Introduced by: Alex Gourevitch and Alexander Kippen
The Myth of a polarized America, Morris Fiorina  BUY NOW AT   Culture Wars? Sometimes the most straightforward points are the most important. Fiorina’s book is a short, easy-to-read study that makes one of those simple but important arguments: the United States is not so divided after all. Using poll data, but sparing the reader the stultifying language of political science, Fiorina shows that, on the most important issues of the so-called Culture Wars, public opinion is not polarized around extremes but concentrated in the middle. Contrasting this data with the ‘red-state, blue-state’ common wisdom, Fiorina concludes that polarization is imposed by politicians and the broader political class in an effort to get elected.The simplicity of Fiorina’s book is also its vice. No doubt Fiorina is right that the culture wars are mainly an artificial imposition, and that most Americans would prefer not to have lifestyle issues be center stage. But Fiorina fails to ask any of the interesting questions that naturally follow from his data. Why does politics seem to be about culture now, when it hasn’t always been? Why do politicians only seem able to articulate political differences in cultural terms?In fact, Fiorina leaves us with many false impressions. For example, he implies that the public is always more moderate than its political leaders. But we know that this view is false. During the civil rights movements of the 1960s, or labor movements of the late 19th and 20th century, the public was more radical than its leaders, and forced them to make serious political concessions, like recognizing unions, passing civil rights legislation, and legalizing abortion. That, in fact, was a period of real polarization, as opposed to the artificial polarization of today.The false polarization of today reflects not the intensity of ideological opposition, or the severity of social conflict, but the intensity of emotion that is part of political debate. Here, too, Fiorina is frustratingly silent. If he has given us numerical proof that society is not polarized, he hasn’t done the harder work of explaining the common misperception. Chalking it up to elites alone can’t be right – they have always tried to impose their views on society. Rather, the point is that when private behavior and lifestyle issues like abortion, gay marriage, and sexuality become subjects for political debate, everybody feels personally attacked. This leads to emotionally charged debate about a very narrow set of issues, that would be best be left to personal choice in the first place.Fiorina’s book is worth reading for exploding one piece of conventional wisdom about American politics. But in the absence of a more encompassing analysis and critique, a statistical disproof of common sense, no matter how well-written, will not take us very far. In fact, it could lead us in the anti-political direction of even greater moderation than we already deal with. The answer to the artificiality of the culture wars is not more pragmatism and compromise, but real politics.Overview by Alex Gourevitch