At a campaign event for a Democratic candidate in October, Joe Biden embarked down a classically Bidenesque aside. During a soliloquy about civility, history, and change in U.S. politics, Biden lamented that the contemporary scene was “such a mean-spirited political environment.” He recalled a different era: “I’ve been around so long, I worked with James Eastland”—a notorious white supremacist from Mississippi and longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “In the days when I got [to the Senate], the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists,” Biden said. “You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
His remarks drew caustic responses from liberals unmoved by nostalgic paeans to the days of backslapping bonhomie with racists, but in true Biden Gaffe fashion the reminiscence conveyed something instructive to those who share the former Vice President’s discontent with the rancor and dysfunction of contemporary politics. That bygone era of relative partisan comity was real, but it was also rooted in some of the darkest iniquities of U.S. history. In other words, the benefits of a system that “works” in the manner of Biden’s depolarized mid-twentieth century are profound—and so are the costs.
Biden’s assessment that politics today are broken echoes across the culture. Party polarization dominates public discussion of our system and appears to define its core dysfunctions. Scholarly volumes appear regularly with cheery titles such as American Gridlock (2016), Deeply Divided (2014) and Why Washington Won’t Work (2015) that diagnose the pathologies of polarization and fitfully offer solutions. A recent Yale conference themed around the death of democracies—and the growing danger of it happening in the United States—featured polarization among a list of systemic ills. And when Thomas Ricks of Foreign Policy queried several national security experts about the probability of civil war breaking out in the United States within the next fifteen years, their average estimate was 35 percent.
To be human and sentient is to be dissatisfied with current U.S. politics. But realistic alternatives to today’s polarization may offer a cure worse than the disease.
There is irony in this. More than half a century ago, some leading scholars, journalists, and practicing politicians surveyed the U.S political landscape and similarly identified dysfunctions and pathologies that cried out for reform. They too produced alarming volumes with downer titles like The Deadlock of Democracy (1963) and House Out of Order (1965). But what those analysts identified as the central problem in U.S. politics was excessive bipartisanship—and they prescribed polarization as its solution.
The system they critiqued was the very one that Biden walked into in the early seventies: a system in which each party contained within its ranks a vast ideological range that overlapped significantly with the other party’s. Such fuzzily indistinct parties, so the critics’ argument went, served not only to hinder the passage of desirable public policy but also to deny voters meaningful democratic choice and accountability. This argument had impact. It informed the actions of figures on the left and right who worked consciously during the second half of the twentieth century to reshape the parties and their operations around internally cohesive and mutually distinct ideologies. As we know today, they succeeded.