Why We're Polarized

When Antonin Scalia, a justice of the Supreme Court, died in February 2016, President Obama named Merrick Garland as his replacement. Scalia was a conservative who was known for his antagonism toward liberals. Presidential nominations to the Supreme Court require Senate confirmation. At this time, the Republicans controlled the Senate. In an unprecedented move, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Garland’s nomination. He claimed that the vote should wait until after the election. However, he later noted that had a Republican been in the White House, he would have held a vote in an election year. Klein is not surprised by this behavior, asking why voters should expect anything different in these polarized times. However, he notes that such behavior could destroy the Supreme Court.

Drawing upon the research of sociologist and political scientist Juan Linz, Klein observes that presidential systems or those with independently elected executives are fragile and often dissolve. The US system has been the exception. Historically, the US system, despite its potential for divided government—the control of one chamber of Congress and the presidency in the hands of different parties—has worked because the political parties have had ideologically diverse coalitions. That has allowed informal norms of compromise and moderation to operate. With the parties now polarized, there is no informal solution to the Constitution’s push toward conflict, raising the question of how a difference between Congress, representing a legitimate majority, and the president, representing a different but legitimate majority, can be resolved. In the case of Supreme Court appointments, justices are now vetted reliably by partisans and are ideologically reliable when on the court, resulting in an increasingly polarized Supreme Court as well.

The nationalization of politics has reduced transactional politics, which formerly allowed for compromises. Klein cites the case of Democratic Senator Ben Nelson’s demands for his support of Obamacare. He extracted a great financial benefit for his state of Nebraska. However, he was vilified in the press for so doing and declined to run for re-election, replaced by a Republican. The vote on Obamacare was on party lines. If state interests were in play, representatives from states with large percentages of people without insurance would have supported it. That did not happen.

Historically, American politics has not been competitive. In given periods, one party had a significant advantage over the other. For example, the Republicans dominated in the 1920s, and the Democrats dominated in the 1930s. When one party is dominant, the other party has an incentive to cooperate. It is the only way to exercise influence and win benefits for constituents. In the current era, neither party has dominance. As a result, the out party seeks to displace the majority party. It therefore refuses to cooperate and obstructs the majority party from implementing its agenda. While bipartisan cooperation is necessary for governance, the minority party fails to offer it in the hopes of making the majority party fail and winning back the majority.

The American system of governance arms the minority party with tools to obstruct the majority. For example, the filibuster, operative in the US Senate, allows a minority to derail the passage of a bill. To break a filibuster in a process called cloture, 60 votes are required. In a chamber with 100 Senators, it is unusual for one party to have 60 seats. While the filibuster was rarely used in the past, it is frequently used in these partisan times. From 1919 through 1970, there were only 49 votes to break filibusters, compared to 218 from 2013 to 2014. The filibuster serves as a constant threat to the passage of critically important bills, such as those raising the debt ceiling, which Klein refers to as a “bomb resting in the center of the global financial system” (223). If Congress refuses to pay its debts, there would be worldwide economic repercussions. Yet Republicans have used this threat to gain leverage beginning in 2011. In short, Klein claims, norms of cooperation and deference are failing in this polarized era.