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The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch.
This isn't a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work.
The megachurch was built on an idea born in India by an American missionary. Donald McGavran spent half a century overseas, and he used much of that time to discover the way churches could convert large numbers of people to Christianity. McGavran observed that converts didn't come to the church one by one. They came in groups. And those groups were socially coherent—castes, villages, or families. The key to church growth wasn't in bringing individuals to Christianity but in converting groups, peoples. And these groups would come if they were appealed to as a "homogenous unit."
"The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufficient unit, but as a part of the group," McGavran wrote in this 1955 book, The Bridges of God. People don't want to come to a church where they hear a different language or eat strange foods. "Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers," McGavran wrote. McGavran said ministers needed to understand the culture of their constituents and recommended that they use the insights of anthropology to tailor their appeals to homogenous groups.
The church establishment largely ignored McGavran. The missionary arrived in the United States at a time when the pews were crammed with parishioners. The mainline churches needed architects and builders in the 1950s, not some bearded missionary who had spent the last several decades in India. But church membership began to decline quite suddenly in the mid-1960s, and by the ‘70s a new generation of young ministers was looking for a way to stimulate church membership, to fulfill the Great Commission's call to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:16-20). They discovered Donald McGavran and began to use his ideas to create churches in the "homogenous units" (i.e., suburbs) being created on the edges of cities.
One of those young ministers was Rick Warren, who stumbled across an article on McGavran in an old Christian magazine. "As I sat there and read the article on Donald McGavran," Warren wrote in The Purpose-Driven Church, "I had no idea that it would dramatically impact the direction of my ministry."
Rick Warren's story is now megachurch legend. He founded his Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and he used McGavran's techniques to attract members. Warren did his market research, even creating an anthropological composite of the target Saddleback member. He's "Saddleback Sam," a Docker-clad, cell-phone-carrying white guy who doesn't like organized religion and doesn't like neckties. That was the prototype for Warren's "homogenous unit," and so he built a church where Sam wouldn't have to cross many "barriers" to join. Sam wouldn't have to dress up for church, and he could look into the sanctuary and see more Sams, a "homogenous unit" of churchgoers. Warren stocked up on flowered shirts.
Ministers building these churches realized friends and neighbors were the best recruiters of new members. Like attracted like, which was an organizing tradition among evangelists. When supplicants answering the Rev. Billy Graham's altar call streamed to the foot of the stage, each would be met by one of the evangelist's helpers. The pairings weren't random. Graham insisted that young women meet young women. Older men greeted older men. Graham understood that the best way to cement the conversion was to show new believers a reflection of themselves within the church.
And the most effective recruiting tool was for friends to "witness" to friends their personal stories of salvation (Acts 1:8).
The marketing techniques all turned inward—friends talking to friends about their experiences in a church built for "people like us," which was the title of a popular book on church growth. The church wasn't designed to transform but to mirror a way of life. And the techniques worked.
It took until 2004 for what was common knowledge among megachurch chaplains to become the latest gimmick for selling a president. The Bush campaign in 2002 had experimented with different techniques to increase voter turnout, from door-to-door canvassers to the noxious (and utterly ineffective) robo-calls. Their tests found that personal contact with a voter was good but that an appeal coming from a friend or neighbor worked best. If it was clear to voters that the canvasser came from the same social hive, Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd told me, turnout jumped.
The Republican campaign in ‘04 recruited neighbors to contact neighbors, and it enlisted respected community members to serve as Bush "navigators," local surrogates for the president. The Bush organizers I talked with in Oregon and Minnesota instructed their all-volunteer canvassers to "witness" their support for the president. "We weren't there to convince anybody," one Oregon organizer told me. "We were there to give testimony of why we were for George Bush. And that's very religious."
The strategy was to reflect voters' beliefs and ways of life back on to themselves, so that the 2004 campaign wasn't as much about the re-election of a president and his policies as it was an affirmation of a local way of life.
The Democrats learned their lesson—they used paid workers who obviously were "not from around here" to do their canvassing in ‘04—and so this year the Obama campaign recruited an "army of persuasion" based on the Bush neighbor-to-neighbor model. In Wisconsin, the Obama campaign has hunters talking to hunters, women talking to women. At training sessions, "Obama Organizing Fellows" were taught to develop short, personal narratives that will explain to their neighbors how they came to support the Democrat—to witness.
Neighbors witnessing to neighbors is a marketing technique suited to Americans, who are increasingly sequestering themselves in communities, churches, and clubs with those who share similar ways of life and politics. The churches created over the last three decades have become some of the most politically segregated institutions in the country, a result of an organizing strategy built on the intentional molding of a "homogenous unit."
These tactics aren't designed to "sell" people something new or different but to show that the product (a church, a new concoction of PowerBar, a candidate) embodies the community's beliefs and lifestyle. "The message you've got to send, more than any other message, is that Barack Obama is just like us," Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill told the Obama fellows, according to the Washington Post. Exactly.
Politicians have been packaging image from the beginning: McKinley sitting on the front porch, Truman speaking from the back of a train, Madison Avenue selling a new Nixon. In the end, however, the message was the same: "Vote for me." Campaigns today are doing something different. They attempt to manage behavior by creating a social environment that encourages people to vote for themselves. The most important message a campaign has to convey is one of flattery, that the candidate is "just like us."
Self-government, however, is the opposite of self-love. Democracy is about meeting and coming to terms with people who look, talk, believe, and think differently from us. Government might work better if that democratic exercise began for voters during the campaign rather than the day after inauguration.
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Before last week, every time Valdis Krebs mapped the reading habits of those buying political books through Amazon.com, he found a few volumes read by both the left and the right.
Krebs used data from Amazon to discover the patterns among readers of the top-selling political books. He would find the other books that readers of, say, Liberal Fascism, would buy from Amazon. As he accumulated data, Krebs found that most books were connected to others. People who bought Liberal Fascism also bought The Obama Nation.
The pattern was always the same. There was one group of readers who bought conservative books and another that supported liberal authors. The maps Krebs made of Americans' book-buying patterns pictured two swarms: liberals on one side and conservatives on the other.
There were always one or two books in the middle-books both sides read, connector books between readers who otherwise had little in common. In Krebs' first map in 2003, the connector book was What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis' book on the Islamic world. The books in the middle would change with the times, but there was always something both sides were reading in common.
Until last week.
Krebs did another run on his Amazon book project, and the swarms flew onto the page, left and right, but the connectors were gone. The two sides read nothing in common. Readers came to the week before the election isolated, separated by walls made out of books.
Krebs' map is worth a few minutes of study. You can see there are fewer books on the red side. That doesn't mean conservatives are buying fewer books, just that they are concentrating their purchases among fewer titles. And look at the book on the bottom left of the red web-Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's book on community organizing. (Conservatives are studying their opponent.) There's a separate cluster of readers of Obama books, people who aren't connected to any of the Bush-bashing books clustered nearby. There are no books about McCain that seem to interest either the left or the right.
Given a choice, people will go to places where their beliefs are reinforced. In a recent study of Yahoo Finance discussion boards, three University of Texas business professors found that stock-pickers cluster. Those who think Apple is going up talk to each other on one thread. Those who think GE will fall even more find their way to the same little spot on the Web. Technology doesn't help people find new ways of thinking or seeing the world -- even when it might be in their financial interest. We still hunker down with those who hold our opinions.
(See "Melting-Pot or Homophily?: An Empirical Investigation of User Interactions in Virtual Investment-Related Communities," by Hsuan-Wei Michelle Chen, Bin Gu, and Prabhudev Konana.)
Morningside Analytics has developed its Political Video Barometer to discover the YouTubes being linked to by liberal and conservative bloggers. Who'd a-thunk the Batman vs. Penguin debate would be a liberal clip (linked to by 82 liberal bloggers but only 14 conservatives)? The 2001 Obama radio interview, in which the candidate talked about the "redistribution of wealth," was linked to by 262 conservative columnists but only 20 liberals.
When the YouTube videos are charted, they swarm, too: liberal YouTubes in one group and conservative videos in another.
And that's the way we live, in more ways than are imaginable. Full-size pickup drivers support John McCain at the same rate as white evangelicals (66 percent), according to a survey by Kelley Blue Book. Seven out of 10 Mini Cooper owners back Barack Obama.
We read apart, live apart, watch apart, blog apart, and drive apart; we are one country that lacks any shared experiences or, it seems, common purpose.
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When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards.
In an unpublished paper titled "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives," Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, and three other colleagues* looked for the underlying personality traits that defined left and right. Gosling is the author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. He's a specialist in analyzing what the things people have around them say about their personalities and beliefs. When it comes to politics, your stuff does define you.
Gosling's theory is that "ideological differences between left and right are partially rooted in basic personality dispositions." In particular, Gosling and his co-authors hypothesized that liberals and conservatives differed in two major "personality dimensions." Liberals are more likely to be open to experiences. Conservatives would score higher on measures of conscientiousness. Liberals would be more motivated by curiosity, creativity, and diversity of experiences. Conservatives would value following the rules, self-control, and order.
The psychologists conducted three tests, and they all produced evidence that liberals did show more openness to experience and conservatives did tend to be attracted to normality. The social scientists took polls and observed subjects in these tests, but the snooping came when investigators looked for physical clues in dorm rooms and offices.
Conservatives' bedrooms tended to have more calendars and postage stamps. They had more flags and sports posters. Conservatives' bedrooms were neater and better lit—they had more laundry baskets, ironing boards, cleaning supplies, and sewing thread.
Liberals' bedrooms had a greater variety of books (especially books about travel, feminism, and music). They had more CDs and a greater variety of music (folk, world, classical). Liberal bedrooms had more art supplies, cultural memorabilia, and maps of other countries.
These same traits carried over to the work life. Conservatives' offices "tended to be more conventional, less stylish, and less comfortable compared with liberal offices." Liberals' offices were more colorful and contained more CDs and "a greater variety of books."
In summarizing their findings, the four authors concluded, "Liberals did appear to be more open, tolerant, creative, curious, expressive, enthusiastic, and drawn to novelty and diversity, in comparison with conservatives, who appeared to be more conventional, orderly, organized, neat, clean, withdrawn, reserved, rigid, and relatively intolerant." Ideological differences were indeed more than skin deep.
And these personality differences varied geographically across the nation. In an earlier paper, Gosling found that those open to experience were more likely to live in California, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, and Colorado.
Conscientious states included Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.
Notice a pattern? Like that all but two of the "openness" states in 2004 voted for John Kerry and all but one of the conscientious states sided with George Bush?
Statistician Bob Cushing found these same differences at the metropolitan level using an entirely different set of data. In a study of how people were sorting by city, Cushing compared personality traits in high-tech cities and low-tech cities. High-tech cities were determined by their tech output and patents per capita. There were 21 cities that placed above the national average in both categories, metro areas such as Boise, Austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, and Portland.
People living in high-tech cities were more interested in other places and cultures. They were more likely to "try anything once." They were more likely to be optimistic and to engage in individualistic activities. High-tech cities grew increasingly Democratic in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 as they collected more people who described themselves as "liberal." (See our book, The Big Sort, for details.)
The 130 cities with the lowest levels of tech output and patent production grew increasingly Republican. Cushing found that people living in these places were more supportive of traditional authority, more family-oriented, more likely to engage in social activities with other people and more likely to attend church. People who described themselves as conservative were more likely to move there.
The differences—political, ideological, and cultural—were growing between low-tech and high-tech metros.
The election next week may well be a landslide. That doesn't mean the basic divisions in the country have gone away. "Political orientation appears to pervade almost every aspect of our public and private lives, possibly now more than in recent decades," Gosling and his co-authors write. "Not only does it describe how we think about and what we value in terms of government and society as a whole, but it also appears to leave its mark on how we behave toward others, travel, decorate our walls, clean our bodies and our homes, and on how we choose to spend our free time."
The Republican Party is likely to end next Tuesday in a shambles. That's when the countdown begins for the time when these basic American differences will re-emerge in our politics.
*"The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind" was co-authored by Gosling, Dana R. Carney at Columbia University, John T. Jost of New York University, and Jeff Potter of Atof Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
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My wife coined the term prespiracy to describe a conspiracy that had not yet occurred. It's a future conspiracy imagined into reality.
Well, the prespiracies have started. Republicans are convinced ACORN has hijacked the election by registering legions of Democratic voters (all named Mickey Mouse).
Not wanting to be out-prespiracied, People for the American Way bought a full page in the New York Times with a 125-point, single-word headline: "Fraud." The liberal-leaning group warned that Republicans were attempting to "suppress the vote" with efforts "which are well under way."
Predictions of another Rove-inspired election coup resonate among Democrats. My Democratic neighborhood's Internet newsgroup was buzzing last week with stories about jimmied-with Diebold voting machines, easily hacked vote-counting programs, and tales about how the last two presidential contests had been swiped.
(How liberal is my ‘hood? Well, interspersed with last week's election banter was a long-running conversation about how a neighbor should "live-trap" rats that had invaded her house so that they could be relocated. Rats, like cats, we learned, have an ability to find their way back home, so the rodent-friendly neighbor's initial question concerned the distance one needed to transport the vermin before it was safe to give them their rightful freedom.)
Both sides are front-loading conspiracies a week before the vote, apparently in order to make sure next week's election will lack legitimacy for at least half the country. (Maybe 40 percent, given John McCain's current standing.) Nobody wants to end Election Day with the simple admission "We lost."
I'm from Kentucky, so I know about buying votes. It happens. The mayor of Pineville, Ky., was indicted this fall for trading money and drugs for votes. (Pills have replaced a traditional half pint.) The mayor's son has already pleeded guilty. Votes were going for $10 to $20 a pop. A few years ago, across the mountain in Virginia, votes were going for sacks of pork rinds.
But before everyone goes totally over the edge about theft of the presidency, now might be a good time to revisit '04, an election many Ds still believe was pirated. The evidence of this theft comes from the exits polls, which were quite different from the final results. The exits showed Kerry winning by three percentage points. He didn't, of course—he lost by 2.5 percent in official returns—and the discrepancy between what became seen as the scientific certainty of exit polls and the messiness of a full vote count set off a thousand stories about stolen ballots.
The botched exit poll was a mystery, and so Edison/Mitofsky, the outfit that conducted the Election Day survey, set off to discover where things went astray. What they found was a country that has more to fear from division, distrust, and partisanship than election fraud.
The primary reason the exit polls in 2004 were screwy was that Republicans didn't want to talk to exit poll workers. Bush supporters especially refused to talk to younger exit poll workers with graduate degrees, according to the final report from Edison/Mitofsky. (No, the poll-takers didn't wear their degrees on their chests, like Boy Scout merit badges. In our culture, apparently, you can pick out the well-educated on sight.) More Kerry voters talked to poll-takers, and so the results skewed Democratic. The official report didn't speculate on why Republicans skirted the exit pollers, except to say that "in this election voters were less likely to complete questionnaires from younger interviewers."
Republicans may have also been put off by the network-news insignia carried on the poll-takers' clipboards. That's not too far fetched. The Pew Research Center found that Republicans had grown more distrustful of all media over the last decade. Republicans were less willing than Democrats to talk to exit poll workers from "television networks," according to one Fox News poll.
(This story doesn't end so easily. Here is a response to the Edison/Mitofsky report. Meanwhile, Mark Hertsgaard in Mother Jones was not convinced the election was stolen.)
The likely answer to the 2004 election hubbub is that the breakdown in the exit poll wasn't mechanical or criminal. It was cultural. The exit poll was fouled up because some people refused to talk to those they believed had a different political persuasion. And they thought they could tell their political opponents just by looking.
The failures of voting machines are a continuing headache. We all wonder why cash machines spit out greenbacks almost flawlessly but electronic ballot boxes seem to work no better than Crackerjack toys. But constructing a ballot machine that accurately counts votes is a problem with a fix.
It's tougher to mend a culture in which political opponents accept as a given that the other side will steal votes, a culture that is so divided that people refuse to talk to fellow citizens just because they look like they might be voting for the opposing party and where no election result is ever final.
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Enough already with the words. Think of this as The Big Sort scorecard for the election, several different ways of seeing how the geographic clustering of like-minded citizens plays out in presidential elections.
First, the sort itself. Here we compare the "landslide counties" in the 1976 and 2004 elections. (Landslide counties are those in which one candidate won by 20 percentage points or more, counting only Republican and Democratic votes.) Both '76 and '04 were close contests, but the distribution of the vote changed dramatically over those 28 years.
In 1976, 26.8 percent of voters lived in a landslide county. (Democratic landslide counties are in black; Republican landslides are gray.) In close elections, the percentage of voters living in landslide counties rose steadily. By 2004, 48.3 percent of voters lived in a county where the contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry wasn't close at all. About six of every 10 counties were won by landslide margins in '04.
In 1976, Democrats won the vote in rural America. Bill Clinton broke even in rural America in 1996, and then rural counties went solidly Republican. So did the exurbs. Cities—particularly cities that produced loads of technology and patents—swerved Democratic.
Basically, the more dense the population, the greater the Democratic vote.
One way to track the election is by this rural/exurban/urban breakdown in each state. Thanks to Tim Murphy and the Daily Yonder, we do that in the chart below for the 2004 election. You can see that rural and exurban votes were essential to President Bush's victory.
(For those who wonder about such things, "rural" here are what the OMB and the census classify as "non-metro." "Urban" counties are called "metro" by the feds. Geographer Tim Murphy created an "exurban" category from "metro" counties where 40 percent to 50 percent of the residents live in rural settings. On the bottom line, you can see that rural counties had 17.4 percent of the vote, exurban counties had 9.2 percent of the vote, and urban counties had 73.4 percent of the vote.)
Given The New Yorker's recent interest in the political significance of ancestry, I wondered why we shouldn't go straight to the source. This map comes from our friends at the U.S. Census. It shows the ancestry group with the largest population in each county. (Ancestry is self-reported.) It's sort of fun to switch back and forth between the 2004 landslide map and the ancestry map. You can see that Democrats didn't do well where the dominant ancestry group was "American." Maybe these are the folks Gov. Sarah Palin had in mind.
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While the rest of political journalism continues to parse the electorate by ways of life described by the U.S. census—Matt Bai gets up close and chummy with "white guys" in the Times over the weekend—we at The Big Sort will consider two measures that are much more telling:
Spanking and shacking.
Yes, if you really want to know how people will vote, forget "white working class" or "single, college-educated women" and find out the important stuff—like whether a potential voter thinks it's OK to give the kiddo a swat.
Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have done some remarkable (and fun) research into the relationship between child rearing and politics. They saw that the National Election Studies surveys in 1992, 2000, and 2002 presented voters with pairs of attributes. The surveys ask, for example, if voters thought it more admirable if a child was independent or showed respect for elders. Should a child be obedient or self-reliant? Curious or well-mannered? Considerate or well-behaved?
George Lakoff described American society as being divided between "two different forms of family-based morality," the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent." The two political scientists realized these questions essentially fell on either side of Lakoff's division—and given the nature of the survey, they could see if there was a political connection between parenting styles and party choice.
There was. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners, and being well-behaved. They were strict fathers. Democrats, meanwhile, were nurturant parents.
Hetherington and Weiler could see this split widen over time. (Thirty years ago, after all, nearly everyone was a strict father.) By the time of the latest survey, parenting styles were a better indicator of political affiliation than income.
The two academics also measured those who favored spanking as discipline for children. They found that the "correlation between traditional parenting practices—the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' approach—and voting for President Bush in 2004 is remarkably strong."
And those styles had a geography. Massachusetts has the lowest percentage of people who favor the switch and the lowest percentage of voters for Bush. Those in Vermont, Rhode Island, and New York were also unlikely to spank and were very likely to vote for John Kerry.
Meanwhile, the spanking states—Idaho, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Montana, Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and Indiana—are, for the most part, reliably Republican even in this year's Democratic-trending election.
OK, how about shacking?
Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe was mapping changes in family formation in the U.S. when he noticed that "blue" states were different from "red" ones. White women in Democratic Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, California, Maryland, Illinois, Minneapolis, New Hampshire, and Delaware were both marrying and starting families later in life, more like women in Nordic countries than those in Utah, Kansas, and Wyoming. In particular, Lesthaeghe found, the higher the rates of cohabitation before marriage—i.e., shacking—the higher the vote for Kerry.
The demographer said that he "could find no better way to predict the vote for Bush" in 2004 than how people were creating families. The more American families formed like the Dutch, the greater the vote for Democratic presidential candidates. (Here is one of Lesthaeghe's papers.)
Lesthaeghe, Weiler, and Hetherington aren't saying propensity to spank or to shack cause people to vote one way or the other. Their point is that family formation and child-rearing attitudes are part of a worldview. Our politics today are divided by worldview, not by demographic type. And those divisions are real and deep, as this increasingly bitter campaign attests.
"Little wonder our politics today are polarized," Hetherington and Weiler concluded. "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
Nor do we live in the same places. Spankers to this side, please. Shackers over here.
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"Jennifer" called into the NPR show "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday to describe a wonderful democratic experiment she and her husband were conducting at the business they own in North Carolina.
Their firm has about 100 workers, and she and her husband believe that "it's important for all of our employees to really be engaged and aware citizens." So Jennifer holds what she calls "lunch ‘n' learns" throughout the year. Sometimes employees will lead discussions on issues over the noon hour. (Workers prepare presentations on, say, health care and then talk about the issue from several sides.) During elections, employees may bring in candidates, who are allowed to talk to employees who come to the sessions. No one is required to attend, but Jennifer said her workers like coming to the events.
"We find that when we have things fostered in a really disciplined but civil way, we get people feeling much better about talking about it," Jennifer said. "It doesn't become as heated, but people become educated and engaged."
Wonderful, right? Well, there was an employment attorney on the show who warned Jennifer to watch out. "If Jennifer was my client," said New Jersey lawyer Stacey Adams, "I would probably strongly advise her against doing what she's doing."
Huh?
There are a "lot of potential problems, even if it's done during nonwork activities such as lunchtime," Adams continued. "I think that if one candidate endorses particular views which are deemed offensive to ... other employees, that could present a problem."
Welcome to America, where a lunchtime discussion of ideas among citizens who might have differing opinions "could present a problem."
Unfortunately, if people don't talk about politics at work, there are very few places left where they might have a face-to-face discussion with those who have a different opinion. Churches are now among the most politically segregated institutions in America. Neighborhoods have tipped either Republican or Democratic, and they have kept tipping as like-minded people have clustered. Even volunteer groups have grown more homogeneous.
Americans love to talk about politics. They just don't find many times when they talk about politics with those who have different political outlooks. (See Diana Mutz's fantastic book Hearing the Other Side for the details on our country's love of political conformity.) Educated people are particularly skilled at avoiding contrary opinions, according to Mutz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes that Americans with less than a high-school diploma have the greatest diversity in political discussion mates. Those with the most narrow political lives are Americans who have suffered through graduate school.
Democracy is greased with tolerance and understanding, and those virtues are more abundant when people who disagree find themselves meeting regularly face-to-face. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1848, "It's hardly possible to overstate the value ... of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar." It's hardly possible to overstate the rarity with which this kind of exchange happens in America.
There is one place in the social landscape where we are pushed into settings with a mixed political crowd. That's at work. "Of all the contexts with the potential for political interaction, the workplace currently has the greatest capacity for exposing people to political dialogue across lines of political difference," write Mutz and Jeffrey Mondak.
The workplace is one of the few settings where people of different political beliefs have to deal with each other, so workplaces are one of the last places where Americans are placed "in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves." In North Carolina, Jennifer's lunch sessions are the kind of hard, day-to-day work of democratic life that most of us avoid.
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This election is getting out of hand. For one rally, I read, the locals rigged up six horses to a wagon big enough to carry a pipe organ and a glee club with 40 singers.
Was this a prop for another Barack Obama mega-rally? Or maybe a Sarah Palin revival? Nope. The six white horses were put to the service of Republican William McKinley in 1896. A two-score political singing group was nothing special back then. Campaigns were exercises in organizing large groups of marching partisans. In Sullivan County, Ind., that year, both parties organized glee clubs for their candidates—although only the Republicans thought of the wagon.
The parties discarded the mass rally as a political device before the turn of the last century, replacing the energy of the throng with a more isolated, individualistic kind of campaign advertising. The grand political rallies went missing for more than a century, but now they're back, and the raw expressions of political anger and feeling produced at these massive gatherings have shocked both candidates and the press. We're simply not accustomed to having people play such an active part in presidential political campaigns.
Just after the Civil War, campaigns were based on these mass movements. The war shaped both the language and the tactics of political campaigns. "Elections were treated like battles in which the two main armies (parties) concentrated on fielding the maximum number of troops (voters) on the battlefield (the polls) on election day," wrote historian Richard Jensen. Party organizers had been in the military and so that organized their parties like Civil War armies. The language we still use in politics came straight from the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam: the "opening gun," party "standard bearers," "last ditch stands," "war horses," "precinct captains," "rank and file" voters and "spoils of victory." Voters would chant battle cries, wave signs and flags, and they would march.
Voters (only men had the franchise) were extraordinarily loyal to their parties then. "Men spoke of political attachments in the same breath as loyalty to religion," Jensen wrote, "for as one Presbyterian historian explained, 'Every man ... is expected to stand up for the creed of his church as he does for the platform of his party.'" Nine out of 10 Americans were firmly committed to one party or the other. Local elections became proxies for the national battle between the parties.
All this roughly describes politics today, a time of intense party loyalty, increased straight-ticket voting, and stark political divisions directed, in part, by theology.
And, of course, the most visible sign that we have developed a 19th-century attitude toward politics is the return of the mass rally.
We should keep following this parallel between the 19th century and today because, as I said, the parties found reason to abandon the mass rally as a political device. The change began after Benjamin Harrison won with a military-style campaign in 1888. Harrison appointed John Wanamaker as his postmaster general, and Wanamaker set out to change the way Americans ran their elections.
John Wanamaker opened in Philadelphia what was considered the nation's first department store, and he brought his sales skills to Harrison's White House when he introduced the merchandizing style to politics. Wanamaker, by the way, is the guy who first said, "The customer is always right" and that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted but that he didn't know which half.
The military approach to political campaigns was unpredictable, Wanamaker realized. The problem with mass marches and parades led by horse-drawn wagons, according to one Wisconsin Democrat, was that the events "stir up the other side almost as much as their own. The trumpet that sounds the note of battle not only inspirits its friends but awakes its enemies."
The alternative was a campaign of "education" and isolation—that is advertising. Instead of relying on torch-lit parades, the merchandizing style printed pamphlets and newspaper ads. War cries were replaced with reasoned arguments. Instead of inspiring dependable supporters, the merchandizing campaign concentrated on identifying and then appealing to independents and waverers.
The goal wasn't to increase turnout. It was to control the vote. And it was effective. The merchandizing style replaced the mass marches and rallies within a few election cycles.
Voters were unimpressed. "The voters' reaction to the new style educational campaigns was lethargic," Jensen reported. Partisan loyalty declined, apathy increased, and voter turnout plummeted. Advertising was more expensive than torch lights, so fundraising became a political preoccupation. The parties had more control over the electorate, but voters were dispirited. Isolated by the merchandizing style, they stopped coming to the polls.
Now we have two candidates who began this campaign as leaders of a post-partisan future running in an election that has become partisan in the extreme. Nine out of 10 Republicans say they'll vote for McCain, and nine out of 10 Democrats say they'll vote for Obama—party loyalty that matches that of the military campaigns of the late 19th century. Local elections have become nationalized, and people show willingness to march and demonstrate in ways that have been missing for the past 100 years. Funny how things work out.
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Bill has just finished a vigorous online chat with readers, and here's the transcript of the discussion. See what readers have to say about the diversity of political leanings in Alaska or the attitudes of people in the suburbs toward urban life. They also touch on the demise of the polite political argument. Good stuff.
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"Big Sort" blogger Bill Bishop will chat online with readers about political segregation and voter trends on Thursday, Oct. 16. Follow the chat starting at noon at Washingtonpost.com or pose an advance question now.
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Political polling parses data according to broad demographic categories—by sex, age, education, race, religion. The polls have been run this way for years, which makes it easy to compare results from election to election. It doesn't matter that these demographic descriptions are only a faint approximation of how people define their lives and politics. This is the tool political reporters have, and so they use it. (What's the line about having a hammer makes everything look like nails?)
Marketing people tell me they use demographic data only when they can't get the good stuff—the polling that much more precisely identifies how people will buy (or vote) based on more detailed lifestyle preferences. But when they can't get the lifestyle data, then sometimes demographic data provides an approximation of what's really happening.
So it is with women, who over the past generation have become more likely to vote Democratic. The numbers go up and down with the dynamics of a particular campaign, but the trend is there. To stop with gender is to stop too soon.
Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson wrote The Cultural Creatives in 2000 based on polling they had conducted over the years. They identified a cultural shift taking place, a change in values. A growing number of people were more concerned with protecting the environment than with expanding the economy. Cultural creatives sought deep relationships and were rolling their own spiritual lives rather than turning religion over to the establishment church.
Other researchers were finding the same trends. Daniel Yankelovich in the marketing world saw the ascendance of values over class, education, or work. Ron Inglehart wrote about a "culture shift" from his perch at the University of Michigan. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted a new Democratic majority coming out of the culture being created in the fast-growing tech cities.
What Ray and Anderson realized is that this culture shift was taking place faster among women than men. More women were interested in alternative religions, holistic medicines, individual rights, and environmental protection than men. When the two researchers counted up the core group of "cultural creatives," they found that two-thirds were women.
More single women are Democrats because more single women are cultural creatives. "It's not 'the demographics,' " Ray and Anderson wrote. Sure, it's simple to separate people by gender, education, income, and the color of their collars, they wrote, but "those conventional categories show only a thin slice of people's lives." To understand why people act and vote the way they do, you had to find their values.
So, where are all the good men? Demographically, of course, there are just as many men as there have ever been. But when Ray and Anderson examine values, not demography, they find a serious shortage of culturally creative men. "The bad news (for women) is that there aren't enough men to go around," Ray and Anderson write. There are lots of women looking for a new kind of relationship and too many men dropping out of college, watching mixed-martial-arts matches on television, and voting Republican.
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Let's get something straight. There is no "women's vote." Women vote, of course. But reporters write about the "voting bloc" of white women as if it has meaning. It doesn't. Elections aren't about demography. They are about ways of life.
Marketing people have known that large demographic categories like "white women" are meaningless since at least 1973, when a New York adman asked in the Journal of Advertising, "Are Grace Slick and Tricia Nixon Cox the same person?" Both were white, young, urban, rich, former Finch College alums and women. Conventional market research in the early 1970s would have plugged in all this demographic data and concluded that, yes, the blond-haired daughter of the president and the lead singer for the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane and author of the acid anthem "White Rabbit" were the same.
All of which made conventional market analysis meaningless, wrote John E. O'Toole, president of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications. It was so obvious the two had nothing in common that you didn't even need to go ask Alice. Tricia Nixon married a Republican White House aide on the White House lawn. The one time Slick was invited to the White House (a reception for Tricia's Finch classmates), she brought along her "bodyguard," Yippie founder and Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman. The two said they intended to spike the iced tea with LSD. The Secret Service didn't let them past the front door.
O'Toole wrote in '73 that statistics on income, age, and education—all the demographic "facts" we still use to divine presidential elections in 2008—had lost relevance because there had been a "Revolution of the Individual." People weren't living according to class or education or age. They were "forming liberation groups: black, feminist, gay, consumer, anything." Marketers had snoozed through the revolution and insulted people by discounting "their intelligence in favor of some vast common denominator."
People didn't define themselves by demographic markers, O'Toole wrote. They lived in groups "united by common attitudes or lifestyles or perceptions of themselves."
Marketing people long ago abandoned most of the demographic data that we still use to talk about politics. I talked with Chris Riley, a Portland, Ore., marketing guy who has worked for both Nike and Apple. Riley said people were forming communities of interest that had nothing to do with categories such as single, white, college-educated women. "I'm not allowed to use market research information, by dictate of (Apple founder) Steve Jobs," Riley said. "They don't trust it."
They don't trust it because demography—classifications such as a favorite from the Democratic primary, the "white working class"—doesn't get at how people live. "There is no (demographic) category for somebody who shapes his entire life around his concern for the environment," Riley explained.
After all, how many white, single women describe themselves that way. A San Diego woman told me recently that she was an "ocean oriented person." That's a more accurate political description in 2008.
Young ministers in the 1970s began designing churches for what one marketer called "image tribes." They created the modern American megachurch by catering to ways of life, not demographic types. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church wears flowered shirts in part because his "target" audience, "Saddleback Sam," "prefers the casual and informal over the formal." Megachurches tailor their services to lifestyles. One California megachurch advertises different lifestyle venues for its Sunday morning service—a "Country Gospel" hoedown, a gathering known as "The Edge" (with Starbucks coffee and Mountain Dew), and a "Traditions" hall with music from a baby grand piano.
The Bush campaign in 2004 was the first to catch up with marketing techniques that had been refined over the past three decades. Bush identified individuals by how they lived—the cars they drove, magazines they read, television shows they watched, ring tones they downloaded.
John O'Toole in 1973 told marketers they misunderstood society by continuing to "shout at a crowd rather than talk to persons." Bush's campaign was the first to run a campaign aimed at individuals rather than crowds.
Barack Obama has essentially copied the Bush approach, identifying the "image tribes" we travel in rather than the bleak and only occasionally meaningful demographic categories that appear in exit polls and are coughed up in stories about politics.
So why do women seem to like Obama more than men? (Pew had women favoring Obama 54 percent to 37 percent at the end of September, while men backed McCain 47 percent to 43 percent.) We'll take that up tomorrow, and also answer the eternal happy hour question "Where are all the good men?"
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French students who disliked America (and loved Charles de Gaulle) were once asked to talk about the United States for an hour or two. At the end of the session, conducted as part of experiments in the 1960s, the students disliked America—and loved de Gaulle—even more.
College kids who join a conservative fraternity move to the right during their four years in college. Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the end of their discussion than before. Racists brought into a room to discuss race grow more intolerant.
Social psychologists have conducted scores of these "group polarization" experiments since the '60s, and they all come to the same finding: Like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded.
Homogeneity creates extremity—or, in the news of the day, a McCain rally.
Republican rallies this past weekend grew heated. The headlines tell the story: "Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally"; "Panic Attack: Voters Unload at GOP Rallies"; "McCain: Obama Not an Arab, Crowd Boos"; "Supporters Jeer as McCain Calls Obama 'A Decent Person.' "
What's going on? The talk-show talk has been that John McCain and Sarah Palin incite this kind of behavior. They certainly haven't helped, but blaming the candidates misses what's happening, and why.
Social scientists have proposed several reasons for why like-minded groups tend to polarize. Two have survived scrutiny. The first is that homogenous groups are privy to a large pool of ideas and arguments supporting the group's dominant position. Everybody hears the arguments in favor of the group's belief, and as they're discussed, people grow stouter in their beliefs.
The second reason like-minded groups polarize has more to do with how we see ourselves. We are constantly comparing our beliefs and opinions to those of the group. There are advantages to being slightly more extreme than the group average. It's a way to stand out, to ensure others will see us as righteous group members.
"It's an image-maintenance kind of thing," explained social psychologist Robert Baron. Everybody wants to be a member in good standing, and though it sounds counterintuitive, the safest way to conform is to be slightly more extreme than the average of the group.
"One way to make sure you aren't mistaken for one of those 'other people' is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your Republican-ness," Baron said. "It's hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words, because you're afraid that other people will call you whatever. In racial terms, you'd be called an Oreo if you were black." At a John McCain rally, if you say Barack Obama is a "decent family man," you are booed ... even if you're John McCain.
This is social psychology as old as the Bible. Recalling his days as a devout Jew, before his conversion to Christianity, Paul said, "Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it." Paul realized that his extremity paid dividends, that he "profited in the Jews' religion above many of my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers." (Galatians 1:13-14)
Or, as Holly Golightly put it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."
Experiments confirmed Paul's and Golightly's conclusions. "An extreme communicator on one's side of an issue tends to be perceived as more sincere and competent than a moderate," social psychologist David Myers wrote. Hello, talk radio.
Those at the McCain or Palin rallies who talk about "hooligans" and "treason," who call Barack Obama a "terrorist," "bum," or "socialist," aren't simply responding to speeches from the candidates. They are acting as members of a like-minded group exactly as social psychologists would predict, which is a less-than-comforting thought.
In his textbook on social psychology, David Myers writes, "Terrorism does not erupt suddenly. Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances bring them together. As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme. The social amplifier brings the signal in stronger. The result is violent acts that the individuals, apart from the group, would never have committed."
It's not just groups on the right that polarize, nor are Republicans the only people to gather in like-minded groups. For the past 30 years, Americans have been sorting themselves into politically like-minded neighborhoods, churches, and clubs. Matching like with like has been often been entirely intentional. Ministers have been taught to attract new members according to the "homogenous unit principle" of church growth. (One book in the church growth literature is titled Our Kind of People.) Subdivisions have designed for certain cultural types—a Christian school in one section, a Montessori school in another.
The antidote to group polarization is mixed company. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade reviewed the rulings from three panels from the U.S. Court of Appeals. They found that when the panels consisted of all Republican or all Democratic appointees, the rulings were more extreme than when the panels had members of both parties. Mixed panels produced more moderate judgments.
The lesson is pretty clear. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain individual excesses. Homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.
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Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker went to "central casting" in the spring of '06 to find the candidate who could win in Bush-red communities. Goldberg recounted a stilted encounter between the Kerrys (John and Teresa Heinz) and a Missouri hog farmer, concluding that Democrats needed candidates who "speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri."
Like Claire McCaskill, a U.S. Senate candidate in Missouri who fit easily in rural communities.
McCaskill won in '06, as did two other Democratic Senate candidates in traditionally "red" states: Jim Webb in Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana. It's a cool threesome. Webb packed heat. Tester sported a flattop. McCaskill could talk to hog farmers, and she looked good at a campaign event standing next to Willie Nelson. Webb dubbed the group the "redneck caucus," and the myth began.
The theory was that central casting had come through. Democrats had found candidates with the style that could take the edge off Republican margins outside the cities. Just a few weeks ago, The New Yorker wrote about Barack Obama's "Appalachian Problem," the Chicagoan's inability in the Democratic primary to find favor among white, rural residents of southwest Virginia. The magazine visited with Sen. Webb about what it takes to win Virginia outside the District of Columbia suburbs.
Webb is good. And it's good for Obama to go to Bristol and Lebanon and Abingdon. But if Virginia, Missouri, and Montana are still close by Election Day, then Obama needs to consider how the Redneck Caucus really won in '06.
They won in the cities. Democrats in urban counties turned out, and their votes sent Webb, McCaskill, and Tester to the Senate.
It amounted to the geographic opposite of the strategy George Bush used in 2004. Ron Brownstein and Richard Rainey reported after the 2004 race that Bush won by turning out the vote in 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the United States, in exurban communities outside the suburbs. They wrote:
In states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia, Republican strength in these outer suburbs is offsetting Democratic gains over the last decade in more established—and often more affluent—inner-tier suburbs. As Democrats analyze a demoralizing defeat in this month's presidential election, one key question they face is whether they can reduce the expanding Republican advantage on the new frontier between suburbs and countryside.
In 2006, in these Senate races, Democrats expanded their advantage in the cities.
You can see here that no member of the Redneck Caucus won in rural communities. They won by piling up majorities in the more populous urban areas.
The point isn't to win in deeply Republican communities, of course. It's to cut the margins. But Webb, McCaskill, and Tester didn't do much better in rural parts of their state than other recent Democrats. Here's a comparison of McCaskill in '06 with Jean Carnahan in 2002. Jean Carnahan was running against Republican Jim Talent to continue filling the term won by her late husband. You can see in the chart below that McCaskill bettered Carnahan in small towns and rural counties by only a fraction of a percent. The real vote margin in rural Missouri was unchanged from 2002 to 2006.
But in the cities, where most voters lived, Claire McCaskill did much better. McCaskill lost rural and exurban Missouri by 71,000 votes. She won the cities by 113,000.
Talent increased his rural vote by 9,712 votes from 2002 to '06. The Democrats increased their rural vote in Missouri by 9,492.
Talent increased his vote in the cities by 28,000 from 2002 to '06, or 4 percent. But McCaskill bettered Carnahan's city vote by 94,000, a 13.3 percent increase.
Missouri, Virginia, and Montana all had turnout above the national average in 2006. The increased turnout came mostly from excited city voters. And the Democrats won.
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A few days after the 2006 election, the Washington Post announced, " 'God gap' in American politics has narrowed substantially."
By 2006, so went the theory, evangelicals were disgruntled with George W. Bush. All the fundamentalists, charismatics, megachurchers, and Southern Baptists were shifting away from the Republicans. The evangelical church was undergoing some kind of fundamental change, and their votes were there for the Democratic taking.
Oh yeah? Seventy percent of white evangelicals voted Republican in House races in 2006, according to exit polls. Back in 2004—when it was abundantly clear to every angry lefty that the religious right was taking over the country—Republican support among white evangelicals was only four percentage points higher.
There was no shift among churchgoers, despite the hype. White evangelicals voted for Democrats in 2006 in the same percentage as gays and lesbians voted for Republicans, both at about 25 percent.
Reporters wanted there to be a big story in 2006, something besides the Democratic takeover of Congress. But, really, the tale of 2006 wasn't about big changes. Instead, the election was decided by small shifts that reached across the board. Democrats picked up three points, five points, seven points among each of the demographic or geographic subgroups of the American electorate. Gallup found the 2006 vote to be a "rising Democratic tide that lifted support in almost all key subgroups."
The few true independents remaining in the electorate voted Democratic, explained Gary Jacobson at U.C. San Diego. Talking with MSNBC.com, Jacobson said the election was "more of an accumulation of small shifts of a few points that added up to a larger trend. ..." There was no one group that switched allegiance, that realigned from Republican to Democratic. Democrats were a bit more loyal. Republicans a bit less.
Well, maybe Ds were a lot more loyal. In my old hometown of Louisville, Ky., Democrat John Yarmuth beat a five-term incumbent. Louisville has a large black population, and Yarmuth won that vote, but in no greater margins than usual. And he didn't make any broad inroads in Republican parts of town. Yarmuth didn't carry a single precinct where Republicans had a majority of registrants, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Yarmuth won in '06 because white, liberal neighborhoods "got even more liberal," giving the Democrat "astounding" majorities, according to a former chair of the local Republican Party.
Democratic voters got rid of all those with Rs behind their names. Ideology, policy, voting records—none of that mattered. Liberal Iowa Rep. Jim Leach lost. So did liberal Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chaffee. Before 2006, Republicans had held 18 seats in House districts where John Kerry won in 2004. After 2006, Democrats had reduced the number of so-called split districts to eight.
Partisanship in the country didn't begin to break down in 2006. It hardened.
Tomorrow: Democrats like to think that their Senate candidates in Missouri, Virginia, and Montana won in '06 because of a special ability to connect with rural voters. Nice story, but what's the real lesson for Obama from the "Redneck Caucus"?
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Let's consider what's not new in this election.
There's a lot. The last five or six elections have been pushed along by trends that have been in place since the mid-1970s. Despite the extraordinary circumstances this year, the basic political contours of the country haven't changed (or haven't changed yet!).
If anything, 2008 appears to be more an extension of the 2006 midterms, an election that changed little in the country's basic political makeup from 2004—except, of course, for the name of the winning party. More on that tomorrow. Today, let's consider how static our politics have been.
Churchgoers Are Still Republicans
Thirty years ago, how often you went to church didn't mark you as a Democrat or a Republican. Evangelicals didn't have a party.
As the parties sorted according to lifestyle instead of class, weekly churchgoers and evangelicals became reliably Republican voters in presidential races. There's no evidence this is changing. Oh, there have been plenty of stories about the breakup of the evangelical vote. I'd read the stories, but the more hardheaded pollsters and religion scholars would find, as John Green did last month, that "Barack Obama's attempt to reach out to Christian voters ... is failing."
In the fall of 2004, George Bush had a 60.4 percent to 19.6 percent edge over John Kerry among evangelicals. This year, Green found, McCain leads Obama 57.2 percent to 19.9 percent. Maybe that will change, but it hasn't yet, according to Gallup. Evangelicals and churchgoers may be "lukewarm" about McCain, but they are still supporting him in numbers just a smidgen below 2004 levels.
Women Voting Democratic
In the 1970s, more women voted Republican than men. Over the past 30 years, they have increasingly voted Democratic. Again, there was a spate of stories about a reversal in this arrangement, but by late September Gallup had women supporting Obama 52 percent to 39 percent.
Fewer Genuine Independents
Political reporters love the story about the rise of the independent voter and the "decline of parties." But over the past 30 years, the number of true independents has declined, and allegiance to party has grown stronger. (Princeton's Larry Bartels wrote the most important paper on this phenomenon.)
Yes, there are more people who register as independent or tell pollsters they are independent. But almost all these people vote reliably for one party or the other. People tell pollsters that they are independents, but when pressed, they admit that they almost always vote for the same party.
Split-Ticket Voters Disappearing
Split-ticket voting has been declining for the past 30 years, too. We are less inclined to pick and choose between parties. People are picking sides and voting that way up and down the ballot. That was especially true in 2006, when Democrats, especially, cast large numbers of straight-ticket votes in New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Rural Is Still Republican
Rural voters have been moving toward the Republican Party since the '70s. That trend continues, too.
Replay 2006
Democrats thought the 2006 midterms were a turning point. They weren't. All these trends stayed in place. Just the results changed. Tomorrow we'll see why 2006 is a good model for 2008.
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"Palin and Biden Stake Their Claims on Change," rang the lead headline in the Times after the vice-presidential debate. Who could blame them? With several wars, Great Depression II, a blistering civil conflict in Pakistan, and European economic collapse, change would be welcome.
But there's something else going on with this "change" business, the reason why "change" is such an appealing message to Americans. It's not that an overwhelming number of voters want a change in particular policy. What Americans want universally is a change in the way government works.
Political writers say voters don't give a rip about governmental process. But these two campaigns are mostly about process, about how government works rather than what government does. Maybe that's because we care more about process than results, more about the way government operates rather than the policies government enacts.
That's the argument of two political scientists from the University of Nebraska, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Policy doesn't drive people's vote, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse. People want good schools, peace, and a strong economy, certainly. But they don't have overwhelming concern about how these ends are achieved.
"What do people care about if they don't care about policy?" the two ask, and then answer. "We argue that people care deeply about process." (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse lay out their argument in their 2002 book, Stealth Democracy: Americans' Beliefs about How Government Should Work.)
People "despise pointless political conflict and they believe pointless political conflict is rampant in American politics today." And they overwhelmingly see a "political system in which decision makers—for no reason other than the fact that they are in a position to make decisions—accrue benefits at the expense of non-decision makers. Just as children are often less concerned with acquiring a privilege than with preventing their siblings from acquiring a privilege, citizens are usually less concerned with obtaining a policy outcome than with preventing others from using the process to feather their own nests."
OK, I'm like many of you. This sounds wrong, belittling. (The "children" reference is over the top.) Hibbing and Theiss-Morse aren't exactly thrilled about what they've found as they've polled and focus-grouped voters. But the Nebraska professors' thesis does explain why outsiders (governors from Georgia, California, Arkansas, and Texas) have won the presidency based largely on their outsiderness, that they didn't live "inside the Beltway."
Now we have the "maverick" (plus his Alaskan sidekick) and the guy who will deliver the "change we need/can believe in." Both candidates have promoted themselves as outsiders who promise to sweep out a government rotten with partisanship and corruption.
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse don't think people want to get rid of "insiders" so "the people" can take more direct control of government. They argue Americans have little interest in most policy proposals and even less interest in the day-to-day work of government. (Largely that's because people shy away from conflict, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse write, and politics is all about conflict.) What they want is for government to be open, accountable, and representative. Their perception is that government is none of those things, and so dissatisfaction with government "usually stems from perceptions of how government goes about its business, not what the government does."
Therefore, people's "main political goal is often limited to nothing more than achieving a process that will prevent decision makers from benefiting themselves."
The Nebraskans contend that the great power vested in government inevitably leads to this sense that politicians are "overpaid lackeys of special interests."
"[P]eople are amazingly sensitive to being played for suckers," they write. "Politicans are often in a position to do this, and as a result the people love to hate them." We are psychologically wired this way. It's not the policy positions politicians take that lead to our distrust, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse write; it is the power they hold.
Most people don't care about politics or policy. They just don't want to be ripped off. And so they vote, time and again, for the outsider, the maverick, the man from Hope, the peanut farmer, the Perot phenomenon in '92, the uniter not a divider, the guy who will deliver change from the bottom up.
This isn't the way I like to think about politics. And given the remarkable failures of the last eight years, it's hard to believe policy isn't a primary concern right now. But eight out of the last nine elections (including this one) have been shaped by the sense among voters that Washington is corrupt, politicians are crooks, and it will take a newcomer to get rid of the corruption and the partisanship.
I can't think of a single policy proposal that has had a similar impact.
(Top) Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images; (Bottom) Photo by Peter Tompson/Getty Images
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House members say phone calls are running 9-1 against the financial rescue bill, and that raises a question. If people really oppose the bill in those numbers—and there are signs they don't—shouldn't "representatives" vote that way?
That was the practice in Colonial New England town meetings, writes Michael Schudson in The Good Citizen. Citizens elected representatives at town gatherings, and "there was a tendency for the meetings to control representatives by providing them mandates or instructions to carry out."
The ties between elected official and voter were looser in the middle and Southern colonies, but the notion that representatives should pay any attention at all to citizens was something that distinguished American democracy. In Britain, representation didn't mean that there would be consultation with voters. Accountability came with elections. Between votes, British representatives made up their own minds. In the colonies, however, representation "had begun to imply, as it did not in England, that the representative should not only use his own judgment but also speak for his constituency." Representatives were "expected to possess local knowledge and to identify with the interests of their constituents." They were supposed to "vote the district."
The conflict early in American democracy, Schudson wrote, tugged between "representatives' obligation to their own best judgment of the public good and their responsibility to the interests of the people."
During the debate on the Constitution, there was an attempt to tie the votes of representatives directly to the will of the people living in the district. (Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein tells this story the best in Why Societies Need Dissent.) The question was whether the Bill of Rights should contain a "right to instruct" representatives—a Constitutional guarantee that citizens could tell their elected officials exactly how to vote on particular pieces of legislation. Anti-federalists made this proposal as a way to restrict their representatives, to constrain the power of the federal government. It was also, to be sure, a more direct and complete fulfillment of the democratic promise of the revolution. After all, shouldn't politicians do what voters demand?
The country chose a different course, wisely so, according to Sunstein. Early American communities were isolated and extraordinarily homogenous. That insularity was a disadvantage. Decisions were made with limited information and without hearing different points of views. Moreover, like-minded groups were prone to grow more extreme in their views over time, increasing the chance that decisions made locally might be indefensibly severe.
Connecticut's Roger Sherman made the argument against the right to instruct amendment:
The words (of the right to instruct amendment) are calculated to mislead the people, by conveying an idea that they have a right to control the debates of the Legislature. This cannot be admitted to be just, because it would destroy the object of their meeting. I think, when the people have chosen a representative, it is his duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult, and agree with them on such acts as are for the general benefit of the whole community. If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation.
The purpose of pulling people together from around a vast and quite diverse country was that you might actually learn something from a representative with a different point of view. Sunstein told me that one of the most profound insights of those who rejected the "right to instruct" was "to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue. I think that was the most important theoretical contribution the framers made. And at the best moments in our history, that's what's happened."
It would be a stretch to say this has been one of the country's "best moments." Congressional districts, even states, have grown more homogenous as people have sorted into like-minded communities. The advantages of deliberation Sherman recognized were lost in partisan rigidity long before the financial system needed bailing out.
The benefit of this crisis (and we're really scratching to find one) is that perhaps Congress will rediscover the use of diversity. That's a start. We'll worry about enabling "people not to hate each other" another day.
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Dan Balz at the Washington Post writes about a "collective breakdown of leadership in Washington," while the paper's lead editorial says the country faces "A Test of Leadership." Over at the New York Times, Jackie Calmes writes that the House vote Monday "was the product of a larger failure—of political leadership in Washington. ..." On the op-ed page, David Brooks compares "this generation of political leaders" to FDR and finds "they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority. ..."
These are all really smart folks, but this time, I think, they have it, as my mother would say, completely bassackwards.
What we have today is a failure of followership.
Americans don't follow like they used to. Every institution that once had "authority" has lost followers over the last two generations. Mainline church denominations have been losing membership since 1965. So have the old clubs and civic groups. Newspaper readership penetration peaked in 1965 and has been declining ever since. Are people fleeing newspapers because a lack of "leadership," Mr. Know-It-All Editorial Page?
People aren't following anymore. And not just in the United States. University of Michigan political scientist Ron Inglehart has been polling worldwide since the 1970s. (See his World Values Survey here.) What Inglehart finds is that people in richer countries are less "elite-directed" and are increasingly engaged in "elite-challenging" activities.
People don't follow. They express.
They don't go to Democratic Club meetings, like the ones held around my hometown of Louisville. They certainly don't wait around to be told what to think by a "leader." They petition or boycott.
People don't read the boring old newspaper. They blog.
"We are witnessing a downward trend in trust in government and confidence in leaders across most industrial societies," Inglehart wrote in 1997. (Yes, that was a decade before Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House.)
The generation that emerged in the second half of the 20th century lost faith in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of Catholic bishops to degrees in Free Masonry to the speeches given by governors and senators. (Ask people in business what it's like to "lead" Gen Y workers. Talk about a group of nonfollowers.) Editorialist and reporters write about the "collective breakdown of leadership" as if an entire generation of Americans were born without the skills of a Sam Rayburn, Dwight Eisenhower, or LBJ. There are just as many leaders as there have ever been.
What's missing are old-fashioned followers.
And, you know what? If we're waiting around for leaders to get us out of our messes, we're going to be waiting for some time. Because followers make good leaders, and followers are gone for good.