coalition.
In the summer of 2009, with the nation in economic crisis and the new African American president struggling to pass his signature health care reform in Washington, a wave of populist anger swept the nation. The so-called Tea Party movement (named after the Boston Tea Party rebellion against taxation in 1773) crafted a narrative that was pro-American, anticorporation, and antigovernment (except for programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit the Tea Partiers, who tended to be older Americans). Mostly it was angry, fed by emotional appeals of conservative talk show hosts and others, whose narratives took political debate out of the range of logic and analysis and into the world of emotional drama and angry invective. A New York Times poll found that Americans who identified as Tea Party supporters were more likely to be Republican, white, married, male, and over forty-five, and to hold views that were more conservative than Republicans generally.17 In fact, they succeeded in shaking up the Republican Party from 2010 onward, as they supported primary challenges to officeholders who did not share their antigovernment ideology, culminating in the rejection of the party establishment in 2016. The election that year signaled a moment of reckoning for a party that had been teetering on the edge of crisis for more than a decade. As establishment candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Ohio governor John Kasich fell in the primaries, so too did Tea Party favorites like Florida senator Marco Rubio and Texas senator Ted Cruz. The split in the party left an opening for the very unconventional candidacy of Donald Trump, which—much to the dismay of party leaders like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—proved to be more about Trump’s personality and the anger of his followers than it did about the Republican Party, although in the end most party members fell in line to vote for him.
The escalating anger of social conservatives who felt inadequately represented by the Republican Party’s mainstream came to a peak in the anti-establishment fury displayed in 2016. During that primary season, both Donald Trump and Texas senator Ted Cruz competed to address the anger that drove that group. They felt used and betrayed, especially by a party that had promised and failed to defeat Barack Obama, a president they viewed as illegitimate, partly because of Trump’s challenge to the president’s birth certificate. The rage of social conservatives seemed to be one of authoritarian populism, a mix of populist anger against the economic elite who profited at their expense; nativist anger at the perception that whites seemed to be falling behind while government was reaching out to help people of color; and partisan anger that, since the days of Richard Nixon, economic conservative Republicans had been promising them socially conservative accomplishments without delivering.
authoritarian populism a radical right-wing movement that appeals to popular discontent but whose underlying values are not democratic
Indeed, social scientists trying to understand the surprising phenomenon of the Trump vote found that one particular characteristic predicted it: a commitment to “authoritarian values.”18 These social scientists have found that some social conservatives, when they feel that the proper order and power hierarchy are threatened, either physically or existentially, are attracted to authoritarian narratives that seek to secure the old order by excluding the perceived danger. In the words of one scholar who studies this, the response is, “In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.”19 Those who score higher on the authoritarianism scale hold the kind of ideas one would expect from social conservatives seeking to keep faith with a familiar and traditional order—antigay sentiment, anti-immigration views, even white supremacy and overt racism. Interestingly, authoritarianism has been found most recently to correspond to narratives that reject the idea of political correctness, a reaction to the sense that expressing fear and anger about perceived threats is not socially acceptable.20
Although there have been major splits in the Democratic coalition in the past, their current divisions are minor, even after an election season when a self-avowed democratic socialist who was not even a party member challenged a more moderate liberal. The Democrats have to satisfy the party’s economic liberals, who are very procedural on most political and moral issues (barring affirmative action) but relatively (for Americans) substantive on economic concerns; the social liberals, substantive on both economic and social issues; and the more middle-of-the-road Democratic groups that are fairly procedural on political and moral issues but not very substantive on economic matters at all. In the late 1960s, the party almost shattered under the weight of anti–Vietnam War sentiment, and in 1972 it moved sharply left, putting it out of the American mainstream. It was President Bill Clinton, as a founder of the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), who in the 1990s helped move his party closer to the mainstream from a position that, as we can see in Figure 1.5, is clearly out of alignment with the position taken by most Americans. Whereas Al Gore, himself a DLC-er, faced a threat from the more extreme segments on the left in 2000, in the 2004 and 2008 presidential races, dislike of George W. Bush united Democrats across their party’s ideological spectrum, and recent Democratic contenders for the presidency have not had to deal with serious interparty conflict. Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidency in 2016 has caused the party to do some soul-searching about where it goes post-Obama.
Where Do You Fit?
One of the notable aspects of American ideology is that it often shows generational effects. Although we have to be careful when we say that a given generation begins definitively in a certain year (there is much overlap and evolution between generations), it can be helpful to look for patterns in where people stand in order to understand political trends. We know, for instance, that older white Americans tend to be more ideologically conservative, and because they are reliable voters, they get a lot of media attention. But with researchers gathering public opinion data on younger voters, and with those voters promising to turn out on issues they care about, it’s a good idea to look at where millennials and post-millennials fall in Figure 1.5.
Keep in mind that all we can do is talk about generalities here—obviously there will be many, many exceptions to the rule, and you may very well be one of them. But as a group, younger voters, especially the youngest voters, tend to be economically and socially liberal—that is, they fall in the left-hand side of Figure 1.5. If you want to test yourself, take the quiz at edge.sagepub.com/barbour8e/American-ideology-quiz to see where you fall before you look at the positions of your peers.
Figure 1.6 Political Ideology, by Generation
Source: Pew Research Center, “The Generation Gap in American Politics,” March 1, 2018, http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/the-generation-gap-in-american-politics/.
In Your Own Words
Describe values that most Americans share, and the political debates that drive partisan divisions in American politics.
How to Use the Themes and Features in This Book
Our primary goal in this book is to get you thinking critically about American politics—to introduce you to the twin tasks of analysis and evaluation with the aid of the themes of power and citizenship. Lasswell’s definition of politics gives us a framework of analysis for this book; that is, it outlines how we will break down politics into its
