In recent decades, Democratic politicians, political analysts, and mainstream commentators have zeroed in on polarization as the central villain of U.S. politics. The way out of our democratic malaise, their thinking goes, is to reclaim something like the spirit of the long-lost vital center, where moderation, bipartisanship, and compromise prevailed against the extremes of left and right.
One problem with this account is that it makes polarization seem like something that just happened to politics, sweeping up both parties in its wake. In reality, polarization was done to politics by conservative politicians and activists—and the leaders of the Democratic Party and prominent liberal pundits have steadfastly resisted it (even as Democratic voters have come to embrace it). In short, the polarization of U.S. politics was a deliberate project: over the past fifty years, right-wing activists within the GOP labored tirelessly to move the party to the right. After a brief flirtation with big-tent politics in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, Republicans developed a two-pronged approach to strategic polarization in the 1990s—with the goal of consolidating their base, disciplining their officeholders, and demonizing Democrats.
The first step was to purge the party of remaining moderates and liberals. GOP leaders had touted Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, but under House Speaker Newt Gingrich they began to hunt “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only), the term coined in 1992 to describe Republicans who lacked fidelity to a right-wing agenda. The second step was to turn Democrats from opponents into enemies. Both Gingrich and radio host Rush Limbaugh led that charge: Gingrich by teaching Republican candidates to use hostile language that described Democrats as “pathetic,” “intolerant,” and “sick,” Limbaugh by tutoring his listeners to do the same. Add to that new developments in obstructing rather than participating in governance—the Republican House caucus innovated in long-term government shutdowns, spurious congressional investigations, and unpopular impeachment trials—and by the end of the 1990s, the right-wing strategy of polarization had been fully developed.
Democratic leaders did not respond in kind. On the contrary, this kind of polarization affronted liberals, who prized bipartisanship not just as good strategy but also as a core value. Democratic politicians throughout the 1990s generally believed that laws developed through compromise, drawing from both conservative and liberal ideas, were better than partisan laws. This view had roots in practical necessity: even as the parties began sorting by ideology, the Democratic Party remained far more ideologically diverse than the GOP, and by the 1980s Democrats had lost their dominance in national politics. But it also sprang from an ideological commitment to technocracy and moderation.