The Roots of Polarization: From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars

The Roots of Polarization

Chicago Studies in American Politics

A series edited by Susan Herbst, Lawrence R. Jacobs, Adam J. Berinsky, and Frances Lee; Benjamin I. Page, editor emeritus

Also in the series:

Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity by Jennifer Chudy

Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy by Taylor N. Carlson

America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King

Partisan Hostility and American Democracy by James N. Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, and John Barry Ryan

Respect and Loathing in American Democracy: Polarization, Moralization, and the Undermining of Equality by Jeff Spinner-Halev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse

Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age by Eric M. Patashnik

Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture by Alexandra Filindra

Accountability in State Legislatures by Steven Rogers

Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide by Matthew Levendusky

Dynamic Democracy: Public Opinion, Elections, and Policymaking in the American States by Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw

Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics by Alexander Coppock

Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason

The Obligation Mosaic: Race and Social Norms in U.S. Political Participation by Allison P. Anoll

A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion by Susan Herbst

Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation by John A. Dearborn

Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America by Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa

Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection by Mallory E. SoRelle

Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era by James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee

America’s Inequality Trap by Nathan J. Kelly

Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It) by Amy E. Lerman

Additional series titles follow index.

The Roots of Polarization

From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars

Neil A. O’Brian

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83454-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83456-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83455-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226834559.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Brian, Neil A., author.

Title: The roots of polarization : from the racial realignment to the culture wars / Neil A. O’Brian.

Other titles: Chicago studies in American politics.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Series: Chicago studies in American politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023054070 | ISBN 9780226834542 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226834566 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226834559 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Polarization (Social sciences)—United States. | Culture conflict—Political aspects—United States. | Abortion—Political aspects—United States. | Public opinion—Political aspects—United States. | United States—Politics and government—20th century. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Political aspects.

Classification: LCC JK1726 .o37 2024 | DDC 306.20973—dc23/eng/20240110

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054070

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to Sarah and my entire family, old and new.

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Theory: Racial Realignment and Contemporary Party Sorting

Chapter 3. Issue Connections in the Mass Public

Chapter 4. Cross-Pressured Voters

Chapter 5. Vote Choice and Shifting Coalitions

Chapter 6. An Alternative Outcome: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

Chapter 7. The Partisan Divide on Immigration

Chapter 8. Beyond the United States

Chapter 9. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

On April 10, 1975, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy stood on the Senate floor and bored in constantly at a legislative amendment from Republican Senator Dewey Bartlett. The issue at hand? Bartlett’s amendment prohibited federal Medicaid funds for abortion services (Lader, undated memo A; Hunter 1975). Kennedy’s actions caught abortion activists off guard. The attack on Bartlett was led, surprisingly enough, by two Catholic Senators who had stayed aloof from [the] issue before—Kennedy of Massachusetts and Muskie of Maine, Lawrence Lader, founder of the then-nascent National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) wrote (Lader, undated memo A). Robert Lynch, who led the US Catholic Bishops’ organized efforts to ban abortion, was just as upset by Kennedy’s actions as NARAL was pleased. Lynch interpreted Kennedy’s actions as a clear message that Kennedy had finally decided not to endorse any attempts to change the current status of abortion-on-demand (Lynch 1975a, 1974a).

While fights between Democrats and Republicans over abortion politics are commonplace today, Kennedy, like other Democrats (and Republicans), had not yet taken a clear position on abortion in the early 1970s (Wolbrecht 2000). Lynch and other Catholic leaders wondered what prompted Kennedy’s about-face in 1975.¹ Catholic leadership learned, from Kennedy’s staff, "that Senator Kennedy is convinced that a majority of the Massachusetts citizenry support his position of acceptance of [Roe v. Wade] (Lynch 1975a). Kennedy had taken a private poll, and his pro-choice abortion position, which he worried might hurt him in a heavily Catholic state, did not affect his standing among the electorate (Hehir 1975). Only if we can demonstrate that [Massachusetts voters oppose Kennedy’s abortion stance] will we be able to move Senator Kennedy to a position of at least neutrality, Lynch concluded. But as Kennedy’s internal polling suggested, this would prove difficult. A 1976 exit survey showed that 72% of Massachusetts voters believe a woman should be able to have an abortion (CBS/NYT Exit Poll 1976). Furthermore, Kennedy’s leadership . . . [on] abortion, Lawrence Lader mused, coupled with his strong stand on Boston school integration, seems to portend a major bid for liberal support, perhaps the signal for his re-entry into the 1976 campaign. In a matter of years, Kennedy had transformed from being publicly indifferent on the issue of abortion to being the leader of abortion [rights] forces in the Senate" (New York Times 1980).

While this vignette focuses on Ted Kennedy and his position on abortion, it is illustrative of a broader transformation of the political parties that has long interested academics, journalists, and other political observers: issues like abortion that had been nonpartisan came to define intense party conflict of the 1980s and 1990s.

This book explores why the party coalitions—which once held overlapping and diverse views on issues like abortion or gun control—polarized on these and effectively every other major culture war issue in the latter part of the twentieth century. By culture war issues, I mean the non-economic domestic issues that have animated political fights in recent decades: gun control, abortion, the environment, immigration, gay rights, and women’s rights.² On each of these issues, Democrats moved leftward, Republicans moved rightward, and intraparty divisions, common in the 1970s, all but disappeared.

I argue that the 1960s racial realignment—referring to the moment when the national parties polarized on civil rights—was a defining moment for contemporary party polarization across other nonracial culture war issues. The parties were able to sort as they did on issues like abortion and gun control in the 1980s and 1990s because the parties in the electorate had already sorted on civil rights in the 1960s. By sorted, I mean that Democrats adopted what we now consider to be liberal positions and Republicans adopted what we now consider to be conservative positions. This is the central thesis of this book: partisan divisions on now-salient culture war issues are connected to and constrained by the electoral coalitions that formed as a result of the 1964 racial realignment (prior to 1964, the national parties held similar positions on civil rights).

At the root of this transformation is a long-standing feature of US public opinion: ordinary voters who hold more conservative racial views also hold more conservative views on a range of other social issues including abortion, guns, and gay rights. These linkages date to the earliest public opinion polls and, important for this book’s argument, precede the national parties staking divergent positions (or in some cases, any position) on these now-salient issues. While scholarship shows that people who are conservative on race hold other conservative positions in the present day, the fact that these same patterns of public opinion date to the earliest opinion polls, some of which go back to the 1930s, has been overlooked.

These preexisting issue connections meant that when racially conservative Democrats, disaffected by the growing racial liberalism of the Democratic Party, started entering the GOP, they quietly brought their conservative positions on other culture war issues with them. In other words, the racial realignment, although about civil rights, redistributed the issue preferences of other policies across partisan lines as well. This is despite issues like abortion or gun control being largely or completely absent from the political agenda at the time.

To be sure, polarization on these issues did not occur only because of the racial realignment, but the racial realignment altered the partisan distribution of public opinion on other culture war issues, which in turn shaped the behavior of politicians and activists in the decades that followed. Absent a racial realignment—in a world in which the parties held overlapping positions on civil rights and cleaved only along economic lines—it is not clear whether the parties would have sorted on issues like abortion or gun control in the manner or to the extent that they did.

This book’s argument breaks from an existing literature on political parties, which contends that party sorting and polarization on culture war issues is a top-down process driven by interest groups, politicians, or the media (e.g., Aldrich 2011; Bawn et al. 2012; Carmines and Stimson 1989; Layman and Carsey 2002; Adams 1997; Noel 2013). This existing scholarship, which collectively serves as a leading theory of US political parties, argues that elites or activists determine which side of an issue the party will take a position on, and then voters eventually follow along. These theories argue that because abortion and gun control were nonpartisan issues when polarization was at its low point, either party could have been the anti-abortion or pro–gun control party and that the eventual partisan alignment was the result of contingent choices made by politicians and activists. Voters played a peripheral role, this scholarship contends.

The Roots of Polarization: From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars shifts the focus back to voters, and it argues that the policy preferences of the mass public are fundamental for understanding the transformation of the contemporary party system. In doing so, this book offers new insights on old theories of interest groups and social movements (e.g., Key 1942; McCarty and Schickler 2018; Krimmel 2017; Proctor 2022). While existing literature focuses on the role of interest groups for party positioning on issues, less work explores why interest groups enter one party and not the other. I argue that the racial realignment, by shaping the parties’ coalition of voters, constrained interest groups to which party they could join. To return to the example of Ted Kennedy, many pro-life groups pressured Kennedy and other Democrats to pick up their cause. But these groups eventually found more support in the conservative wing of the GOP that had been rapidly growing since the early 1960s.

Likewise this book calls into question the role of party leaders as opinion makers who had the ability to pull the party in one direction over another in polarization’s formative years. At least on highly salient issues, politicians staked positions that reinforced what their (potential) constituency desired. For example, Kennedy’s prominence in the Democratic coalition meant his public support for abortion reform shaped public opinion among liberal Democrats. But this messaging did not appear out of nowhere; it was shaped by the perception and reality that for Kennedy, staking pro-choice positions was an avenue to build or maintain his voter coalition at the state or national level.

Together, these findings offer a new frame for understanding how the 1964 racial realignment still shapes the party system today. Our current politics runs through partisan paths worn and re-worn over the last sixty years. Even at times when race has been less visible in political campaigns, the partisan divisions over race that arose in the 1960s are the roots of today’s partisan culture wars.

A Primer on Twentieth-Century Party Positions

Today, we take for granted that a suite of cultural issues including civil rights, abortion, and gun control are bundled together in the party system and that each of these issues will receive at least some attention throughout the campaign cycle. But this has not always been the case. This section briefly outlines the evolving positions of the national and state parties, as well as other political elites, across non-economic issues that define the contemporary culture wars.

National Party Platforms

Between the 1930s and the early 1960s, the national parties held similar positions on civil rights, and partisan conflict in this era largely centered on government intervention in the economy. Party competition and coalitions were shaped by the New Deal economic policies created to combat the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, in 1964 (for reasons discussed in chapter 2), the incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Johnson embraced the civil rights movement while Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, absorbed the conservative opposition. In a fairly short time period, civil rights and racial equality, which had crosscut party lines since the 1930s, had become a central feature of national partisan conflict. Democratic voters supported broader calls for racial equality while Republican voters opposed them. Parties in government and organization divided similarly. Political scientists refer to the moment the parties divided on civil rights as the racial realignment (a term I use throughout this book).

My core argument is that the parties splitting on civil rights pushed them to divide on other once-nonpartisan social issues like abortion or gun control, which at the time were largely absent from political conflict. In the mid-twentieth century, the national parties either lacked positions on now-salient culture war issues or held overlapping views on those issues. If you read a copy of the New York Times in the 1950s, you would see few articles about abortion or gun control, and those that existed made little-to-no mention of partisan conflict.

To get a broader sense of party conflict on culture war issues, figure 1.1 plots the net number of liberal and conservative sentences that address each culture war issue in the national Democratic and Republican parties’ platforms between 1944 and 1996. Although the platform lengths vary, and tone cannot be captured by mentions, they paint a broad picture: the parties did not start taking consistent, differentiated positions on these issues until at least the mid-1970s.

Figure 1.1. National Party Platform: Liberal/Conservative Issue Mentions. Each graph plots the difference in the total number of liberal sentences minus total number of conservative sentences in each party’s national platform. To do this, I simply count the number of sentences in each party’s platform that take a stand on the respective issue and subtract them. Higher values are more liberal. Republican Party plotted in gray; Democratic Party plotted in black. Platforms are from the UCSB American Presidency Project.

Both parties first included brief language on gun control in their 1968 platform but had yet to divide on the issue; each party’s respective platform supported gun control.³ Perhaps surprisingly, Congress passed gun control legislation in 1968 with a higher percentage of Republicans supporting its passage than Democrats. Senators Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Edmund Muskie—the Senate’s leading liberal Democrats and national figureheads of the Democratic Party—did not vote on the legislation; a common maneuver to avoid taking a stand.⁴ McCarthy said gun laws should not be passed under panic conditions (Karol 2009, 86). It was not until the mid-1970s that the national parties first diverged on gun control.

On abortion, the parties first took diverging stances in 1976, although the language in each party’s platform was carefully crafted to reflect the intraparty heterogeneity that still existed. And although Republican Gerald Ford was marginally to the right of Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, it would not be until 1980 that the two major presidential candidates meaningfully differed on abortion. In fact, the most prominent partisan advocate for liberalizing abortion laws in the late 1960s was Republican Nelson Rockefeller.

On gay rights, Democrats first included very brief language about protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1980, although the 1972 Democratic platform made a vague mention that Americans should be free to make their own choice of lifestyles without discrimination. The national Republican Party platform did not include language on gay rights or sexual orientation until 1992, at which point they adopted a conservative position.

While abortion, gun control, and gay rights were completely absent from the parties’ platforms until at least the late 1960s, the issues of women’s equality, immigration, and the environment did receive attention by the national political parties in the mid-twentieth century. However, the parties held overlapping views on these issues until the 1970s. For example, both parties included supportive language on the Equal Rights Amendment in their national party platforms between 1944 and 1976. In fact, the GOP in 1940 was the first party to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. This makes its disappearance from the GOP’s platform in 1980 all the more surprising.

On documented immigration, both parties supported liberalized immigration laws in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, when Congress passed reform legislation that removed nation-based immigration quotas in 1965, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in Congress supported this legislation. On undocumented immigration, the issue was absent from either party’s platform until 1972, at which point Republicans included a single line in opposition.

With respect to the environment, both parties supported federal environmental regulations in the mid-twentieth century (Karol 2019, 12). While there were certainly exceptions—such as George H. W. Bush’s passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1990s—by the late 1970s, Republicans were generally to the right of Democrats on environmental action.

State Parties

The Democratic and Republican state parties did not split much earlier than the national parties on culture war issues. Gamm et al. (2022) find that abortion and gay rights were absent completely from state party platforms until 1968 and 1972, respectively. When these issues did emerge, they did so gradually, and partisan lines were blurred. Democratic platforms in Massachusetts, Missouri, Rhode Island, and South Dakota adopted conservative abortion platforms throughout the 1970s while Republican parties in Michigan, New York, and Hawaii, for example, adopted liberal abortion platforms (Gamm et al. 2022, 20–21). On gay rights, Republicans did not mention homosexuality until 1978, and in 1980 just 25% of Democratic state party platforms endorsed gay rights.

Analysis of state party platforms by Hopkins, Schickler, and Azizi (2020, 2022) show that it was not until the late 1970s that state party platforms divided on gun control, and state party polarization on immigration did not appear until the late 1980s. Relatedly, Jake Grumbach’s (2022) analysis of state-level party conflict shows that through the 1970s (at least), state policy outcomes on abortion, immigration, the environment, LGBT rights, and guns differed little between state governments controlled by Democrats compared to state governments controlled by Republicans.

Public Intellectuals

Due to the centrality of national parties to an existing literature on parties and public opinion, much of this book focuses on national parties and their leaders (e.g., presidential candidates). However, it is worth noting that thought leaders, on both the right and left, were also generally quiet on culture war issues throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When conservative thought leaders envisioned a new Republican Party, one that broke away from the New Deal consensus and racial liberalism that defined much of the midcentury Republican Party establishment, issues like abortion, gun control, and gay rights were absent. For example, in 1963 William Rusher, the publisher of William F. Buckley’s conservative magazine, National Review, wrote a now-famous piece titled the Crossroads for the GOP, which argued that the GOP’s path to winning national elections ran through the South. Rusher and this article were enormously influential for building modern conservatism in the Republican Party, yet Rusher’s piece did not mention abortion, guns, gay rights, or women’s rights as issues to build this coalition.

Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, a road map for conservatism in the next decades, also did not mention abortion, guns, gay rights, or women’s rights. Likewise, Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority—which Newsweek called the political bible of the Nixon era and which was treated as a blueprint for the modern Republican Party—also did not mention any of these issues (Phillips [1969] 2014, xv).

In fact, conservative social activists who would later stand on the front lines of the culture wars on abortion and gay marriage (often referred to as the New Right), were routinely frustrated by conservative intellectuals for focusing on abstract economic principles rather than emerging social issues that they believed would mobilize new voters. The New Right had always been different from the Old Right (a la William F. Buckley, for example) because of its concern for the moral issues, a founder of the culturally conservative activist movement recalled. When mainline conservatives were trying to decide whether abortion was an individual freedom issue or not, the precursors of the New Right were introducing Human Life Amendments into Congress (Marshner, n.d.).

One might imagine that conservative intellectuals, committed to reducing the role of government in everyday life, might oppose or feel conflicted about more government restrictions on abortion and gay rights. For example, in 1957, in their first article that took a stand on homosexuality, the conservative National Review supported a British commission that rescinded laws making homosexuality a crime. What we want are fewer laws, not more, the article read (Lejeune 1957). Such an argument cropped up among activists, politicians, and thinkers on the political right for years (Proctor 2022). William Safire, a tremendously influential conservative intellectual, and James J. Kilpatrick, a very prominent and racially conservative commentator on the right, employed a similar libertarian logic at times (Safire 1974; Kilpatrick 1964). (Chapters 3, 6, and 7 discuss this further.)

In short, the issues that filled and divided the political world of the 1950s and 1960s were much different from what characterizes contemporary partisan and ideological conflict.

Voters

Finally, while the parties and political thought leaders’ views crisscrossed partisan lines, partisan cleavages among voters in the mid-twentieth century were also blurred. Figure 1.2 plots partisan opinion, measured by partisan identification, in the 1950s and 1960s toward now-major culture war issues. Not only are the partisan divides on the issues small, on some issues Democrats have more conservative attitudes than Republicans. This might surprise some readers. Several broad factors underpin these trends. First, the white South and conservative Catholics, two very culturally conservative constituencies, still identified as Democrats in this era. Conversely, more socially liberal constituencies in the Northeast were still Republicans. Third, African Americans, who were heavily Democratic by the 1960s, held quite conservative views on abortion and gay rights.

Figure 1.2. Public Opinion by Partisan Identification, 1950s–1960s. Each black dot represents the average position of Democratic identifiers and each gray dot the average position of Republican identifiers for each policy listed down the y-axis. Each variable is standardized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Higher values reflect more conservative attitudes.

As the next section discusses, the fact that Democrats and Republicans held similar views on now-salient culture war issues coming out of the 1950s is used by existing scholarship to argue that when the parties divided, the parties could not have been reacting to public opinion because public opinion was nonpartisan. This book argues that this is an incomplete picture: by the time abortion and guns became salient issues, southern white and conservative Catholic constituencies had already become unmoored from the Democratic Party because of its embrace of racial liberalism in the 1960s. This is despite these voters not yet identifying as Republican.

Party Positioning: Existing Scholarship

If issues like abortion once sat outside of partisan political conflict, how then did the parties develop the positions they hold today? One view of parties is that politicians, hungry to get elected and stay in office, will learn what their voters’ positions are on issues like gun control or abortion and adopt those views to secure votes. Indeed, this concept rests at the center of representative democracy in the United States. In Federalist, no. 57, James Madison defends frequent elections to the House of Representatives as a crucial link ensuring that the elected few would pursue the interests of the many. Members of the House of Representatives, Madison wrote, will