by Bill Bishop
Conservatives weren't the first to fund ideological organizations. Liberal foundations were "pioneers in social movement and advocacy funding" in the 1960s and 1970s, according to sociologist Theda Skocpol.7 McGeorge Bundy at the Ford Foundation promoted philanthropy to support social activism, and grants from foundations helped create the infrastructure of the American left, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.8 In response to these initiatives from the left—and to the backsliding of Republican leaders in Washington—conservatives organized their own foundations and think tanks, and they nurtured their own organizations and leaders. Mark Rhoads said there was talk at the time of building a "shadow society." But what else were they supposed to do? Conservatives were literally starting from scratch after World War II.*
But conservatives were rebuilding just when America's civic life was about to shift.
From the Eastern Star to Common Cause
America in the 1950s was brimming with broadly based, locally rooted civic organizations. There was the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest membership organization, and the Free Masons, PTA, American Legion, United Methodist Women, Farm Bureau, and Order of the Eastern Star. Many of these organizations were segregated by race or gender, but they were all rooted in local chapters, and they all included people across lines of class, occupation, and political party. Civic organizations at the time copied the federal system, with chapters and members who elected local, state, and national officers. The kind women of the Eastern Star learned the fundamentals of self-government, and they held dinners, as they did in my former hometown of Smithville, Texas. The bank president would attend those dinners; so would the women from the school lunchroom and the guys from the volunteer fire department. Organizations such as the Eastern Star were political in that they represented their members in state and national capitals. They were democratic training grounds, where people learned to hold meetings, run for office, stage elections, give speeches, and wield power. Mass membership organizations that cut across lines of class, occupation, and religion occasionally produced unpredictable political results. Theda Skocpol, in Diminished Democracy, her study of civic life, pointed out that the normally conservative American Legion lobbied in the 1940s for the GI Bill, one of the most successful big-government social programs of the last century.
Skocpol discovered how these American civic organizations changed, starting at the time of the 1965 unraveling. Quite suddenly in the mid-1960s, Skocpol wrote, "old-line membership federations were no longer where the action was." Membership in broad-based, cross-class, fraternal and veterans groups plummeted in the late 1960s and early 1970s and "civic life was abruptly and fundamentally reorganized."9 The Elks, Masons, and Eastern Star were replaced by an avalanche of advocacy. The new groups weren't broad based, and they weren't democratically controlled. They were run from the top and organized around policies or issues. They weren't for fraternization; these new groups had agendas. John Gardner started Common Cause in 1970, and the organization has been lobbying for campaign finance reform and open government since. Marian Wright Edelman moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s to lobby for Mississippi's Head Start program. By 1973—the same year conservative midwestern legislators met to begin ALEC—she had raised the money to begin the Children's Defense Fund.
There wasn't a conspiracy by the left or the right. The breakdown of broad-based organizations was taking place throughout American society. Political parties and mainline religious denominations both lost membership at the same time people quit the Free Masons and the Eastern Star, the United Methodist Women and the Lions.* Broad-based groups declined and were replaced by associations of narrow ideological intents. This shift fit the Big Sort pattern. As Americans divided physically and spiritually into communities of interest, they divided into civic groups of interest, too. It wasn't a plot. Americans were simply constructing organizations in their own images.
"Their Own Echo Chambers"
In 2001, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal magazine the Nation, wrote, "We need to build an ALEC for our side."10 Michelle Goldberg traced how conservative groups created their own reality through self-reinforcing reports and radio broadcasts in Kingdom Coming, her book on the religious right. As the antidote, Goldberg wrote, "liberals need to create their own echo chambers to refute these kinds of distortions."11 Internet bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote admiringly about the "network of conservative organizations promoting and coordinating their efforts." That strategy was brilliant, according to Zuniga and Armstrong. Liberals shouldn't condemn what the Republicans had done. These founders of the websites Daily Kos and MyDD suggested that Democrats should create something just like it—a "vast left-wing conspiracy." Democrats needed candidates adept at "market segmentation," "micro-targeting," and "data mining."12 Writer Bill McKibben wrote that Armstrong, Kos, and the people of the "Net Left" were "all about winning. That's what animates the on-line activists ... The issues aren't secondary, exactly, but there's a clear consensus that worrying about the fine points of policy is an empty exercise without real power, and that power comes from party unity."13
Party unity brings with it other things. Conformity, secrecy, and obedience spring to mind, as does the segregated politics now at large in the country. But nobody stopped to think through the consequences of what was happening. Everyone was too busy setting up parallel institutions in an arms race of political organization building. In 2003, liberals created ALICE, the anti-ALEC American Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange; now every state legislator could meet with lawmakers from other states and be ideologically "at home." Liberals created think tanks in states to match white papers with think tanks established by the conservative State Policy Network. Pro—stem cell research groups battled anti—stem cell groups. The National Center for Science Education, founded in 1981, set out to defend "the teaching of evolution in public schools." Its conservative doppelganger was the Discovery Institute, founded in 1990 to promote the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution.* Republican lawyers had the Federalist Society; Democrats had the American Constitution Society. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was countered by the anti-ACLU American Center for Law and Justice. EMILYs List raised money for pro-choice women candidates; the Susan B. Anthony List did the same for antiabortion women candidates. The Club for Growth doused conservative candidates with contributions, so unions and left-leaning bloggers created They Work for Us in early 2007. There are liberal summer camps and conservative summer camps to prepare the next generation of ideological warriors—and now even Conservapedia for those who find Wikipedia too liberal.14
In 2003, Rob Stein began showing his PowerPoint presentation "The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix." The former Clinton administration official's slide show was a history of modern conservatism, an architectural diagram of the social and political infrastructure conservatives had created beginning in the 1970s.15 In mid-2005, at least eighty rich liberals inspired by Stein's presentation pledged $1 million each to pay for a Democratic mirror of the conservative system. The Democracy Alliance set a goal of raising $200 million to develop left-leaning institutions to counterbalance the think tanks and leadership groups on the other end of the ideological seesaw.16
And so the circle was complete. The left raised money to create a political infrastructure to counter foundations on the right that created a political infrastructure to counter a political infrastructure created by foundations on the left. The left scrambled to match a conspiracy by the right, which began when the right attempted to better a strategy of "advocacy philanthropy" that liberals had pioneered.
Politics of the Centrifuge
In the spring of 2005, I wandered to a downtown Austin hotel to attend the Southwest Landowner Conference. This was a rancher crowd. The men's footwear was heavy on dogger heels and exotic hides: ostrich, snake, and gator. The median facial hair w
as the handlebar mustache. The women worked their needlepoint while the men adjusted their hearing aids and squinted at maps projected at the front of the room. The spirit was western friendly and bighearted. These people came from Sonora, Fort Davis, and Cortez because they wanted to learn, as one speaker put it, "how private property is being abolished in America."
Many rural landowners worry about the effects of laws such as the Endangered Species Act and federal regulations preserving wetlands. The landowner conference went beyond a simple mistrust of an intrusive government, however. Perceived threats were coming from all over—the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol, activist judges, advocates of "sustainable development," and the Nature Conservancy. The environmentalists' demand for "open space," said a speaker, was "one small step toward a larger agenda," which was, we learned, the end of private property. "They will eventually take your land," said Michael Coffman, a former manager for a paper company. The aim was socialism, he said, and the force driving the anti-landowner movement was theological. The UN protocols and the environmentalists' agenda, Coffman said, sprang from a "pantheistic" faith, "the belief that nature is God ... and must be protected from the use and abuse of man."*
After Coffman's speech, a man from Oregon stood up and told the crowd that in his state, "we have linked the Christian movement with the property rights movement." I later asked the gentleman what he meant, and he pulled out the voting results from two referenda on the Oregon ballot in November 2004. One prohibited gay unions. The other extended the rights of property owners against certain types of zoning. He spread out sheaves of county-by-county voting totals and pointed to the "yes" votes for the two proposals. "Those people and those people," he said, stubbing a finger at those who voted for both measures, "are the same."
This isn't a story about paranoia among western cattlemen. (When these landowners fret about the end of private property, they sound positively carefree compared to those on the left who believe that the attacks on 9/11 were coordinated by the federal government and that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was caused by explosives set by order of the president.) The ranchers represent a general American phenomenon. Over the past thirty years, Democrats and Republicans have come to disagree about more and more issues. In the 1970s, there was little difference between Democrats and Republicans on issues such as abortion, school prayer, and women's rights, according to Thomas Carsey and Geoffrey Layman, the two political scientists who have done the most work in this area.17 Now the two parties differ on everything—not only abortion and school prayer but also the war in Iraq, who should be on the Supreme Court, even Wal-Mart's business practices.
In traditional political science theory, as parties take opposing sides on new issues, older disagreements tend to disappear. Fresh conflicts take the place of older, staler divisions. According to this theory, the rise of cultural issues in the 1970s should have displaced the economic differences that divided the parties in the 1930s or the civil rights and social welfare divisions that emerged in the 1960s. But these long-standing issues didn't go away. Republicans and Democrats still cling to the opposite sides of economic matters (such as the minimum wage) and civil rights, differences that have existed for generations. Instead of displacing the old issues, the new cultural issues were added on. The differences between the parties now include economics (tax cuts, health care), race (social welfare), the environment (global warming), and the array of issues that fall under the general heading of "culture": abortion, gay rights, women's rights, and school prayer. Layman and Carsey have shown through their analysis of survey data that the conflict between the parties has been extended. The differences between the parties are particularly acute among party activists. Carsey and Layman have found that Republican Party activists have grown more conservative than Democratic activists have grown more liberal, a discovery in line with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's findings in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. Hacker and Pierson argued that while both parties have become less moderate, polarization has been "unequal," that Republicans have moved more to the right than Democrats have edged to the left.*18 That advantage, if one can call it that, in Republican extremism may be temporary. Layman and Carsey have found that newer activists from both parties are more polarized than older party stalwarts.
People certainly change parties when their beliefs conflict with party platforms or leaders. But Layman and Carsey have found the opposite happening as well. People are changing their minds to align with their parties' positions. "Even on issues as divisive and emotion-laden as abortion and racial equality," they wrote, "there is evidence of individuals bringing their attitudes into line with their party ties."19 People don't methodically take an inventory of their political beliefs and then cast about for the political party that best matches their ideology. Carsey and Layman have found that people at times change their beliefs to conform to the positions of their party. "When party leaders, candidates, and platforms take distinct stands on these issues, it signals to citizens which views on these issues go with each party," Layman and Carsey wrote. "This creates pressure for citizens to bring their party identification and views on these issues closer together."20 Party membership is not simply an affiliation. It's a screen that filters and shapes the way people perceive the world. Again, politics is working both top-down, as people pick up and follow signals from party activists, and bottom-up, as growing majorities in legislative districts push elected officials to the extremes.
In the early 1990s, Bill Bellamy, a Republican county commissioner in Jefferson County, Oregon, began to see a change in the way his constituents posed questions. They were linking issues. People would ask Bellamy about property rights, and once he'd answered, they would then assume that they knew his views on abortion, taxes, and gun control. "The interesting thing is because of my position on land use, they didn't have to ask me about the others," Bellamy told me. "The religious right has gotten very good about asking questions other than the direct one. If they ask[ed] you about land use and property rights, they would walk away feeling very comfortable about what your position was about abortion and gun control, without you having to say what it is."
No wonder the ranchers at the Southwest Landowner Conference saw a connection between the United Nations, private property rights, gay marriage, and party politics. They were connected. Over the past thirty years, the parties have cultivated more areas of disagreement, and people have allied themselves more tightly with their parties, either by changing parties or by changing their minds. As new issues have cropped up—the war in Iraq, telephone spying by the government, a Spanish version of the national anthem—Americans have divided neatly by party. And all this has taken place as people have sorted themselves into more like-minded churches and communities, all social networks that tend to enforce uniformity of beliefs. In 1972, the democratic theorist Robert A. Dahl warned that a sign of extreme political polarization was when two sides "posed two alternative ways of life, two kinds of society, two visions of man's fate and man's hope."21 Today the division in the country isn't about party allegiance. It's about how we choose to live. And as the parties have come to represent lifestyle—and as lifestyle has defined communities—everything seems divisible, Republican or Democratic.
The top-ten-grossing theaters for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 were all in heavily Democratic cities: Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. The best theaters for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ were in deeply Republican Mesquite, Texas; Houston; Morrow, Georgia; and Orange, California.*22
Republicans withdrew from a thirty-seven-year-old Capitol Hill softball league for Senate and House staff members in 2006 because they claimed that the Democratic commissioner of the league had introduced a "socialist" playoff system. Republicans charged that the new system favored teams with poor records. One Republican staffer wrote in an e-mail message: "The commissioner has a long-standing policy of punishing success and rewarding failu
re. He's a Democrat. Waddya' expect?"23
Seven out of ten conservative Republicans think Wal-Mart has a good effect on the country, but only four out of ten liberal Democrats agree.24 By August 2006, six Democratic presidential candidates had appeared at anti—Wal-Mart rallies.25
Democrats flock to taverns in local chapters of Drinking Liberally, an organization that "gives like-minded, left-leaning individuals a place to talk politics." On the other hand, there is a "Christian alternative to yoga." Scores of people have been trained to teach PraiseMoves, a combination of "deep stretching, gentle movement and strong Scripture."
Democrats are more protective of plant life than Republicans (who are more apt to restrict their environmental concerns to the impact on fur-bearing creatures). Democrats more than Republicans say that laws ought to be passed to limit consumption of natural resources—especially by the rich.26
In a poll taken eight days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, three-quarters of Democrats said that the reaction by federal authorities had been fair or poor. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans said that the federal response had been good or excellent.27
In the spring of 2006, just days after USA Today revealed that the National Security Agency had been collecting phone records of U.S. citizens, 73 percent of Democrats said that this was an invasion of people's privacy, while 69 percent of Republicans said that it was a necessary tool to fight terrorism.28
The Cook County, Illinois, Republican Party felt the need to take a position on junk food. In 2006, it sent out a news release asking the media to attend a book signing by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser and to "ask a challenging question or two."29
Just days before the 2006 midterm elections, the Pew Research Center released a poll finding a "vast divide" between Democrats and Republicans. The poll confirmed that only 10 percent of the public was truly independent. Seven out of ten Republicans said that the economy was doing just fine. Three-quarters of Democrats said the opposite. Six out of ten Republicans said that the war in Iraq was going at least fairly well. Eight out of ten Democrats thought that the war was going poorly. Democrats and Republicans, Pew found, "see the world quite differently."30