what causes US political polarization?
The jet airplane?
Smith: It’s interesting to hear Alan Greenspan talk about some of the factors that led to the change. He said one of them, he thinks, is the jet plane. Because now members from the West Coast, instead of bringing their families to live in D.C. – that’s something that you hear over and over again – that, in fact, families were brought to the District.
Rumsfeld: And much less so now. You try to have a gathering for an evening celebration for some purpose and to include members of the House or Senate on a Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday, you don’t get anybody. They’re not here, the overwhelming majority. Unless they live in Virginia or Maryland, they’re not here. That’s one thing. The jet aircraft.
Another thing, I think, is the gerrymandering that has been developed to a fine art in our country. Today there are relatively few Congressional districts that are considered contestable. The threats that members feel tend to be in the Democratic Party from the left, and in the Republican Party the threat comes from the right. That tends to polarize the situation, and you don’t have this pressure, or natural political process that led people to work things out in the middle and to try to fashion compromises that would make sense for the country. So you end up electing people who tend to be most representative of their political party as opposed to their district. That’s, I think, maybe as or even possibly more important than the jet aircraft.
from Donald Rumsfeld’s oral history at the Gerald Ford Library.
Robert Gates offers different answers in his George W. Bush oral history:
Engel
As a person outside of politics through that interim largely, what did you ascribe that to?
Gates
It depends on whether you talk to Republicans or Democrats. [laughter] But it mostly happened in the House. Some people will say that it began with Newt Gingrich going after Jim Wright and the viciousness with which that took place. Others will say that it was the impeachment of Clinton. Others will say the cumulative effect of the Democrats controlling the House for 40-some years and the arrogance with which they did that and then the Republicans’ determination to take revenge when they finally got a majority.
But the thing that really began in the early ’90s was the steady erosion of the numbers—my best examples are in the Senate—of the people—center-left, center-right—that I regarded as bridge builders. David Boren called me in early ’94. He had been invited to become president of Oklahoma [University] and he was wrestling with it. He asked me to come down to his Senate office to talk about it. We talked for an hour. At the end I said, “David, there is an easy solution to your dilemma here. When you’re in your car or on an airplane and daydreaming, are you daydreaming about what you can accomplish at OU [Oklahoma University] or what you can accomplish in the Senate?” He just burst out laughing. He said, “That makes it easy.”
So you lost in fairly short order Bill Cohen, Sam Nunn, David Boren, Bill Bradley, and then over time Jack Danforth, Bob Dole, Nancy Kassebaum, a number of moderate Democrats, of additional Democrats. More and more from both parties, even in the Senate, which is less polarized than the House, all those guys from the center were disappearing. Olympia Snowe is the most recent. It’s not because any of them were in danger of not being reelected. They were just fed up; they were tired and frustrated because there was nothing happening.
Or maybe it all began with C-Span. Ari Fleischer in his W. Bush oral history, he’s talking about his time as a Congressional staffer:
Perry
Could I ask about reaching the public? You said you were learning so much about how it could be done in a noneffective way with the Republicans in the minority in the House. Can you talk about the role of C-SPAN during this time? I’m thinking particularly of Newt Gingrich’s use of that to foment the revolution of ’94.
Fleischer
What a great point. People forget, now with Facebook and Twitter, how revolutionary C-SPAN was and how, in the Senate particularly, it was controversial. “What? A camera in the Senate?”
A group of people in the House minority all of a sudden got this idea that if you delivered a one-minute speech, you could create an audience and you could market that speech. You could do things with the speech that the New York Times would never cover, that your normal mainstream media would never cover, so it became one of the first, if not the first, ways around the mainstream press corps to reach a targeted constituency. I think Republicans in the House came to it out of desperation and a lack of anywhere else to go, so it was good timing for them. If you remember, [Thomas P., Jr.] O’Neill ordered the cameras to pan the empty House chamber, showing that these are just speeches, there is nobody here, this is theater, which probably propelled it even more, because then people started paying attention. “Hey, it is theater; I want to see what the theater is about.”
It’s fascinating. In retrospect, if there is one thing I could change–and this genie is so far out of the bottle I don’t think you could, and I think Mike McCurry would agree with this too–I would no longer televise the White House press briefings. I would take C-SPAN off the air. There is a piece of me that is just–“haunted” goes too far, but if you think about the institutions in Washington that are held in the highest regard, with the most respect by the American people, it’s the Supreme Court, where their deliberations are entirely in secret, with no transparency, and up until 2008 at least, the Federal Reserve. Their deliberations are entirely secret. There is something about the massive exposure that also can coarsen democracy and that’s at work in the House, the Senate, and the White House. The genie is out of the bottle, but it did start with C-SPAN.
