Political Division? That’s Nothing New

Despite what you keep hearing, the idea that we’ve never been more politically divided is just not true. At least since the end of the ’60s, we have also spent most of our time being divided. Understanding precisely where this not-new division started is key to plotting any strategy for moving forward, and it’s the subject of Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, in which two Princeton historians, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, survey the modern political landscape like geologists looking for the ancient faults. In this case, ancient is only as old as “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” the John Lennon and Elton John duet that they performed live in 1974 at Madison Square Garden, but what’s most fascinating (and helpful) in Kruse and Zelizer’s account is how, in the bright light of hindsight, so many different pieces align to give us a politics that is so partisan as to be meaningless, as well as predestined, or predetermined, not to mention horrifically dispiriting.

While evolution has taught us to stay focused on day-to-day hunting and gathering and coffee-making, Kruse and Zelizer show the way politics and business not-so-slowly destroyed a century-old news delivery format—the combination of newspapers and broadcasting, first radio, then TV—replacing it with . . . well, nothing yet. Neither side of any of the myriad fault lines comes out looking particularly wonderful, and, in the historical context, what remains of the even more profit-obsessed press now seems untethered: Kruse and Zelizer cite a 2016 study showing that, after the cable networks benefited from the so-called Trump Effect during the presidential campaign, so did Trump, with nearly $6 billion in “free” media (i.e., unedited coverage), which works out to more than the other 16 Republican candidates combined.

Race, of course, is the great American theme, and the book begins with 1968’s Kerner Commission pointing out that unrest in American cities was due to cities that were (and still are) separate and unequal, a bleak description of what, if it were in another country, we would call apartheid. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it,” the report said. The commission’s findings went largely unheeded, though it reads like a primer for the unrest that happened in 1992, when the Marines moved into South Central Los Angeles (for what the police called riots), as well as for injustices perpetuated today. Democrats and Republicans blamed each other at the time; President Nixon launched a “War on Crime,” and eventually both parties worked hand in hand to bring about the mass incarceration of black men (aka, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994) that, as Kruse says, “only furthered and deepened what had been long-standing lines of a two-tiered racial system in the U.S. justice system.”

The book’s introduction features President Barack Obama’s farewell speech, the point where the stillborn liberal exclamation “post-racial America” was officially retired. After all, America is not even post-nativist. “You can see it in the president’s comments about the caravan and the border, those are kind of naked racist appeals there,” says Kruse. “But in a way, it’s able to be subtler because it runs so deep. It’s not quite on the surface. I think a lot of people have gotten inured to the idea that racism has to be obvious—it has to be someone literally dressed up in a Klan robe—but it’s the more invidious forms of structural racism which in a lot of ways cross party lines.”

The book reads like a backwards whodunit, starting with the election of Jimmy Carter, who only narrowly won, and then with the election of Ronald Reagan, who won the electoral college handily, but only barely won the popular vote. (Sound familiar?) I asked Zelizer to set the divided scene.

Zelizer: Both of those elections, 1976 and 1980, remembering that they were close, remembering that at neither time were they some kind of mandate is really important in understanding where this story starts. For Carter, in 1976, on paper, it looks great. You have a Democratic president and a Democratic congress, so for a Democrat, it looks like, okay, Watergate is over and we’re back to where we were in the ’60s. But in fact, as we’re trying to show, the Republican party is changing and rebuilding itself, and the forces of conservatism are quite strong. And Carter will struggle with this during his presidency, and the next few decades are really as much about the right as anything Carter could try to achieve. And the same is true in 1980. Reagan and his advisors tried to sell it as a revolution and as a dramatic shift to the right, and it was significant, the move rightward. But at the same time, the legacies of liberalism and policies like social security and then grassroots movements, such as the nuclear freeze movement or the gay rights movement or feminism, are very much alive and well in the ’80s. So the notion that this is a divided country, and that the forces on the left and the right are quite strong is very evident in the ’70s and ’80s. Neither side wins entirely.

I’ve read that President Carter held a conference on the family during his term. How did this precipitate the so-called culture war that picked up in the ’90s, and for which cable news drum beats today?

Kruse: The lines of division you see today—they really start coming into focus. Originally, they call it the White House Conference on Family, then they changed it to White House Conference on Families, plural, with the idea that there are multiple forms of families that are legitimate beyond the stereotypical male breadwinner and female housewife with 2.1 kids at home. That model of the ’50s really does get challenged in the ’70s, and Carter is trying to acknowledge that there are multiple kinds of legitimate families, and the pushback from the right is, “No, no—there’s one kind of family, and it is very much the traditional model.” That arguing over what constitutes a family to begin with, really does begin in this period. This is what become the lightning rod on issues of gender and sexuality, this idea of “family values.”

How does the Equal Rights Amendment play into this?

Kruse: Again the ERA starts out seeming uncontroversial. Who could be against equal rights for women? And when the ERA comes up to Congress, it’s quickly ratified by several states. It looks like it’s going to be a slam dunk. Then Phyllis Schlafly takes the charge, and with her organization STOP ERA—and the STOP stands for “stop taking our privileges”—she argues that the ERA isn’t going to lift up women but rather tear down traditional families. So they really make this movement that says that what they are doing is not against the rights of women but for the rights of families, or parents, of children, what will be an incredibly contested sphere.

Right now, Democrats campaigning in Wisconsin, afraid to repeat the mistakes of 2016, and the landscape of lost jobs is clearly tied to international affairs. How is the decline of manufacturing in the United States impacted by the so-called end of the Cold War, the early ’90s in the U.S.?

Zelizer: You have in the ’70s a fundamental shift in the economy. You have the manufacturing sector, which was union-based, starting to diminish in strength and size. Part of it is being replaced by new kinds of jobs—service sector and high-tech jobs—and part of it is that those jobs start going to other countries where labor is cheaper. And then, converging with that, is the end of the Cold War, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which really opens up, I think, the movement of capital—and the ability of factories, which are still labor-intensive, to relocate and move around in a way that was still difficult when the Cold War constrained world markets in some ways as it did world politics. And I think the fundamental problem that was evident in the ’70s for unions still hasn’t been resolved today, meaning it’s not just about protecting union jobs here in the U.S. and strengthening unions. At the time, you see a shift. Factories move elsewhere and there are huge pockets of labor that have no protections, where regulations are weak, and, at the time, unless something was done to reverse this, labor would be in a pretty perilous state—and that’s pretty much how things went.

We talk about finance reform more and more with each election cycle, though the courts seem to go the other way. What are the roots of campaign finance reform in the ’70s?

Kruse: Campaign finance reform is a key point coming out of Watergate. I don’t think a lot of people would remember that. But everyone remembers the line from All the President’s Men, when Deep Throat tells Bob Woodard, “Follow the money.” Well, what money are they following? They are following campaign donations that get funneled through the Committee to Reelect the President, with the unfortunate [nickname] of CREEP, and those checks get funneled through banks in Miami and Mexico and on to the Watergate burglars. Campaign finance was an integral part of the Watergate scandal, something that Congress tries to fix in the aftermath with the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendment in 1974. The Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo weighs in with an all-but-forgotten decision that’s important because it strikes down a lot of post-Watergate attempts to rein in abuses of campaign finance. More importantly, the decision sets up an unequal system in which it allows unequal spending by candidates on their own campaign, something that obviously privileges the wealthy. This is where we get more millionaires, and now billionaires, in politics—you don’t get a Ross Perot or Howard Schultz without that landscape getting changed. At the same time the decision opens up the floodgates for political action committees, or PACs, which had long been on the scene but largely on the left. But post-Valeo, business PACs really flood not the presidential, but congressional, races and suddenly have a huge presence in Washington, D.C.

It’s hard to imagine going to the gym without the likes of Sean Hannity on one TV screen and Rachel Maddow on the other, each presumably looking at the same world but with different-colored glasses. In tracing the route from three white male TV news anchors to #nativetwitter, not to mention round-the-clock broadcasting of what’s harder and harder to call “news,” what surprised you?

Zelizer: In writing this story, we knew where it ended, obviously. But going back and tracing the history of how we got here was really eye-opening. CNN goes on the air in 1980, and, all of the sudden, you have 24 hours of news and stations devoted simply to putting out news quickly as opposed to putting news through all the editing done at the networks. So the news cycle in 1979 was fundamentally different from what it was in 1981. To move, then, to the era of conservative Fox news, and just to see how this very partisan, edgy media starts to become legitimate. And then in the early 2000s, to move to the Internet and a kind of world where there are even fewer filters. You see all the mechanisms of controlling information start to fall away, and when you look at this multi-decade process, what you start to get is how entrenched it is, how we really remade our media institutions, as opposed to this just being about one channel or a very temporary moment. You are left with the idea that all the incentives of the institutions of the media push us to the kind of news we have today. It’s not a straight line. It’s not a back and forth. And to get out of it will really require remaking the basics of how the media works.

In Fault Lines, we look back to see that when Reagan came into office, in 1981, he pitched himself as a government slayer, cutting taxes and programs, but he lost support even among his followers when he tried to cut social security. Likewise, Trump came promising to kill the Affordable Care Act, but a whole lot of Congressional Republicans ran in the recent midterm elections promising to keep preexisting conditions protections and Medicaid expansions. Is basic health care a new third rail?

Zelizer: When Obama set out to pass health care legislation, he was, in some ways, shell-shocked, he and other Democrats, by all the previous efforts to push for health care that end up in disastrous fashion. So he says, “Okay, I’ll build this from Republican soil.” Then they take a plan that’s built out of all these Republican ideas and turn it into another version of socialized medicine. But he’s able to get it through, and I don’t know if it’s the third rail yet. The reason social security was protected under Reagan was, in part, because people were used to the benefits. A lot of the Great Society and New Deal programs were so ingrained by the ’80s that when Reagan shifted from “Do you hate government?” to “Do you hate benefits?” then the whole conversation changed. The question now, after all the partisan fireworks over [the] ACA, is if people are getting used to the benefits so much that the ability to really roll them back is diminishing.

So after touring the past four decades, is the United States over the past 40 years looking more or less conservative?

Zelizer: I think it’s messier than that. Look, on economics, it’s not clear that we’re totally “conservative” as a country. One of the things we’re trying to highlight with Fault Lines is that the debates that start in the ’70s on issues like taxation and deregulation, they were never resolved. We didn’t shift wholly to the right, and I think there are a lot of pockets of American society—in the democratic party, in what remains of the labor movement, and in social movements, that—well, the Rev William Barbers of the country, they’re not on board with the inequality, with a weak or unstable middle class. I’m not sure there’s a consensus there. And on socially liberal issues, too, I think the country has moved dramatically on issues like sexuality and gender, in a liberal direction, even in red states. But the pockets of conservatism are still very strong. We’re seeing that now, with groups that are like the evangelical Christian voting block—they’re still very powerful. So I don’t think there’s any area where you can say, ‘Well, that’s where we are, and you just need a candidate who can figure out that combination.’ And there you go—he’s the next president.

I am remembering that critics of Ronald Reagan argued that he was an actor, with no interest in policy, but then years later, when more details emerged—in particular, when his radio speeches were published—they showed him as detail-oriented, carefully crafting his image. Trump is likewise ridiculed as a buffoon, and yet he spent years before the presidency not just playing the press, but being schooled by producers in the art of ratings. How would you compare and contrast president number 40 with 45?

Zelizer: Yes, both are each masters of a different kind of medium. Reagan was incredibly hands-on, and it gives life to the idea that he was just reading a script. He was crafting the script in a lot of ways and he took incredible care with that. Trump is a master with a different medium, but it is one that’s much rawer and faster and has a lot fewer filters, in every sense of the word. Reagan relied not just his own genius with media but also with skilled stagecraft executed by Michael Deaver—they had a message of the day and crafted it and hammered it home—it was really quite artful. Trump does it by the seat of his pants. The tweets are full of typos and mistakes that would have driven a perfectionist like Ronald Reagan insane. In terms of the politics, Trump has shown a fealty toward the Republic orthodoxy created by Reagan, in terms of tax cuts, conservative judges, the lip service his administration pays towards social conservatism. On other issues, they are radically different. Look at Reagan on immigration. When he campaigns in 1980, he promises to be as humane as possible to Mexican migrants. He oversees the immigration reform of 1996, which provides amnesty for undocumented workers who are in the U.S. That’s a far cry from Trump and his wall.

But also Trump’s not a total maverick. We’re looking at this period from the ’70s to today, and today is deeply rooted in the movement that led to Reagan’s presidency, in the agenda that he laid out and that they are still fighting for.

Have you seen the 1986 Saturday Night Live skit called “Mastermind,” in which the public Reagan pretends the presidency’s details are beyond him? But then behind the scenes, he’s tiring his aides with his grasp of detail?

Kruse: The Phil Hartman sketch. Yes, one of the best!

With history as your guide, how much are the stories of the president—I guess, his disengagement with everything that isn’t about him—an exaggeration, or, even, as in the comic sketch, a feint?

Zelizer: That’s the mystery! Remember back with Reagan everybody said, “He’s a bozo, a lightweight actor.” Then we leaned toward, “Oh, my God, a lot of this was strategic and crafted!” With President Trump, we don’t know if that’s true. It could be that he’s seat-of-his-pants and doesn’t understand what he’s doing. But there is that looming question related to that skit: Is there more going on behind the scenes? Is he playing the country? What’s going on? I think that’s a big question that the next round of historians is going to be looking at.