Are Polarized Politics Necessary?
by Renée Paradis
During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, then-candidate Obama promised an end to the bipartisan rancor of Washington politics. This was partly a not-very-subtle suggestion that, if elected, Hillary Clinton might re-ignite the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that made the political climate of the 1990s so toxic. Obama suggested that by electing him, America might enjoy a calmer, less shrill political climate and that Washington, in turn, would be more congenial, more responsive to a moderate public.
Instead, what we’ve observed, over the past year and a half, is a national political discourse likely to be stuck on the “shrill” setting for quite some time.
Alan I. Abramowitz’s new book, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy, posits that what fuels the oft-bemoaned vitriol from both sides of the aisle is not a disconnected, bickering political class, but instead an increasingly polarized, increasingly politically engaged public. He also argues that this polarization is a natural consequence of the realignment of the two major political 
parties following Democratic support for the civil rights movement and the subsequent Republican “southern strategy” in the last third of the twentieth century.
Abramowitz spends the first third of his book demonstrating that it is the most engaged — and therefore the most civically responsible — citizens that are the most polarized. Abramowitz then argues that, contrary to some conventional wisdom, what ails us is not a polarized political elite that has lost touch with America outside the Beltway. Instead, polarized Washington reflects that the majority of citizens who vote, donate money, volunteer for a campaign, or otherwise help a particular politician get elected, are themselves deeply polarized.
The most provocative part of Abramowitz’s thesis may be his notion that this development is not entirely a bad thing. Rather, Abramowitz argues, offering voters a clear choice between opposing ideologies has had the effect of engaging more voters, and gives voters a genuine choice between different outcomes at the ballot box. That polarization has, in turn, increased political participation: when the prospect of the other side winning makes your blood boil, you’re more likely to do what you can to ensure that doesn’t happen.
In many ways, the most interesting chapter of The Disappearing Center is the final one, in which Abramowitz discusses the effects of this polarization on governance. The book seems to have gone to press just a few weeks after Barack Obama’s inauguration, before the last long year of health care reform “debate” conducted by Hitler-mustachioed placard. But Abramowitz sagely argues that we should have expected this. In a polarized system, no real bipartisan compromise is possible: compromise will enrage a representative’s supporters, and it will not win her any votes from the other side.
Instead, effective government in a polarized system requires responsible party governance: when voters express strong policy preferences via an election, the newly elected majority party should deliver those policies in government. Abramowitz identifies two structural problems in American government, however, that stand in the way of responsible party governance: the possibility for divided government, where the President's party does not control either one or both houses of Congress; and the Senate, which through its gross mal-apportionment and its cloture rules, can prevent a popular majority from controlling Congress.
Abramowitz devotes his efforts to making a detailed statistical case for increasing polarization in the electorate over the last few decades. In doing so, he engages commentators like Morris P. Fiorina, who argued in his 2004 book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America that Americans are largely moderate. This is no doubt an important empirical case to be made, and Abramowitz makes it convincingly. But to the lay reader, the most compelling and puzzling questions raised by The Disappearing Center do not concern whether America is increasingly locked into political polarization, but what is to be done about it—questions that the book does not set out to address.
As we have seen during the past year, while growing polarization may mean increased political participation by more engaged voters, it also means that increasingly, getting anything done in American government may become impossible—not because our elected representatives have lost touch with the moderating American public, but instead because they listen to us to a fault.
Writing from Berlin, Renée Paradis is a former Brennan Center staff Attorney.