(Columbus) These are my notes for a talk today at Ohio State University on the assigned topic of “civic partisanship”:
If “partisanship” means active membership in a political party, then it is desirable. Parties can be worthy components of our civil society, especially when parties are internally diverse and meaningfully organized at the local and state levels. However, participation in party organizations is very rare today. Parties have become labels for entrepreneurial politicians, and sometimes for voters, rather than organizations that do anything at the local, state, or national level.
For example, in my state of Massachusetts, which is heavily Democratic, the state Democratic Party has 6 employees and an annual budget of $7 million in an election year. In her uncompetitive reelection race the same year, one candidate, Elizabeth Warren, spent $28 million. Most people who volunteer in politics will work for candidates, not a party.
If a political party is not an organization but a label that people attribute to themselves and others, then partisanship is at least somewhat problematic. It discourages deliberation and cooperation with people who hold a different party label.
First, partisanship can encourage hostility. Affective polarization means disliking people of the opposite party. It has risen symmetrically for Democrats and Republicans to alarming levels. In 2020, the ANES asked people to rate the parties on a 10-point scale. Giving the other party a zero score suggests that one is affectively polarized. By that standard, just eight percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans were affectively polarized in 1978. These rates rose steadily in both parties during the 2000s, reaching 48% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats in 2020. That year, more than half of Republicans over the age of 60 rated Democrats at zero.
Note that youth were not especially polarized compared to older people. About 38% of people under 30 who identified as Republicans or Democrats rated the opposite party at zero. So if affective polarization is a problem, it is not especially a youth problem, and it’s hard to see K12 or college education as the main solution.
Second, even if it’s not hostile, partisanship can replace independent thinking about issues. There is no a priori reason that beliefs about Ukraine, vaccination, tariffs, abortion, and immigration should cluster in two ways, labeled Democratic and Republican. People should combine these issues in diverse ways. But there is evidence that many people put their beliefs together in packages based on cues from party elites.
That would be OK if it represented a valid division of labor. We could imagine that responsible and accountable professional leaders think carefully about issues and propose combinations of beliefs to busy citizens, who benefit from the professionals’ guidance. However, the influence of party leaders is problematic if they are self-interested and unaccountable, which is how I would broadly characterize elites today. Besides, in a two-party system, the choice of elites is badly constrained.
Third, when partisan labels are associated with left and right, this encourages a mental model in which everyone can be located on a spectrum. The very idea of polarization presumes that the left and right are located far apart or are moving further apart. This is a metaphor, not a fact, and it is misleading. People actually hold many beliefs that are more or less connected to each other with reasons. For example, I support Ukraine because I oppose authoritarianism. That is a pair of connected beliefs. Combinations of beliefs and reasons form networks. In any given group, individuals’ networks prove diverse when you map them. I have found that people who identify with the same party and leaders have unique networks.
When we think of people as polarized, we erase their individual thinking, which, in turn, discourages deliberation. There can be a vicious cycle in which we describe people as polarized, ignoring their uniqueness, which encourages them to become less individual and critical.
These points imply that we should teach students to appreciate actual parties but to be suspicious of partisan labels as heuristics. I also want to raise one other issue related to partisanship and civic education.
We have a civic religion in the USA, whose scripture is the Constitution. It is often used as the outline for studying government and politics. But the US Constitution does not mention parties, and its authors saw parties as grave threats to republican government. In a curriculum shaped by the text of the Constitution, political parties belong under the First Amendment as associations. This is misleading because they are integral to the political system.
What’s more, parties may be fatal to a constitution that establishes a presidential republic. In 1990, Juan Linz observed that every presidential republic except the USA had failed because the president sooner or later came into conflict with the legislature and was either defeated or became an authoritarian. One explanation of the survival of the US Constitution is that our two parties long encompassed opposing factions, notably white supremacist southern Democrats and progressive northern Democrats. Therefore, presidents were able to govern like prime ministers, assembling majority coalitions in Congress. That option ended during the Clinton Administration, when the parties sorted. Arguably, the Linzian nightmare has since played out.
94% of the time that the government has been shut down because of a conflict between the president and Congress has occurred since 1995. Three out of four presidential impeachments have taken place since then, but they have had no consequences for the president. Presidents of both parties have governed via executive order. Most recently, Trump has signed fewer laws but issued more consequential executive orders than any predecessor in the first 100 days.
If Linz’ theory is playing out, then it is political miseducation to teach students that the Constitution is an excellent design that, among other things, allows parties to flourish as voluntary associations. Perhaps the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact. Students should at least be able to wrestle with that possibility. That would mean, not so much criticizing partisan attitudes or habits of thinking, but critically assessing a constitutional order that cannot handle parties as we know them.
See also: affective partisanship and young people; People are not Points in Space; the Constitution is crumbling; the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; and putting the constitution in its place
