences of this polarization have been felt through the entire American political system. Government shutdowns, legislative hostage-taking, mid-decade redistricting, and the refusal to even consider Supreme Court nominations are not aberrant moments. Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”
Consider this extraordinary finding: In 1960, political scientists asked Americans how they would feel if their child married someone who identified with another political party. Four percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans reported they would be “displeased.” In 2010, by contrast, 33 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans reported feeling “somewhat or very unhappy” at the prospect of interparty marriage. Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an identity. A 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Foundation found that 49 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats say the other party makes them “afraid.” Among politically engaged Americans, the numbers are even higher—70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans say they live in fear of the other party.
These surveys point to the rise of a dangerous phenomenon in American politics: intense partisan animosity. The roots of this phenomenon lie in a long-term partisan realignment that began to take form in the 1960s. For most of the twentieth century, American parties were ideological “big tents,” each encompassing diverse constituencies and a wide range of political views. The Democrats represented the New Deal coalition of liberals, organized labor, second- and third-generation Catholic immigrants, and African Americans, but they also represented conservative whites in the South. For its part, the GOP ranged from liberals in the Northeast to conservatives in the Midwest and West. Evangelical Christians belonged to both parties, with slightly more of them supporting the Democrats—so neither party could be charged with being “Godless.”
The civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, put an end to this partisan arrangement. Not only did it democratize the South, at long last, by enfranchising blacks and ending single-party rule, but it accelerated a long-run party system realignment whose consequences are still unfolding today. It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo. In the decades that followed, southern white migration to the Republican Party quickened. The racial appeals of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and, later on, Ronald Reagan’s coded messages about race communicated to voters that the GOP was the home for white racial conservatives. By century’s end, what had long been a solidly Democratic region had become solidly Republican. At the same time, southern blacks—able to vote for the first time in nearly a century—flocked to the Democrats, as did many northern liberal Republicans who supported civil rights. As the South went Republican, the Northeast went reliably blue.
The post-1965 realignment also began a process of sorting out voters ideologically. For the first time in nearly a century, partisanship and ideology converged, with the GOP becoming primarily conservative and the Democrats becoming predominantly liberal. By the 2000s, the Democratic and Republican parties were no longer ideological “big tents.” With the disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, areas of overlap between the parties gradually disappeared. Now that most senators and representatives had more in common with their partisan allies than with members of the opposing party, they cooperated less frequently and voted consistently with their own party. As both voters and their elected representatives clustered into increasingly homogeneous “camps,” the ideological differences between the parties grew more marked.
But the sorting of the American electorate into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans cannot alone explain the depth of partisan hostility that has emerged in America. Nor does it explain why this polarization has been so asymmetric, moving the Republican Party more sharply to the right than it has moved the Democrats to the left. Ideologically sorted parties don’t necessarily generate the “fear and loathing” that erodes norms of mutual toleration, leading politici
ans to begin to question the legitimacy of their rivals. Voters are ideologically sorted in Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but in none of these countries do we see the kind of partisan hatred we now see in America.
Realignment has gone well beyond liberal versus conservative. The social, ethnic, and cultural bases of partisanship have also changed dramatically, giving rise to parties that represent not just different policy approaches but different communities, cultures, and values. We have already mentioned one major driver of this: the civil rights movement. But America’s ethnic diversification was not limited to black enfranchisement. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced a massive wave of immigration, first from Latin America and later from Asia, which has dramatically altered the country’s demographic map. In 1950, nonwhites constituted barely 10 percent of the U.S. population. By 2014, they constituted 38 percent, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044.
Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed American political parties. These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party. The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.
The Republican Party has also become the party of evangelical Christians. Evangelicals entered politics en masse in the late 1970s, motivated, in large part, by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP embraced the Christian Right and adopted increasingly pro-evangelical positions, including opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and, later, opposition to gay marriage. White evangelicals—who had leaned Democratic in the 1960s—began to vote Republican. In 2016, 76 percent of white evangelicals identified as Republican. Democratic voters, in turn, grew increasingly secular. The percentage of white Democrats who attended church regularly fell from nearly 50 percent in the 1960s to below 30 percent in the 2000s.
This is an extraordinary change. As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party. In other words, the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.
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By the 2000s, then, Democratic and Republican voters, and the politicians representing them, were more divided than at any point in the previous century. But why was most of the norm breaking being done by the Republican Party?
For one, the changing media landscape had a stronger impact on the Republican Party. Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats. In 2010, 69 percent of Republican voters were Fox News viewers. And popular radio talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham, all of whom have helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse, have few counterparts among liberals.
The rise of right-wing media also affected Republican officeholders. During the Obama administration, Fox News commentators and right-wing radio personalities almost uniformly adopted a “no compromise” position, viciously attacking any Republican politician who broke with the party line. When California Republican representative Darrell Issa declared that the GOP could accomplish more of its agenda if it were willing to work, on occasion, with President Obama, Rush Limbaugh forced him to publicly repudiate his claim and pledge loyalty to the obstructionist agenda. As former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it, “If you stray the slightest from the far right, you get hit by the conservative media.”
Hard-line positions were reinforced by well-funded conservative interest groups. In the late 1990s, organizations such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth became leading voices in the GOP, pulling Republican politicians toward more ideologically inflexible positions. Norquist demanded that GOP congressmen sign “no tax” pledges, essentially forcing them into an obstructionist stance. Thanks, in part, to the loosening of campaign finance laws in 2010, outside groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance—many of them part of the Koch billionaire family network—gained outsize influence in the Republican Party during the Obama years. In 2012 alone, the Koch family was responsible for some $400 million in election spending. Along with the Tea Party, the Koch network and other similar organizations helped elect a new generation of Republicans for whom compromise was a dirty word. A party with a core that was hollowed out by donors and pressure groups was also more vulnerable to extremist forces.
But it is not only media and outside interests that have pushed the Republican Party toward extremism. Social and cultural changes have also played a major role. Unlike the Democratic Party, which has grown increasingly diverse in recent decades, the GOP has remained culturally homogeneous. This is significant because the party’s core white Protestant voters are not just any constituency—for nearly two centuries, they comprised the majority of the U.S. electorate and were politically, economically, and culturally dominant in American society. Now, again, white Protestants are a minority of the electorate—and declining. And they have hunkered down in the Republican Party.
In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of “status anxiety,” which, he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social status, identity, and sense of belonging are perceived to be under existential threat. This leads to a style of politics that is “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic.” Half a century after its publication, Hofstadter’s essay may be more relevant than ever. The struggle against declining majority status is, in good part, what fuels the intense animosity that has come to define the American Right. Survey evidence suggests that many Tea Party Republicans share the perception that the country they grew up in is “slipping away, threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they believe is the ‘real’ America.” To quote the title of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s recent book, they perceive themselves to be “strangers in their own land.”
This perception may explain the rise of a discourse that distinguishes “real Americans” from those associated with liberals and the Democratic Party. If the definition of “real Americans” is restricted to those who are native-born, English-speaking, white, and Christian, then it is easy to see how “real Americans” may view themselves as declining. As Ann Coulter chillingly put it, “The American electorate isn’t moving to the left—it’s shrinking.” The perception among many Tea Party Republicans that their America is disappearing helps us understand the appeal of such slogans as “Take Our Country Back” or “Make America Great Again.” The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.
Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump learned that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful—and that the pursuit of politics as warfare can be appealing to those who fear they have much to lose. But war always has its price. The mounting assault on norms of mutual toleration and forbearance—mostly, though not entirely, by Republicans—has eroded the soft guardrails that long protected us from the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies in other parts of the world. When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the guardrails were still there, but they were weaker than they had been in a century—and things were about to get worse.
8
Trump Against the Guardrails
D
onald Trump’s first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, America’s new president began his tenure by launching blistering rhetorical attacks on his opponents. He called the media the “enemy of the American people,” questioned judges’ legitimacy, and threatened to cut federal funding to major cities. Predictably, these attacks triggered dismay, shock, and anger across the political spectrum. Journalists found themselves at the front lines, exposing—but also provoking—the president’s norm-breaking behavior. A study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found that the major news outlets were “unsparing” in their coverage of the Trump administration’s first hundred days. Of news reports with a clear tone, the study found, 80 percent were negative—much higher than under Clinton (60 percent), George W. Bush (57 percent), and Obama (41 percent).
Soon, Trump administration officials were feeling besieged. Not a single week went by in which press coverage wasn’t at least 70 percent negative. And amid swirling rumors about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, a high-profile special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed to oversee investigations into the case. Just a few months into his presidency, President Trump faced talk of impeachment. But he retained the support of his base, and like other elected demagogues, he doubled down. He claimed his administration was beset by powerful establishment forces, telling graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” The question, then, was how Trump would respond. Would an outsider president who considered himself to be under unwarranted assault lash out, as happened in Peru and Turkey?