i think we have to work at that and the federal government has got to support that as we worked to build a more perfect union. >> the fact you are both cosponsoring it and the fact that you embody that conversation in this work and at the fact that you are getting so much done together and building real relationships and friendships is incredibly helpful. people should take notice to it and thank you for the work and made that sent forth more ripples of hope. also more civic education please for places like this and for all of us. thank you so much. [applause] >> hello. thank you for being at this roundtable. polarization misuses. a conversation between historians and political scientists on polarization in recent american history. the significance of that history. they are trying to rewrite broadly the history of american politics. one note -- joe always scheduled to be part of this roundtable, but his travel schedule is such that he is just getting an out and he will not be able to join us. if you are at this panel, you read everything he writes as soon as it comes out, so this is probably redundant, but i would urge you to read his writings on related topics in the new york times and elsewhere. they displayed to me a quality of real wisdom in discussing contemporary issues in the 19th and 20th century u.s. history. this should be a topic of interest to a broad audience. i want to frame, before we start, the significance, as we understand it for the study of american politics. this item was stationed describes modern american politics. context was asian is multidimensional what you cannot deduce the politician's knowledge from tax policy. and then increasingly unidimensional. there is an ideological line. concurrent with this, there has been an ideological sorting to a lesser extent, but notable in the attitudes of voters. a variety of lyrical dysfunction stems from partisan gridlock. the past couple of decades has produced a large and impressive body for polarization. congressional behavior for average americans. for number of reasons that i think we will get into in other remarks and more detail, some of the findings from that literature have entered the conversation as among political journalists, the polarization has become go to framing for understanding the maladies of contemporary american politics. in the last two years, in the conference at purdue, it has played a role in this. many historians of the late 20th century have been skeptical of the notion that polarization ought to serve as an organizing ring work for understanding the political history of this. . one to start this chronology with matthew lassiter in the 2011 essay. the journal of american history. it called for political history beyond red and blue. it cited a number of key developments in the late 20th century policy that were realized on a bipartisan basis. a war on crime and the war on drugs. a deregulation of a number of industries in the 70's and how financed in the 1990's. military adventurism in the 21st century. by 2019, they identified a trend toward neo-consensus history of the united states politics. more broadly, it was thought with a rise and fall of liberal order. polarization is one story within the broader story of making and unmaking eight neoliberal order. in short, it seems that historians a flick of science engaged in the valuable dialogue of the history and significance of polarization to defined terns and research agendas that might usually converge to see what is a stake. to see what it illuminates and what it obscures it whether it succeeds or fails as an organizing framework for contemporary american national politics. if it does fail, if anything, what might be better. we rarely have an opportunity to sit down and hash out these questions. i am deeply grateful that we have this chance, and agreeing to take part in this conversation. i will go ahead and introduce everyone now. first up, thomas zimmer. at the far left, of this podium. we have a visiting professor at georgetown foreign service, and he is currently writing a book on the history of polarization, and as a concept since the 1960's, amy to store size and see how it rose to become one of the defining they are does of our time. his comments will really situate the rest of the conversation. he also writes a regular column for the guardian about the past and present of american democracy. next will be julia. an associate professor of political science. the author of delivering the people's method's, and the changing politics of a presidential mandate did she is also a contributor for fivethirtyeight.com. after julie will be nicole. an associate scholar with the obama presidency oral history project. authored and conservative media critic. she has a conservative revolution to remake politics in the 1990's. her book comes out in august. she is among many public contributions to the columnist and cnn has hosted her politics. starting this summer, the associate professor of history and director at the rogers center for of vanderbilt university. finally, sam is the associate professor at colgate, and for our purpose, author of the landmark book. the polarizers, postwar architects of the postwar era. he is also writing for venue such as american prospect, democracy, and plus one, the new york times let it go, fox. this will be a roundtable. each panelist will have about 10 minutes, that should leave us plenty of times for questions from the audience and more discussion in general. >> hello. hope you can hear me. as you can hear, my voice is shot. that is the result of some allergy related albums. it is not covid. i keep saying it's not covid. it's not covid. of course. yes. if i was a psychopath, i would say that and said here. it sounds terrible, but i assure you, i usually sound more pleasant. i am honored to be part of this roundtable. very grateful to mason and sam for the invitation. i'm excited to go first, and i will use that to open with a bit of a broadside against the polarization narrative. the least controversial thing you can do in american politics is to cry polarization. if you do, you will be rewarded with a steady stream of nodding heads from across the clinical spectrum. polarization seems obviously true sometimes. we look at dysfunction in congress, and the way american society seemingly disintegrates into regard each other with increasing hostility and aggression. yet, i wish we would be more critical to them. towards polarization as a diagnosis of our time. i believe that in most cases, at least in the way the concept has been popularized in use, it obscures more than it names. quite often, it deliberately does so. i think the fact that it does is precisely what makes it attractive it is the future, not the bottom of the narrative. i want to be clear what i'm criticizing and when i use the term polarization. it is not a point that there are specific aspects in culture that are polarized. i'm sure we'll talk about them, today. but i find polarization mostly descriptive, rather than explanatory. more importantly, i believe once it is adopted, as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing paradigm, it obscures not only what the challenges, which is radicalization of the right, but also transports a misleading idea of the recent past and how we got there. i want to talk about why it don't think fuller asian provides a helpful assessment of the current situation. it is true that in a comparative perspective, the gap between left and right, and excuse the broad views of these right here. it is very wide on many issues. but where that is the case, with guns, pandemic response, the question of whether or not clinical violence is acceptable if you lose an election, it has often been entirely a function of conservatives moving to the right. the right is more extreme than other countries. more than the mainstream conservative party. then there are issues where we find broad consensus across large parts of the political spectrum one week talk about law and order policies or housing and urban development, and not what has been rightfully criticized as an artificial red blue binary. even some of the so-called wedge issues don't necessarily look so polarizing it for example, not only has there been a pretty steady two thirds majority that thinks abortion should be legal in cases for decades now, but relatively few people support the full no accession legalization of abortion. even worse work a complete band under any circumstance, so it seems to have been clustered consistently in between these polar opposites. what about finally areas in which we are indeed dealing with a rapidly widening partisan divide that is not caused by conservative war. sleep caused by the conservative climate change. it has been polarizing, and republicans and democrats are moving away from each other, and they are largely vacating a position in the middle, but as a political narrative, i think fuller's station is misleading. it implies two things. both sides are moving towards the extremes, and the extremes in the widening gap between the two positions are result from and the actual problem. crucially, democrats are not democrats. they are moving to extreme positions. but not by international comparison. they are in line with a position shared by all experts in the world. meanwhile, a sizable percentage of republicans are drifting further into the shared position for experts. it is also not the widening divide, per se, that is the problem. if democrats had not moved on the issue, the gap would be smaller. but we absolutely would not be in a better position. we would just be in a position where fewer people acknowledged the urgency of climate change. beyond offering a misleading interpretation, we find polarization problematic. if we examine the past through the legs of polarization, if we write history as polarization, we tend to create a narrative of the american policy decline. almost all casting consensus on the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, it mythologized as it as an era of unity and order and stability. such a decline often comes with a hefty dell's -- dose of nostalgia. something the right is actually successfully weaponize. in u.s. history, and i don't need to tell anyone in here this, politically, the consensus is usually based on a cross partisan basis to leave a social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal rights. the consensus of the euro was no exception. it ended on both parties agreeing that patriarchal role would remain untouched. by the 1960's, that consensus has started to fracture. parties began to split over the question of whether or not it should become a multiracial mocker see, a system in which status would not be primarily determined by race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. in many ways, the polarization is the price u.s. society has to pay for real progress towards him. yet, polarization is exactly what characterizes much of the broader polarization. this dorians have not been immune to that kind of thing. the influence becomes obvious in the way it shapes the latest attempt to provide a synthesis of u.s. history. from 2018, this story relies on polarization as a framework for the recent -- recent post-1960's past. the final due to 50 pages of that book before that is really good, but the final pages are basically a long drawnout lament over america's decline that was caused by both sides being increasingly extreme and unreasonable. that is largely unsupported by the evidence presented in the book. it is a striking example of the pitfalls of using historical paradigms. what could be a better way to approach polarization from a historical perspective. i think rather than reproducing by projecting them back into the past, we should strive to restore the narrative by making the idea of polarization itself the focal point of our analysis. basically, i think we should approach polarization likely would any other broad societal diagnosis characterized by past zeros, asking what does it tell us about this era that this idea was so prominent that we should investigate its genesis, rise to prominence, how it has been used and abused clinically, how it has been theorized in social and clinical sciences, and how it has been popularized it how it has been represented, how it shapes the discourse. the ways in which americans conceive of their own society. at that we need to ask, what made this particular idea so attract to so many people at this particular moment it that takes me back to what i said in the beginning. how, in a way, the polarization narrative obscures more than it illuminates. it is a feature and not about this concept is useful if you want to lament major problems of the american politics. but you may not be able to bring yourself to address that the fact of american democracy is not that way. the concept provides a rhetoric of rapprochement that it does not require agreement as to what is actually ailing america. only that polarization is a potential. i think we need to see the narrative rise in the context of an ongoing search for unity, in the wake of the actions. is there nothing that american elites can agree on anymore. polarization is the problem. polarization is attractive because the interpretation confirms the unease at which the weight delete look at the contentious development since the 60's. it provides alleviation by legitimizing consulted by consensus it never breeds contention. not polarization but the crying of polarization never breeds contention. it makes everyone not in will. it suggests unanimity. that is the genius of the narrative it provides the language for a lament that blames nobody and everybody. it said of the espys that and feels interned by offering consensual interpretation. it is reestablished to the back door. conservatives, the last thing i will say, they are very adept at using this feature of the narrative. after january 6, elected officials like to tell us that we shouldn't focus so much on the insurrection, but real underlying problem of relation. republicans block voting right legislation in the senate earlier this year. it was explained that the actual problem was they were forced to sign and vote on controversial language. it would only increase the polarization. and andrew sullivan explained that liberals should see the good in a pulsing rights to abortion concerning the problem was polarization. it started polarization, or so it was claim, so adding it -- ending it was giving the country a chance to lower the temperature. we could work on the key issue, which was overcoming polarization. by latching onto a new consensus discourse, conservatives are counting on obscuring, rather than illuminating churches to present actions and incisions as legitimate and aligned, and i think this should give us more reason to be skeptical of all things polarization. thank you. >> thank you. that is a great way to kick off this discussion. next is julia. >> i agree with much of what was said, but there are some things are a little different. i want to talk about how i conceptualize polarization. it is mostly political science from a political science perspective. i went to ask what the metaphor is for polarization, most of them have never thought about that. then you get to what thomas was talking about with polls. it is a metaphor about magnets -- magnet. then when i started teaching 10 years ago, i assigned a book on disappearing center, which he says that people who don't are not. this is from the before times. i would hand out cereal. i handed out two types of cereal. one was loose cereal, there were sticky cereals, and i bought generic there were little clusters. that is what was argued for informed voters. their issues were closer. you can figure out where someone stands on abortion. i asked, is this the same as the magnet metaphor. it is not. it could be, but it is not. they could coincide, but they are not the same thing. fuller agent is a lot of what we know them. clean from the field of political science. it is really about consistency and not extremity. what i pick up on that conceptual framework, i know that -- we bring in race, we bring in development in the 21st century, and my real love and area of research, the american presidency. i want to start with the idea that polarization is a flattening concept. polarization, political scientists love to do this. i was preparing myself this morning for how i would communicate with people in other disciplines after not commuting with anyone my cat. i heard this one. local scientists like to rule out and destroys like to roll in. that is true. we like to simplify things. polarization is great for that. it is one variable to explain them all. my colleague at 538, he wrote a piece in 2018 morning that everything is partisan, correlated and boring. it was very easy to predict knowing about party identification. i think you start to see, and another difference between scientists have thought about this topic, and that is from historians. i tend to pick out a way ideology is central and ideological movements are central we had for political scientists, we talk about parties. we tell ourselves return about sign -- parties, but we talk about where you score yourself, from zero to six. it is partisan identification. that really does get us to the story of what polarization is, and those two things converging. it is partisan identification. and when did partisanship start to become central to help people make every decision. those are slightly different stories. the first question really highlights 1968. if you were to do an extensive review of landmark works on polarization and political finance books, they would have a chapter or section that starts in 1968. or 96 24. in that general era. one thing we do is we identify race as central, and then there is a little shoehorn in. there were other social issues. we get to the race, and that is the argument of when conservatives gravitated toward the republican party. it is the story of the southern strategy. that is the drive-by historical story that scientists tell and then we shy away from the implications of that story. by the conclusion, throwing all sorts of people that i am friends with, we are backward thomas was. how do we get back to the center? how do we get back to reasonable parties. we've only -- in my discipline, we start asking the russian, what does it mean to be centrist and meaningful. you only believe in so much sacrifice and service of that goal? do you only believe in so much sacrifice and accomplishment? the empirical answer to that, for the american look my bs. but i don't think people have contended with those implications. or with the asymmetry. not just in more recent radicalization's, but in in the historical legacy and asymmetries of that. you can't say, one party became a liberal party, the other became the conservative. the liberal party has more people of color in it, ok. now we have polarization. that happens in a historical context. i think i spent most my time talking about that, but i want to say something about the presidency. the modern presidency is conceptualized and includable science as being antithetical to parties. in 2008, richard skinner wrote an article about artists and presidency that argues that that is over. now, presidents are dependent on their supporters in the electorate, and their own partisan in congress. they disagree about things. i taught a course on the 21st century presidency, and i thought it was a real evan -- evolution from george w. bush to trump and what i call the hyper partisanship. essentially, partisanship not as an issue disagreement, but as teams. way that shapes the presidency. the way in which congressional republicans will not hand away into a democratic president, though i don't think that is an entirely one-sided thing. it is asymmetrical. it shows something about the presidency, but the polarization from the framework is limited. it helps us understand the presidency because it ensures that the party relationship which is fraught as it ever was. there are labels. there are organizations that have more than one person in them. not just a president. they are not designed to be top down. presidents have some advantages. they can communicate directly with their partisan. that does give them, some prisons more than others, real edge. with members of congress, they exert congress. in the current presidency, is quite liberal -- limiting. there is asymmetry and the president is very constrained by partisanship and labels and by teams. ultimate leak, they don't have leverage to control their own team. i think that is a critical distinction we often lose. i told everyone if i had enough caffeine, i would bring race in the presidency together. so, a medium amount of caffeine. they also have partisanship in the presidency. in the obama presidency, there was another area where i invention into -- i am venturing into some territory where we shouldn't store size thing or contemporary things in a room of historians, and i'm doing it wrong. there is a critical shift between the party sorting of the 1960's and whatever is happening in 2008. some of that is the heightening of this team mentality. i also think it is the way in which what we are observing, a fact of ours and polarization in the country really challenges the central fiction of the american presidency which is that it is for all the people. this is a fiction that is as fictitious as important. it is impossible to maintain. when we think about race as polarization, and we think about the dynamics of the first african-american president. that really takes on a new surveillance. we see this situation is developing, and how the presidency is a partisan symbol, and central to that ship. even as the president cannot control the behavior of his own team. i think i will end by saying that i think the obama presidency is a critical moment to look at. a moment of transition that helps us understand the central action that got struck, and why. how partisanship and polarization such as they are have a ball. since that late 1960's turning point. i will leave it there. >> thank you. that was great. thank you for getting us into the 21st century. stories are only now figuring it out in the 1990's. good to know. speaking of, nicole. >> i will talk about the 1990's, and i'm going to build upon a lot of the really great and provocative thoughts that we had with is going to be a great discussion. i agree with the description of polarization as a historical process and a description of a historical process in the drivers for expirations of things. but i also want to talk about fuller is asian as a lyrical strategy. something that would be used on the right in the 1990's to rate affect area but as i do, i will talk about the 1990's, and from merely in this talk, i want to muddy the waters. even in that moment, it is an incredibly effective strategy. with a newly robust conservative media, it is not the only strategy being used. it is so interesting once you dive into it. if you think about it, it's in your of rampant polarization. it emerges as much more complex than that. it is understandable why we think of that as an era of fuller's agent. it starts with those early 1990 culture wars that are so fierce and consume so much oxygen in u.s. politics. newt gingrich emerged as the avatar of polarization. how we see he was in the 1980's, but in the 1990's, he comes into his own of course, conservative media. it becomes a juggernaut figure when the show goes national. in 1991 and 1993, is dominating discourse, but getting a lot of oxygen in conversations about u.s. politics, and then fox news and other outlets found that later in the 90's. yet, if you look at the kinds of conversations that are happening in the early 1990's, including on the right, it is going to radicalize dramatically over the course of the decade. what are they talking about? they're talking about the voter. they're looking at 1992 ending era orders a shoe. here, you have a good chunk of american saying no to either already. they are choosing someone who cuts across so many different issues. someone who is pro-abortion. higher taxes, and attracts as many conservative voters as he does liberal voters. for both political parties, after the 92 election, they have the provost. they decide that is what they need to win the election, and so much of what newt gingrich does over the next two years, the republican party over the next two years, it is about getting those voters on board. they believe that in order to do that, they have to be less authorizing. if to prevent themselves -- present -- they have to present themselves as less polarizing. that is developed not only fictitiously on this idea of 60% issues, but they will also include things in the documentary with 60% of americans agree with it. but frank luntz, who is responsible for that, and one of the reasons this is a little hinchey is saying that you cannot have clinton's name anywhere in here. you cannot have the work of looking anywhere in here. this can't be identified as a conservative republican project because it has to be able to draw in off of those people who don't necessarily agree that democrats and bill clinton are not just the opposition, but the enemy. you have this real effort not only to reach out to the perot voters, but they even want -- but even once newt gingrich becomes the speaker, he and bill clinton, as many of you know, are working quite closely together on a number of issues. there are a number of ways in which the republican and democrat party are coming closer together. not because the republican party is moderating, but because the democratic already is moving quite sharply on some issues to the right. that is the case when it works with crime and incarceration. that is the case when it comes to immigration. janet reno ok'd operation gatekeeper and put up more of a border wall in san diego. you have diane feinstein coming out strongly. undocumented immigration. immigration before the impeachment gets underway. you have newt gingrich and bill clinton talking about privatizing social security. it is a conservative era in which newt gingrich and bill clinton are working closely together on a number of issues and at the same time, fuller's asian being used very effectively as a political strategy, even with something like the contract of america which has more emphasis on issues like reform, rather than issues like abortion or buns. what you have is newt gingrich looking to polarize that and say we are the party of reform, and they are the party of corruption. we are not just reaching to a perot voter. we are taking issues, we are making them part of who we are. we are the good guys. they are the baggage it is also a decade where you see a pretty sharp move away from the 1980's idea of reagan democrats and a big ten party. in the early 1990's, you start to hear the widespread use of rhino, republican in name only, which is about taking things more exclusionary and moving people to write. the strategy of polarization is something that brett noted, having been in the archives, he is very forthright about it. what we need to do is arise. that is his approach to politics. it is also something that blows up in his face. the thing about using polarization as a strategy is that the kind of procedural radicalism that it encourages can then be used against you. just as newt gingrich overthrew the republican party, in 1994, you have an election. there was a new group emerging, calling themselves true believers. they are constantly challenging new gingrich, telling me is not on long enough, he tried to end the government shutdown, and he had a group of legislators including people like lindsey graham and helen chenoweth who refused to the government shutdown. newt gingrich has suddenly been out radicalized by people in his own party. as a strategy of polarization, new enrich used it, and it's one of the reasons he pursues impeachment as he does. it is also a core strategy of those new media of the 1990's. it is something that had been used by conservative media before the 1990's, but they were not powerful enough they were not able to insert themselves into the conversation or shape the move of the party in the same way they would be able to in the 1990's. so, i think what you see is if you can allow the polarization as a nickel strategy, rather than a description of what is happening in the 1990's, there's room for both rated i think the true analysis for accurate analysis of what is happening in the 1990's is a story of conservative radicalization. it goes pretty far in the 1990's. also being a decade in which orders station isn't earned to understand, not because the parties are polarizing, but because conservatives are using polarization as a political strategy. >> thank you. next is sam. >> thank you so much. as the person here who has a book with the word polarizing the title, i've chosen to take everything that has been said so far as a personal attack and >> as it was meant. >> i will respond in kind acts i will offer some points of consensus about very valuable efforts to qualify polarization as a framework i am planting my flag on the idea that there is still value in taking this seriously. with political history, first, a point of consensus. there is a point of polarization and framework. obviously, thomas is completely right that most popular discussions and a lot of political science discourse around polarization has embedded within it an implicit and explicit nostalgia for bygone eras of bipartisanship. it is an enormous position that the problem with fuller's asian and some past eden was preferable. that is bad. i think as a conceptual matter, you really can separate a discussion of polarization as a process of empirical evidence and an array of implications for governance and policymaking from a normative position that polarization is bad and bipartisan in this century is preferable. i certainly hope i've done that in my own work. secondly, there is a very kind of magnet model. there is a presumption of some degree of symmetry between the two poles. two things happening on either side. in the actual argument, there is an assumption that there have been symmetrical contributions from the right and the left from the democratic party republican party to this. again, political science as moved in this direction in the last decade or two. it is very -- perfectly possible to consider the significance of a broad phenomenon in which we see increasing partisan discipline. a tighter alignment, and a sorting of the parties, they are also keeping in mind that it is highly asymmetrical who has been intruding to this process. 2008, there was a breakpoint. they contributed to a major transformation in the system, and in the ideological sorting of the parties. a structure of congress. back in the 1970's and 80's, and more recently, there was a clear contribution made on the right. in terms of political scientists, we talked about asymmetric polarization, and paul pierson have written a number of books. they make the argument that it is basically a symmetry of two parties rooted in different balances of power. interest groups in their coalition, and for the last 30 or 40 years, republicans have had a coalition that reinforced the plutocratic political process while democrats have become corrupt. other redistributive interests. alongside business interests, the exigencies of campaign finance, and expensive electric landscapes. robbing. that reflects and manifests in asymmetry. david hopkins wrote a book about that did it is a different beef and it wasn't a historic account for that, but they depicted the democratic party as a coalition of this brick groups working together to achieve a set of discrete policy goals. by contrast, the republican party has had a movement at those and homogeneity in their coalition, and more ideological language. that manifested itself in different contributions to the phenomenon we know of it behavioral us, and people who studied voters, psychologist, and more. it showed asymmetry in the kinds of people and degree and homogeneity and overlapping of different kinds of social identities. race and religion. again, if you have a party as consistent with increased homogenous and overlapping identity groups with a bunch of different dimensions, that grandma faiz abor intense partisan identity and a more radical one. political scientists have caught up that there is asymmetry going on. the big contribution that historians have made with some assistance later on by political science and the american development, has been to remind us of major ongoing constituent realms of public policy. partisan or even rocked ideological conflict really hasn't defined the dynamic cleanly in the way we think of fuller's nation. we are both democrats and republicans, and there is conservatism that has made important contributory role. i think it is not coincidental, giving the nationalized natureo. many of the key issues that fall outside the clean fuller's asian narrative are policymaking that was made substantially as a local regional and state level. criminal justice, the kind of spatial and racial politics of housing and education. those are big things. polarization doesn't explain the politics of those is they do other issues. that's my olive branch. i will say two quick things. one is not evocative, and one more provocative i think polarization is still important. human -- historian should not find themselves doing a rhetorical move as shown and identified. there is a consensus subtext to a lot of political history that seems to either all of the stuff you see around you is just a performance, and really, it is pure sound in. , and underlying a neoliberal consensus. one thing that i think is different -- dangerous in that discourse is at the sorting parties for constituencies with found implications of the functioning of the callista two. also policymaking. one of have shown francis lee, i think, these effects have been, even if the underlying difference between the parties are less yawning than day to day accounts. how you organize your conflict and system has implications for the functioning of the policy outcomes. the fact that parties have become much more essential in organizing all policy making at the state level really has a lot of effects. congress is the obvious example of this. the rise of the last few decades of parties becoming relatively more homogenous, ideologically. they delegate more. power to the central party leaders, this is why nobody knows or needs know who the committee chairman r. they don't have the power that they used to. there are more people in congress that matter, and they get together at the white house to pass a gigantic omnibus bill that crams everything together because actually trying to legislate doesn't working more. doesn't work. >> then it leads to brinkmanship, hardball, sling hardball, government shutdown, a global depression that was almost unleashed by defaulting on debt for no reason, these are really big phenomenon. it should be grappled with. rather than dismissed as sound in. . >> 30 seconds. we can talk more about this. in the q&a, i think it didn't come up as much, but a lot of what i see is the prevailing view of historians being skeptical about polarization as a framework is that they think it obscures the main story of the democratic party since the 1970's. it is not a move to the left or polarization or extremism. it is a neoliberal term to the right. this is where they see a convergence of political economy about immigration and law and order in the 90's. there's a good book about democrats, and that's where they see the polarization is doing a lot of work to obscure what's really going on, rather than not. my asymmetry points was a real factional movement in the democratic party that achieved major party within the already and was in the country in the 1990's. there are correlations all across the developed world, and a crisis in the 19 emmys. i do think historians have exaggerated the level of convergence, and the extent of the neoliberal term. there is a lot of other stuff going on in that party, even in those lean years with liberalism in the 80's and 90's. it helps explains why in the last two decades, certainly last decade, we have seen unmistakably a resurgence of energy on the left within the, craddick party, shifting the center of power of that party to the left anyway that i think consensus narrative among historians does not a duty -- does not do a good job of doing. >> i cannot wait to hear what you think of each other's comments, but let's open it up to questions. can i ask that if you have a question, you come up to the microphone here so they can hear you on the television. >> i've noticed columbia is up first. you're a lot faster than everyone else. anyway, great panel. i love this discussion. the final comment gets out what i was going to ask. i think we taking ourselves off the hook too much in locating lame or polarization, exclusively on this plane. i think it's well established that there was asymmetric polarization through the bush administration, and, kratz have been racing to catch up. i think you can see this in all kinds of ways. pew research did on this, and kevin drum wrote a lot of popular pieces about this a year or so ago. a few examples -- immigration, wealth, in the 1990's, the democrats were talking about opposing undocumented immigration. everyone was against it, and it was talked about as illegal immigration. it is only in recent years that we've revised the language, and we've seen democrats take on a much more liberalized position where undocumented immigration through legal channels has been considered an acceptable thing. nobody would take that position in the 90's or 80's or 70's. a lot of people, but you can also look at other ways. look at the boats against supreme court justices. every single trump nominee, they were not necessarily worse than the bush nominee for the reagan nominee. you can argue individuals, but every demo that will was them. every republican will now oppose any item nominee. it is just. take off one or two. you see these patterns in the team stuff that was talked about. primary challenges like to say there is no polarization when incumbent popular liberal progressive democrats are sitting with identified socialist, or maybe not that much, but sometimes, winning that is not different. so you see structures patterns, on the left, they are very similar, and maybe not quite as far to the extreme, and you can argue about the exact differences if you want to quantify, but the patterns are there. it points to the institutions and it used to be a network news channel that was kind of thought of as liberal, and it was actually neutral, or it aspired to have an audience of all stripes. after fox, msnbc decided would the invented self as liberal network. the same thing after trump. you look at the tanks and the things like the center for american progress prey that is not brookings. there monitoring -- modeling themselves on heritage. the left liberal democratic space with the creation of institutions thrown overboard. you can call them myths of neutrality, but i think of them as aspirations. they once governed liberal policy making. now, it is very much partisan, and our team works. i want to challenge us and say our week trying to get our site as it were? maybe there russians in the room, but are we trying to get our side off the hook, and make this a simple morality tale? there is actually more structural analytical dynamics going on that are more profound. >> do we want to answer questions which mark >> i will merely say thank you for finishing some of my thoughts. just in terms of describing what's going on in the last decade. there is a one wave during the bush years, a model of the idea of the conservative infrastructure, and it emerges as an answer. there is media matters, and talk radio. then there is the subsequent mainstream set of institutions for the democratic party. in the last decade, we talk about primary challenges. democrats, there is a real electorate term on the left, and with the socialist lab, democrats models themselves on the tea party by using ideological ivory challenges as a way to shift the center of gravity of the democratic party. i will only amend by saying i would not describe any of that as describing lame because i don't think it is something to be blamed for. it is good. it is the relation -- i think it's good. it's the price of progress. there's a lot going on outside of that who should be attended to. >> i would throw in a couple of other things. i would not -- i would agree with a lot of what you said. he read back into the 1990's in the 1980's, and that is something that is good to get back into the record and clarify, but we are not trying to retroactively do that, but on the point of immigration, the language we are hearing is very different from the 1990's. even the way that ray and pep begin were talking about immigration, it sounds more like the democrats than it does in the 1980's. it is using the language. they are talking about some of this language, and talking about opening up immigration so they have an agreement in north america or court. there is also something specific happening around immigration in the 1990's and 1994 did it is a creation. it is a very polarizing issue in the mainstreaming of language, and democrats are responsible -- responding to the rights and the changing nativism around immigration. that's another panel. >> i would like to say briefly that the analytical distinction between artese and partisanship is important the weight of those interact is different into parties. this is the longest i've ever been on a panel and not talked about populism. i think the republican party is sort of consistent with an effort or movement to define itself in an outsider way, trying to gain institutional power in the party. you see less of that in a democratic race. that is a critical asymmetry. a which of blame is sort of linguistic fallback. i don't know if it is the most useful analytical framework, but the parties are different >> can i just say, it is important not to miss the forest for the trees. i don't know how these work. this primary challenge or that one, you could say yes. the democratic establishment is supporting a pro-life representative in texas. i think, once you take two steps back, that is one. it is broad empirical research. we don't rely on roi -- our cherry picking example. i have a really hard time not seeing a profound asymmetry in one side left. the democratic party is by international comparison, and there's a bunch of research on that, just a standard centerleft party, a pretty big tent party that goes all the way from joe manchin to wherever you want to go, aoc or whatever, that is a standard centerleft party with standard centerleft positions on almost everything. that does not mean it has not move left on many issues over the past -- mostly over the past decade or so, since the obama era, but to say that is, you know, in the ballpark of what the republican party has -- do you all think that sort of economic and material divisions within our society play? there is one thing that always strikes me. we are living through this great age of economic inequality, which graphs pretty well to this age of polarization, yet these conversations are typically not associated with one another. from the perspective of my own research, i am wrapping up a book on middle-of-the-road politics of rural and small-town america after world war ii, and it has just been stunning to see the hard right turn that rural america has taken in the 21st century, and i myself cannot help but to attribute that with how deep the economic disparity has become between city and countryside when we talk about wealth and power and things like that, so i am just curious to throw that out. i mean, do you see these processes as interconnected? do you think that it is an obscuring of economic inequality in favor of culture wars and that is what is creating the polarization or where these material questions fall in these conversations? so i am going to sit down. >> go ahead. >> everyone is looking at me. [laughter] this is not any type of final answer to that. i think and what you said -- i think in what you said, there is an answer to the question other than the economic implications of the urban-rural divide. in most of the research i know or have read, what is interesting is that it is really the urban-rural divide and all that comes with it that is more important than the economic divide, where, you know, once you go, you know -- you know, if you are in rural america, regardless of what state you're in, red state, blue state, whatever, it will tend republican or conservative, but that is true even in rural areas that are not economically struggling, and so i think, to me, the overriding factor is something else. there's a lot of research that tends to describe the, you know, polarization more as something that puts cultural issues at the center. i want to push back slightly on the idea that it is just culture wars, because that is really a discussion over civil rights and civil liberties and profound questions of national identity and who gets to be included and who does not that is not captured just by culture, which is not what you were saying, but that is how it is often used. i would not say economics are relevant. i would say that other factors are more important here. >> basically, in the last 20 years, rural areas -- in such a way that plays into that divide. >> there is that sort of condition there, where it is easy to foster this team mentality when people are fighting for scraps. that is sort of intuition to me. i do wonder about what people think about institutions. one thing that struck me that i was not expecting to find is that this outsider mentality is applied to parties. distrust people have toward parties is informed by the impression that they are run by moneyed elites. i only know literature in my own field, maybe in sociology, has indicated that, so maybe it is there. >> mccarty and rosenthal -- i have a phd in history -- they wrote a book all about rising inequality and polarization at the same time. i have never quite grasped the argument. >> no. ok. i don't know what i want to say since this is going out on the air, but -- >> go ahead, on national television. >> do not talk crap about your colleagues, but whatever. >> one thing i found really compelling, to my surprise, it was a deep ethnography of four different cities in iowa that the author made up names for them. it was all about -- making the argument, basically, the kind of neoliberal turn of the economy in the 1970's had this profound effect on the embeddedness of political and partisan leaders in local civic organizations, that it used to be that there -- it was not unpolarized, but it was a constrained local politics of democratic actors rooted in labor unions. and republican leaders rooted in the local chambers of commerce and a bunch of civic associations, the local notables and the city boosters, etc., and there was kind of an antagonism, but also a very localized and rooted politics and they were at the core of local political organizations that had a lot of our in the old already -- a lot of power in the old party system. he makes the argument that, over the decades, as the cities de india -- de industrialized, the city boosters, the civic leaders, stop getting involved in party politics, because they are trying to put forth this notion that we are just here for the good of the city so give us money and set up industry here. that leads party politics in an era where there are far fewer mediating civic institutions to bring people together. people get really spun up on national level political issues, culture war issues. it gets a little more abstract. a lot of these are important issues but they are not tied to anything going on at the local level. and it was a connection between broader class and political and economic development and polarization that i had not seen before. >> i wanted to add quickly, i don't know if historians are reading catherine kramer's work on politics in wisconsin. if not, you should be, because it gets at these relationships between distributive issues, perspectives, and political culture that gets at the questions you raised, keith. >> great. thanks so much for this. i went to graduate school at columbia. it is true. i wanted to ask a question about the cold war, about foreign policy, about international influence, because this has been a very domestic panel. and so that is kind of a question writ large, but i guess there were a couple of different moments that started popping up to me that i think people might be curious to hear your reactions to. one is the idea of the 1940's and 1950's as a time of consensus. on the one hand, we talk about an anti-communist consensus. on the other hand, if you look at the politics of the truman years and early eisenhower years, particularly mccarthyism, those are some of the most vicious, operatic, bridge burning partisan politics we have ever seen, and in a lot of ways, the style of that moment becomes the trump style via roy cohn. maybe it is true the parties were mediating things differently, the parties looked different, but the ferocious, divisive partisanship and attack politics of that era. a second air that came to mind, and i'm a big fan of the polarizers -- i have assigned it many times in class -- but, actually, the reforms to the primary system, for instance, that emerged in the 1970's, those are driven in part by what happens in 1968 at the democratic national convention, which is being driven partly by civil rights politics but a lot by the vietnam war, disillusionment about lies about foreign policy, the behavior of the cia and other forces. so the kind of politics of vietnam and its influence on this critical moment of institutional reconfiguration that i think produces some of what we are going to describe as polarization. that's another moment. the third moment is -- i might even throw in a fourth moment -- the third moment is the 1990's. to what degree does the end of the cold war mean a set of pressures on both what can and cannot be said with an american politics -- said within american politics come off, and to the degree this kind of global war for hearts and minds was at least in part about showcasing certain visions of the good society, of a civic society, certain forms of immigration politics, racial justice, that all changes dramatically at the end of the cold war and i think domestic historians maybe haven't grappled with that. the last one i will throw out is the idea that, now we are 30 years out from that moment, that is part of what is allowing for the flowering of a new socialist politics in this country as well as a kind of weaponization of anti-socialist politics that has certain precedents in american history but seemed different in a post-cold war environment. there are other examples too. the big question -- you don't have to do all of those -- but does the cold war matter in this story and do those global conflict come into play? >> i will jump in. when it comes to the cold war, because it is -- you know, it is interesting. in studying the right in the 1950's and the 1960's, their biggest frustration was that they could not polarize the country. they were like, how do we get these parties to sort out differently than they are? we need all the conservatives in one party, all the liberals in the other, and that will heighten the differences. it will make clear what our ideas are and people will be able to vote for which one they want. and they could not make it happen. they kept trying and they had moments of success. they were obviously huge fans of mccarthy in his approach, but i do think that kind of -- the way that the cold war constrained and shaped those politics, you see it in the 1990's and this is the idea behind partisans, that the end of the cold war unleashes a kind of old right that had been constrained by the cold war and some things that had been part of that consensus, even in eras of very divisive politics, like a consensus about democracy being a good thing, that goes away pretty much as soon the berlin wall goes down, and so that introduces a new kind of politics, a new edge to politics, and widens the range of what is politically possible. to your last point about the contemporary age, i think it is an astute point that you could imagine a 1990's in which the left is able to make full -- to take full advantage of that changing geopolitical climate and become more like a dsa democratic party, but it goes in the opposite direction. >> go for it. >> yeah, i mean, my thinking on this, which is maybe not particularly developed in the cold war context, because the difference comes from vietnam and the narrative that comes out of the vietnam era and feeds nicely into the 9/11 period in which all these issues become part of -- become easily framed in domestic culture war terms. not to use this panel to relentlessly promote my own work, but i wrote a piece in 530 at about that. i had an interesting exchange with a political scientist who saw things very differently than me. i saw this as a pitfall on the left of seeing international conflict in its terms and putting domestic lenses on it. i see that as a trend out of that era. there are probably elements of that in the cold war that i have not observed, but i see that as a critical part of the post-vietnam, post 9/11 issue. >> yeah. i thought you articulated in the question how, in fact, how ambiguous it is. i have had students who have offered that we did not have polarization because of the cold war, but politics never stop at the water's edge. you could certainly say as a historical project, the 1940's, on the left, had huge constraints because of the cold war, and was in part crushed by anti-communist politics. so that's a story of the cold war having a problematically depolarizing effect on politics. but there's nothing more outrageous than the things you read mccarthy and his ilk saying. it was not partisan. i mean, it was in part partisan, but there were a bunch of southern democrats who were kind of allied with him. it is just not a politically quie -- quiescent time through the 1960's. so it leads me -- this is something i completely dodged in the book. i just do not talk about it and it is a problem but i would be anxious to read nikki's book. if there was something you could say about the 1990's as a turning point that connects to the fall of the berlin wall, if there's a sort of moment of all bets are off, let's have a crazy food fight over everything now. i don't know. >> can i just add two stray thoughts on that? you drove home how utterly mythologized this idea of consensus is. not only was it -- you know, the mythology is not only that it was much broader than what ever existed. it was broad -- it was imagined to be broader than it was even in the white elite consensus. the traditional or established story of movement conservatism and what brought the different factions on the right together is that it was anti-communism. that was the conservative fusionist project. the interesting thing is what happens to a fusionist project when what fuses it goes away. and i think what is becoming clearer and clearer is that the anti-communism was really more a sort of broader anti-liberal, anti-left kind of thing that brought these factions together. so it was not really, or primarily or predominantly, the soviet union, communist threat, whatever. it was communism as in anything that threatens to level traditional hierarchies, conceived as socialism, left, whatever, and broadly speaking, more antiliberal, anti-left. and so i think that was interesting. when the cold war ends, you know, they just remain sort of anti-communist in their ways, which is not anti-soviet, but more anti-left, antiliberal. >> thank you. this has been so fascinating. i have two questions, one much more fully formed than the other. the first is i come from the world of media and technology studies. i think it has been common in public discourse to hear the media and technology being blamed for polarization, and particularly in my world, i think one corollary we here to polarization is echo chambers and radicalizing algorithms and i find that frustrating because i think it is easy to slip into technological determinism, but on the other hand, media plays some sort of role, so i would be curious to hear your thoughts on the role of media in all of this. the last question is that, as someone who studies digital media, i cannot help but thinking about a meme that elon musk recently posted, which was showing history over time as he thought and it was the left getting more and more extremist over time and the right staying the same, and so i am curious if anyone can speak to if there's a longer history of the right wing thinking it is the left being radicalized. >> you know, i was talking to someone who was -- who is writing this terrific book, and we were talking about the relationships between different forms of media and forms of politics. one of my strong beliefs is that our media systems constitute our politics and vice versa. they cannot really be extracted from one another. they are so interwoven and interlinked, so it is very easy to blame the emergence of different media, whether it is conservative talk radio, fox news, particular media forms like twitter and social media, for things like radicalization without necessarily paying attention to the way that the radicalism predates those media and the way that the politics shape how those media end up being used. as a non-technological determinist, it does not have to be this way. twitter did not have to develop the way it did. they do not have to be used as part of a radicalizing project. they were because there were political incentives for them to be used that way and for them to remain in use that way. so on the media front, i think it is important to understand them as intertwined, and i wouldn't necessarily -- i don't think that it is -- i think it is flattening to say one caused the other, because it is a constituent of process -- it is a constitutive process. >> maybe this will accidentally answer your question. one of the narratives -- elon musk -- i guess if you are going to make up something, you can tweet whatever you want. if you are going to make up your data, it is fun. but you have cued into something important, which is there is this narrative that the democratic party left me, which makes me think of a discussion we had before about urban-rural issues. there's a common narrative there that is also the narrative of the migration of the southern democrats into the republican party. this is the trajectory of that change. and that sorting. and i think it is easy to fall into the trap, then, of centering those narratives and centering those voices. again, these are great books. i really like kramer's book and i like her as a person. it is a phenomenal book. there isn't really an analogous one about the politics of urban african-americans, at least not in my field. you know, this interesting, i taught that book alongside matthew desmond's evicted, which takes place in new orleans, where i live, and the way both of those authors talk about their interactions with the state are quite similar. they are both having bad interactions with the state, african-americans in milwaukee and white people in rural wisconsin, but we don't see that connected to partisan politics in the broader literature in a nonwhite and urban context. the short answer is i think that kind of very widespread and often uncontested narrative is part of what you are talking about. >> there's a panel on television -- there was a panel on television earlier asking historians to take television seriously. this may not be fair, but i want to give you a primary source to analyze. the primary source from television that i would like you to analyze is snl skits in the lead up to the 2000 election of -- remember, you know, the lockbox one, and "i agree," and that interregnum period of al and george ruling together, like flip sides of the same coin, and the emergence of this red state versus blue state polarized narrative. i would like to know how each of you read that popular narrative into the moment of the 2000 election and this narrative of polarization. thesis statements, please. i will be grading. [laughter] >> i already kind of frame it as a distinct and contestable analytical claim. you know, i used to work at the american prospect, an american liberal political magazine out of college, and they have old issues from the bush years. on the wall, they had old covers, and there was there cover -- was their cover of their issue just prior to the election. "bush and gore -- what's the difference?" and there are lots of differences if you read the articles. you might be thinking, what is the difference? they were worried about nader. and it seemed crazy even three years later, when i was there and i saw it. the 1990's, there was just -- if you look in quantitative times -- in quantitative terms at the process of polarization that starts in the 1970's, it is a phenomenon in the 1990's, but it is still a process where, at the margins, there are still plenty of moderate republicans. there are no longer bull weevils but john barrow and these southern moderates are still around. it is a process, as you were saying. and obviously, the ascendant face of the democratic party who becomes president is all about framing things in maximally moderate terms and his successor, al gore, is running. this is where you get ralph nader running on thursday not a difference -- running on a there-is-not-a-difference third-party venture. so it was a hinge point moment where underlying processes were happening -- witness the impeachment, but you can draw very different conclusions based on the behavior based on the party candidate, including al gore and george w. bush, who ran criticizing gingrich and dole, bush running as a compassionate conservative. that 2000 run by him for the classic model of, you know, throw out a bunch of kind of moderate positioning and bromides in the general election. >> we have close to reached the end of time. >> i was going to quickly throw something in. we often talk about polarization in terms of policy, but it is also this procedural radicalism, and if you think about 2000, everything from the brooks brothers riot to the supreme court ruling is procedural radicalism that has real consequences for how people perceive politics and the other party. >> yeah. >> i will try to be brief. full disclaimer, i am running on very little sleep. be patient with me, but i will try to be quick. there's been a discussion describing polarization as let's call them points on a scale moving further and further away from each other. i wonder if that is polarization or the inability or a willingness to compromise. that might be a result of one side moving further then the other -- moving further than the other. why would you want to compromise with that? that seems to be almost beside the point. compromise is the stuff of liberal politics. for those of us who are a little more skeptical of this polarization thesis, doesn't that seem like something -- if a government is not able to function, isn't that something we should be trying to study and find out why that happens? but that is a big if. >> can we get one more question or comment quickly and then we will wrap up? >> i am curious, since one of you talked about the importance of parties as not just partisanship, i was wondering about your thoughts on how polarization is or is affected by the different ways in which the institutions of the two parties operate. and if i could quickly say, i wanted to cosign something you said. i think it is disingenuous to say that speaker pelosi endorsed archer. i mean, santorum endorsed a moderate candidate, and he is still a right-wing media. members endorsing their candidates is not an indication of how they are aligned. >> quick closing thoughts? >> sure. you know, i only mentioned that because i said -- i specifically said this is not a good argument, because it is cherry picking. i specifically said that's not a good argument, so i am not -- you know, i agree. it is not a good argument. yeah. so what is the real problem? you said isn't the real problem that both sides do not see the other as a legitimate political actor anymore, and i would want to push back against that, because i just do not really see that from anyone who matters on the democratic side. i am not saying on the left in general or the dirt bag left or whatever -- that is not what i'm saying -- but i know there are people who are on the broader left -- but if we are talking about who are the people who actually matter institutionally or not just institutionally but just politically on the e democratic side, i don't get that -- on the capitally democratic side, i don't get that. i do think it is really out the core of what's happened to the republican party. this has moved to the center of republican politics, the idea that the other side, the democrats, are not a legitimate political actor, they are an illegitimate actor pursuing an american project -- pursuing an un-american project. so i would reject that not seeing either side we talk about people who matter politically -- side when we talk about people who matter politically. >> the structure of the two parties. i wanted to say briefly that i think there're differences in the way they are organized, and that mostly reflects the concerns of their coalitions over time. i think the actual problem is the nature of the coalitions, or at least the thing that drives the way they operate differently. the democratic party is a patchwork of a lot of different groups and the republican party is a lot more internally homogenous, so i think the organizational structures are a reflection of that. in terms of the first question, i think what we are seeing very much -- frances lee's work on congress basically says that, when congress is up for grabs, when elections are competitive, then neither side will hand the other a win. i think that is a dynamic you are describing, not being able to compromise, not because there are differences that are fundamental though they may be large, but because it is a team issue. this speaks to a growing consensus about party labels as teams. >> the price of progress is polarization. the price is higher in the united states of that given the structure of our political institutions, a madisonian system of separate powers. to get anything past, you need a huge amount of concurrence, majorities in many places at once. it is really hard to do that and even if the parties have not gotten more extreme, they have gotten more