Democrats and Republicans are not Polarized on a Left-Right Spectrum
Democrats and Republicans are not Polarized on a Left-Right Spectrum
Verlan Lewis, Utah Valley University
Political scientists speak about party polarization in a few different ways, including affective polarization (the observation that partisans in the United States’ two major parties increasingly dislike each other),issue polarization (the idea that the two major parties are moving further apart on particular issue positions), and ideological polarization (the claim that Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart on a general ideological left/right political spectrum). The idea of ideological polarization is based on the myth of left and right, but Americans’ belief in this myth is, along with other factors, helping to create a reality ofissue polarization and affective polarization that is undermining constitutional democracy.
The claim that Democrats have moved to the left and Republicans have moved to the right in recent years is based on the false assumption that there is just one issue in politics. After all, a one-dimensional left/right spectrum can, by definition, only measure one thing. But the truth is that there are many different issues in politics (e.g., immigration, income taxes, Social Security, abortion, and foreign policy) with different stances that can be bundled together in many different ways. When we use the language of left and right, however, we are implicitly claiming that hundreds of issues in politics are bound together by one big issue that determines a person’s stance on the smaller issues. So, what is the one big thing that the left/right spectrum measures? Asking several different people might get you several different answers, but this is just more evidence that politics is multi-dimensional—it is about a lot of different things—and cannot be usefully modeled on a single line running from left to right.
A few examples from the Republican Party over the past decade can help show why this framework is misleading. According to conventional wisdom, Republicans nominated a center-right presidential candidate in 2012 in Mitt Romney, while nominating a far-right candidate in 2016, 2020, and 2024 in Donald Trump. The implication of the left/right spectrum here is that Trump must have taken Romney’s moderately conservative positions to the extreme. In 2012, Romney campaigned on moderately using American military power abroad to spread democracy. The left/right spectrum tells us, therefore, that Trump must be an extreme foreign interventionist wanting to spread democracy, but in reality, he campaigned as a non-interventionist and repudiated the supposed right-wing Iraq War as foolish. Likewise, in 2012, Romney campaigned on moderately cutting government deficits by reforming entitlement spending. The left/right spectrum tells us, therefore, that Trump must want to gut Social Security and Medicare. The reality, however, is that President Trump refused to reform entitlement spending and signed into law the single biggest spending bill in American history. Similarly, in 2012, Republicans argued that Americans should elect Romney because of his conservative moral rectitude and personal integrity. The left/right spectrum tells us, therefore, that, as an extreme conservative, Trump must be extremely moral, virtuous, and honest in his personal and public life. The reality is that his bombastic speech does not align with civic virtues of moderation and civility.
Unsurprisingly, ordinary Republican identifiers have changed their positions on many issues over the past decade to align themselves with Trump. Does it make more sense to say that Trump has moved the GOP to the left over the past decade? No, because there are other issues in which Republicans have maintained the same issue positions and/or become more extreme. To pretend that the many issues in American political discourse can be collapsed onto a single line confuses more than it clarifies. To tell us that Trump is an extreme right-winger tells us who loves Trump (those who identify as on the right), but it does not tell us useful information about what Trump’s policies are at any given moment.
Rather than moving the Republican Party to the left or to the right, Trump simply redefined what the right or conservatism means. The bundle of issue positions that are considered left-wing or right-wing at any given time inevitably changes. As a result, the claim of ideological polarization—that Democrats have moved to the left and Republicans have moved to the right over time—is misleading because the very meanings of left and right have also changed during that same time period. We would be better off just describing how Democrats and Republicans have changed their positions on various issues.
It is not only misleading to say that the two parties have ideologically polarized in recent decades, but it is also harmful because the left/right framework implies that all of the issue positions of Team Blue and Team Red flow out of their stance on one big issue. This mental mistake contributes to unreasonable issue polarization and toxic affective polarization.
First, when a person or group believes in the myth of left and right, they think that to be an extremely good citizen means to take each of their party’s current issue positions to the extreme. After all, if their party’s ideology is a good philosophy, then to be an extreme progressive or extreme conservative must be extremely good. Where once our two parties took moderate and evolving positions on a variety of individual issues, partisans now swing from wild extremes on each political issue to signal sufficient loyalty to their ideological team’s ever-changing issue positions.
Second, believing in the myth of left and right leads to dogmatism. If all of the issue positions considered progressive flow out of a progressive philosophy on the left-hand side of a political spectrum, and all of the positions considered conservative flow out of a conservative philosophy on the right-hand side of a political spectrum, then all a person has to do is get the one big issue correct (choose to be a progressive or a conservative). They can then assume that all of the issue positions of their own party must be correct, and all of the issue positions of the other party must be wrong, as a matter of course. It is no surprise that, as the myth of ideological polarization has become more widely accepted by Americans in recent decades, so has the reality of affective polarization.
A more realistic, and healthier, way to view our two parties is to recognize that each party is a pluralistic coalition of individuals and groups with different views that is constantly changing in some ways and remaining the same in others. Each party’s platform is a basket of issue positions subject to change from election to election and year to year. Understanding this pluralistic truth allows us to recognize that each party is always correct about some things and wrong about others. We might prefer one party over the other at any given time, because they have more of the issue positions we like than the other party, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that our party is right about everything (because it has the correct philosophy) and that the other party is wrong about everything (because it has the incorrect philosophy). Taking the pluralistic view of our two political parties allows us to be more honest and rational evaluators of when each party’s rhetoric or behavior matches or departs from our own political principles.
The left/right framework leads to totalitarianism because, rather than viewing politics as the contest between two pluralistic, coalitional parties that are each correct and incorrect about various things at any given time, it causes us to view politics as a struggle between two ideological parties that are on opposing sides of a left/right spectrum. If one party really is right, and the other party wrong, about everything, then we do not need to engage in civil discourse, learn from others, persuade, compromise, or limit government power. Instead, we simply need to shut down discourse and win for the good side and dominate the bad side. We need to centralize power in the national government and in the presidency, trample the rule of law, and elect a dictator on our side who will implement our party’s good policies and suppress our enemies. Reducing the complexity of the world to only a singular viewpoint is a false and dangerous intellectual framework that leads to totalitarianism. Pluralism, on the other hand, is the true view of politics understood by the American Founders and leads to limited government, the rule of law, the separation of powers, federalism, and individual rights. The success of our constitutional republic depends upon getting rid of the false left/right way of thinking and returning to the pluralism of the Founding.
