The polarization of American politics has done its work and we now have an especially ugly example of where it leads. I’m referring to the fight over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a justice of the Supreme Court.
But the partisan fisticuffs, as nasty and unethical as they were, represent only half of the awfulness of the episode. The other half was provided by the gang-like conduct of Democrats, the left, and the mainstream media toward a single individual, Kavanaugh.
The anti-Kavanaugh crowd isn’t solely to blame. The party system played a part. It doesn’t require the manner in which the nominee was treated, but it certainly allows it and even encourages it. Chances are a Kavanaugh-like ambush will happen again.
Republicans? They were not the perpetrators, but I suspect they’re capable of treating a Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president in a cruel and disrespectful fashion. They were respectful of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the last two Democratic nominees, as Democrats generally were toward GOP nominee Neil Gorsuch.
Perhaps Republicans will be as respectful to the next Democratic nominee as they were to Sotomayor and Kagan, but the system isn’t likely to be any more kind. The parties are sharply divided along ideological lines. Liberals are Democrats, conservatives are Republicans, and they are poised for political combat.
“[P]arties have few short-term incentives to cooperate in policymaking,” write Stanford political science professors David Brady and Bruce Cain in “Are Our Parties Realigning?” in the fall issue of National Affairs. They shun compromise. Kavanaugh was confirmed, but only one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, voted for him.
Why the divide? A major factor is the parties are tied in political strength, in what Brady and Cain call “rough parity.” And “as long as both parties have a shot at majority status, bipartisan cooperation is less likely to emerge. Thus, we have arrived at a new equilibrium where party parity divides citizens, ties up the Congress, and gives us Trump as president.”
Brady and Cain note three other significant consequences: “partisans of each party misperceiving those of the other; presidents who are dividers, not unifiers; and very close elections.” They did not discuss the Kavanaugh case in their essay.
They cite a Pew poll in 2016 that “found that a majority of Republicans considered Democrats to be closed-minded, while large pluralities of Republicans said Democrats were immoral, lazy, dishonest, and unintelligent. Democrats reciprocated by holding the same view of Republicans: closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent, and lazy.”
It gets worse. Among the “politically engaged members of both parties” the views are “even more negative. . . . Political polarization is no longer just about policy differences but now shapes how partisans understand each other as human beings.”
This was clear in the conduct of anti-Kavanaugh protesters. They screamed and yelled during the nominee’s confirmation hearing, harassed lawmakers in the Capitol, confronted Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at a Louisville restaurant, and drove GOP senator Ted Cruz and his wife out of a Washington eating establishment.
President Trump is hardly a uniter. He likes to punch back at critics and political foes. He mauls the press verbally. He uses Twitter to take on opponents from anywhere in the world. He criticizes Republican leaders with whom he works or whom he has put in office. No one is off limits, even foreign allies, at the least the nominal allies.
The president is divisive inside the GOP, according to polling by YouGov of 5,000 Americans in 17 separate surveys since 2015. His primary voters, compared with Republicans who voted for other primary candidates, are “older, whiter, less well-educated, have lower incomes, and are disproportionately from the Southern, border, and Midwestern states.”
That’s not all. Trump supporters are, “on average, angrier about politics, more likely to believe that many in the government are crooks, and more dissatisfied with government,” Brady and Cain write.
More important than specific issue differences is the degree to which Trump Republicans and other Republicans split on the president himself.
Eight months after Trump’s inauguration, his early backers liked him more than other Republicans did by a better than three-to-one margin. Brady and Cain believe Republican women who voted for Trump over Hillary in 2016 but don’t like him now are crucial to his success in 2020.
But there’s another way of looking at Trump. He’s adjusted to the new party system. He loathes his political adversaries, often “misperceiving” them. He’s a divider. He’s shown he can win a close election. Sounds like Trump fits the moment perfectly.
