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The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era
Even in this most partisan and dysfunctional of eras, we can all agree on one Washington is broken. Politicians take increasingly inflexible and extreme positions, leading to gridlock, partisan warfare, and the sense that our seats of government are nothing but cesspools of hypocrisy, childishness, and waste. The shocking reality, though, is that modern polarization was a deliberate project carried out by Democratic and Republican activists.
In The Polarizers , Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was then cast as the solution. Republicans and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label—with the toxic results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians, intellectuals, and operatives who worked together to heighten partisan discord, showing that our system today is not (solely) a product of gradual structural shifts but of deliberate actions motivated by specific agendas. Rosenfeld reveals that the story of Washington’s transformation is both significantly institutional and driven by grassroots influences on both the left and the right.
The Polarizers brilliantly challenges and overturns our conventional narrative about partisanship, but perhaps most importantly, it points us toward a new if we deliberately created today’s dysfunctional environment, we can deliberately change it.
In The Polarizers , Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was then cast as the solution. Republicans and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label—with the toxic results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians, intellectuals, and operatives who worked together to heighten partisan discord, showing that our system today is not (solely) a product of gradual structural shifts but of deliberate actions motivated by specific agendas. Rosenfeld reveals that the story of Washington’s transformation is both significantly institutional and driven by grassroots influences on both the left and the right.
The Polarizers brilliantly challenges and overturns our conventional narrative about partisanship, but perhaps most importantly, it points us toward a new if we deliberately created today’s dysfunctional environment, we can deliberately change it.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published December 28, 2017
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436 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 9, 2018
Full Disclosure: Sam Rosenfeld is a terrific human, and one I worked with during one of my first jobs.
I really enjoyed The Polarizers, which documents the effort by activists, political scientists, and politicians to "solve" the problem of politicians having no particular allegiances to one side of the issue. We talk a lot about polarization these days — about how it's creeping into every aspect of our lives, about how tribalism affects our relationships, even influencing who we date and marry.
On one hand, choosing our lives based on our values seems normal. And as Rosenfeld points out, this was actually a huge problem for politicians in the past. Your political party might have a majority, but that was no guarantee you could count on its elected members to help you pass legislation.
So party operatives, activists and political scientists went about solving this problem. If members of a party were subjected to ideological litmus tests, if the way parties nominated candidates changed, and if parties voted on political platforms, all that might indicated that your allegiance to a party wasn't just your mastery of a local political machine, but it would indicate where you actually stood on the issues. Then, party leaders would have a clear idea of where they stood when it came to tough fights.
Rosenfeld takes you through the nitty gritty of this process — I'm not going to lie, it's an academic book (though very well written) — and it follows the details of convention rule changes quite closely.
But overall, especially as someone who covers politics for a living, I found it to be some much-needed perspective on how we think about the tyranny of polarization in our everyday politics.
I really enjoyed The Polarizers, which documents the effort by activists, political scientists, and politicians to "solve" the problem of politicians having no particular allegiances to one side of the issue. We talk a lot about polarization these days — about how it's creeping into every aspect of our lives, about how tribalism affects our relationships, even influencing who we date and marry.
On one hand, choosing our lives based on our values seems normal. And as Rosenfeld points out, this was actually a huge problem for politicians in the past. Your political party might have a majority, but that was no guarantee you could count on its elected members to help you pass legislation.
So party operatives, activists and political scientists went about solving this problem. If members of a party were subjected to ideological litmus tests, if the way parties nominated candidates changed, and if parties voted on political platforms, all that might indicated that your allegiance to a party wasn't just your mastery of a local political machine, but it would indicate where you actually stood on the issues. Then, party leaders would have a clear idea of where they stood when it came to tough fights.
Rosenfeld takes you through the nitty gritty of this process — I'm not going to lie, it's an academic book (though very well written) — and it follows the details of convention rule changes quite closely.
But overall, especially as someone who covers politics for a living, I found it to be some much-needed perspective on how we think about the tyranny of polarization in our everyday politics.
November 30, 2020
Give this book more attention. Now.
Occasionally you read a book that takes your view on a familiar story (US politics since the 50s) and clicks on a different lens that opens up fantastic new insights. This is one of those books.
We all know that America is polarized today. What we didn't know before this book is that that process was an active effort, within structures incentivizing/driving polarization, by politicians and activists in both parties, following roughly the same logic, over the course of decades. Start in the 1950s, when neither party had a strong ideology, both contained liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and American politics existed in a so-called consensus around New Deal style programs, bipartisan cooperation, and incremental reform. In comes "responsible party doctrine" (RPD), which says a few things in favor of actively polarizing, or "realigning," the parties on ideological grounds. First, when the parties are so similar and cooperative, it is hard for voters to know whom to blame or credit for laws and policies. Second, it is hard for parties to differentiate themselves in the eyes of voters when they have no coherent policy agenda and ideology. Third, internal diversity means compromise and occasional incoherence, as in, how can you advance civil rights when a third of your party is made of Jim Crow Democrats? The same logic applied to conservatives.
The answer for numerous politicians and party leaders was polarization: seek more homogenous, ideologically defined, nationally organized parties that exert more control over members in Congress and present clearer choices to the US people who were also starting to shift in the 60s into liberal and conservative camps. They pursued this agenda in a variety of means: fighting to weaken party bosses at city levels, reforming Congressional committees and procedures to limit the importance of seniority in favor of party status/loyalty, creating stronger national party structures, promoting candidates at all levels who fit the ideological platform, trying to isolate or even eject moderates (for the GOP) and southern Dems (for the Dems). This process happened mostly in the 60s and 70s. Of course, this process was driven by the massive upheavals and realignments of the 60s, but it is important to acknolwedge that these people were pushing the wheels of history from within, so to speak. IN the GOP, for instance, in the 70s, you saw a strong effort to unseat non-polarized moderates like Gerald Ford who muddied not only the ideological waters but failed to present a clear platform and choice (think a later version of "a choice, not an echo) to the American people. Liberals felt similarly about bipartisan, supposedly non-ideological, old-style politicians like LBJ. By the 80s, the shape of realignment was emerging as the GOP had become the solidly conservative party and the Dems the solidly liberal one.
This is an almost tragic story, but an understandable one. The major actors wanted parties to be more than just assemblages of as many interest groups as they could stack together, however contradictorily. They genuinely believed that this kind of composite party inhibited important changes and send a confusing message to the voter. The result, after several more decades of polarization (now reflected in people's lifestyles, locations, brand choices, etc-see Prius or Pickup). In an argument similar to that of Mann and Ornstein, Rosenfeld says that polarization has collided with the Madisonian structure of our political system to produce paralysis, enmity, and more polarization. Our Madisonian system is designed to inhibit the formation of, limit the power of, and limit the duration of clear majorities (think staggered midterm elections, filibusters (not a Madisonian concept but it fits the bill) bicamerialism, separation of power, 2/3 majorities for some things, other procedures that slow things down), which means that compromise/negotiation are almost always essential for passing anything (the Great Society, for example, was highly bipartisan). But when you have polarized, highly ideological, and uniform parties (especially the GOP), the incentives are to obstruct when the other side is in power, knowing you can reverse that quickly, so that you can continue to present a clear and pure ideological slate to your polarized base. That's an essential dynamic of our politics today, and Rosenfeld brilliantly shows us how we got to this point.
The only downside of this book is that is somewhat inside baseball. There's a lot on intra-party disputes, reforms of Congressional committees, and mid-level party activism that requires you to really pay attention to sometimes dry material. Rosenfeld does better than most with this kind of material, as the book is pretty concise and he paints interesting portraits of these activists. So who should read this? Well, definitely every scholar of modern American politics, no matter the discipline. General political junkies should also check it out, especially those who have enjoyed polarization books like Ezra Klein's or Tim Heatherington but want a deeper historical background. In sum, I thought this book was brilliant and I'm sure I'll come back to it often in teaching and research.
Occasionally you read a book that takes your view on a familiar story (US politics since the 50s) and clicks on a different lens that opens up fantastic new insights. This is one of those books.
We all know that America is polarized today. What we didn't know before this book is that that process was an active effort, within structures incentivizing/driving polarization, by politicians and activists in both parties, following roughly the same logic, over the course of decades. Start in the 1950s, when neither party had a strong ideology, both contained liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and American politics existed in a so-called consensus around New Deal style programs, bipartisan cooperation, and incremental reform. In comes "responsible party doctrine" (RPD), which says a few things in favor of actively polarizing, or "realigning," the parties on ideological grounds. First, when the parties are so similar and cooperative, it is hard for voters to know whom to blame or credit for laws and policies. Second, it is hard for parties to differentiate themselves in the eyes of voters when they have no coherent policy agenda and ideology. Third, internal diversity means compromise and occasional incoherence, as in, how can you advance civil rights when a third of your party is made of Jim Crow Democrats? The same logic applied to conservatives.
The answer for numerous politicians and party leaders was polarization: seek more homogenous, ideologically defined, nationally organized parties that exert more control over members in Congress and present clearer choices to the US people who were also starting to shift in the 60s into liberal and conservative camps. They pursued this agenda in a variety of means: fighting to weaken party bosses at city levels, reforming Congressional committees and procedures to limit the importance of seniority in favor of party status/loyalty, creating stronger national party structures, promoting candidates at all levels who fit the ideological platform, trying to isolate or even eject moderates (for the GOP) and southern Dems (for the Dems). This process happened mostly in the 60s and 70s. Of course, this process was driven by the massive upheavals and realignments of the 60s, but it is important to acknolwedge that these people were pushing the wheels of history from within, so to speak. IN the GOP, for instance, in the 70s, you saw a strong effort to unseat non-polarized moderates like Gerald Ford who muddied not only the ideological waters but failed to present a clear platform and choice (think a later version of "a choice, not an echo) to the American people. Liberals felt similarly about bipartisan, supposedly non-ideological, old-style politicians like LBJ. By the 80s, the shape of realignment was emerging as the GOP had become the solidly conservative party and the Dems the solidly liberal one.
This is an almost tragic story, but an understandable one. The major actors wanted parties to be more than just assemblages of as many interest groups as they could stack together, however contradictorily. They genuinely believed that this kind of composite party inhibited important changes and send a confusing message to the voter. The result, after several more decades of polarization (now reflected in people's lifestyles, locations, brand choices, etc-see Prius or Pickup). In an argument similar to that of Mann and Ornstein, Rosenfeld says that polarization has collided with the Madisonian structure of our political system to produce paralysis, enmity, and more polarization. Our Madisonian system is designed to inhibit the formation of, limit the power of, and limit the duration of clear majorities (think staggered midterm elections, filibusters (not a Madisonian concept but it fits the bill) bicamerialism, separation of power, 2/3 majorities for some things, other procedures that slow things down), which means that compromise/negotiation are almost always essential for passing anything (the Great Society, for example, was highly bipartisan). But when you have polarized, highly ideological, and uniform parties (especially the GOP), the incentives are to obstruct when the other side is in power, knowing you can reverse that quickly, so that you can continue to present a clear and pure ideological slate to your polarized base. That's an essential dynamic of our politics today, and Rosenfeld brilliantly shows us how we got to this point.
The only downside of this book is that is somewhat inside baseball. There's a lot on intra-party disputes, reforms of Congressional committees, and mid-level party activism that requires you to really pay attention to sometimes dry material. Rosenfeld does better than most with this kind of material, as the book is pretty concise and he paints interesting portraits of these activists. So who should read this? Well, definitely every scholar of modern American politics, no matter the discipline. General political junkies should also check it out, especially those who have enjoyed polarization books like Ezra Klein's or Tim Heatherington but want a deeper historical background. In sum, I thought this book was brilliant and I'm sure I'll come back to it often in teaching and research.
February 6, 2020
I wanted to like this book more because I think Rosenfeld does important work - bridging history and the American Political Development school in political science - that "brings the ideologues back in" to the history of party reform and realignment. On the one hand, he does a really solid job telling the story of how activists took over the parties and does an able job bringing this to the present. On the other hand, he *only* writes about the people. The social cleavages and social change that animated the "polarizers" (race, the Vietnam war, environmentalism, the role of the state, etc) are basically treated as exogenous, which makes this a fairly bloodless account of an epochal change that we're all still living with. R. basically admits as much in his bibliographic essay, but it is a definite weakness.
January 15, 2021
As a boomer, I found that this book brought many "aha! moments." It put many news events I remembered from my past into context, and offered insights into the ways the two major political parties have changed during my lifetime. It also exposes the underlying philosophical beliefs that fueled the changes, and how we got from the era that touted the importance of compromise to the polarized place we find ourselves in today.
Read
January 31, 2024Really interesting book that explains state of our current party system (or at least what lead to 2016). Wish there was a little more context about the effect of civil rights on polarization as well as a more straightforward timelines after reaching the Reagan presidency.
April 9, 2019
Another one who wants and needs a "strong America", a "great America", who is upset because politicians talk instead of "uniting us" to do "great" somethings.
August 9, 2021
Very relevant and well researched, utterly boring.
December 2, 2022
See my complete review of this detailed history of the Republican and Democratic Parties since WWII here: https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/.c/...
February 3, 2024
This book was incredibly informative, though a bit tedious.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews