Sam Rosenfeld Fogged Clarity Podcast

The Colgate University Political Science professor and author of The Polarizers: “Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” discusses the 2018 midterm elections, Bernie Sanders, and the media’s inability to save us in an exclusive discussion.

TRANSCRIPTION



Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be joined by Sam Rosenfeld, assistant professor of political science at Colgate University and author of The Polarizers: Post-War Architects of Our Partisan Era. Rosenfeld holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Review, Politico andVox, among other outlets. Sam, I appreciate you taking the time.

Sam Rosenfeld: Thanks so much for having me.

BE: Absolutely. Let’s talk first about your book The Polarizers. And congratulations on that. It came out in December of last year and it’s incredibly pertinent to the times we’re living in. So we’ve been hearing so much of late about divisiveness in America and we daily witness the enormous partisan divide in Washington. Your book reveals that such ideological separation was and is the plan of activist politicians and thought leaders on both the right and left following World War II. The book evidences that party polarization was a deliberate response by these individuals to combat what they saw as a growing lack of discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans. Can you explain why the engineers of party polarization regarded and seemingly still regard unity and a relatively unified national political ideology as a problem in the first place?

SR: Absolutely. So, the middle 20th century party system that is forged in the New Deal realignment of 1930’s, and then consolidated in the early post-war era is one that still to this day is a lot of gauzy nostalgia for among commentators who lament contemporary polarization and came of age in an era when things seemed a lot more civil and consensual. It was a party system in which it was, for contingent historical reasons–particularly the Democratic party, which was the dominate electorate majority party for many of these decades, after the New Deal–contained within it both the most liberal and activist political actors, and at the national level was the center left party. But also contained within it conservative and reactionary and, on the question of race, the most white supremacist faction of American politics in the form of southern Democrats who had disproportional amount of power in Congress. So the majority center-left party contained these hugely divergent ideological factions. On the right, in the Republican Party you also had a minority progressive–a northern Republican progressive tradition–dating back to the Mugwumps and capital-P Progressives that still had influence in the party, as well as a bunch of small government stalwart conservatives. So in both parties you had these big, internal ideological factions. And that meant that when policy was made, when legislation and legislative coalitions were put together, it was routinely done on a bipartisan basis. You had ad hoc coalitions of Republican and Democratic liberals to do some stuff. And then you had an institutionalized coalition of what was called the Conservative coalition of largely southern Democrats working with Republicans to block liberal legislation. But what it basically meant was that the parties, which is what organized the electorates votes and behavior on election day had much less influence shaping policy making. And bipartisanship–the norms of working across the aisle in various ways–were institutionalized and regularized. This is how people expected politics to happen. On the one hand, that makes it look like what was going on there was a unitary consensus, where people just didn’t disagree in that...