Ron Brownstein has a piece in the National Journal that is worth reading. There is this very straightforward and, I think, correct diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s current travails:
But their greatest problem is that they control all of Washington’s levers at a time when most Americans are deeply unhappy with the country’s direction.
The broader point of the piece is that Americans are alienated from a variety of institutions, both political and nonpolitical. I think the polling data suggest this as well. However, I don’t agree with two conclusions that Brownstein draws from this:
This deep, broad, and visceral discontent is a recipe for social and political volatility. As recently as 2004, GOP strategists such as Karl Rove saw in George W. Bush’s slim re-election evidence that Republicans were building a “narrow but stable” electoral majority. That was immediately followed by Democratic routs in 2006 and 2008 that reduced the GOP to virtually a rump Southern party and inspired Democrats to dream of their own lasting majority. Two years later, Democrats are struggling to hold even one chamber of Congress.
Nothing about recent elections strikes me as “volatile.” (Indeed, there is evidence that elections have become less volatile over time. See this old post.) The United States is more narrowly divided in terms of partisanship than in previous eras. There is also no solid Democratic South to mitigate the inevitable swings that arise from economic growth and recessions. Both things may contribute to more frequent changes in party control of the presidency or Congress, but that has nothing to do with alienation. That’s just what happens when neither party can claim a large majority.
Brownstein also sees this alienation as intractable:
They [recent polls] point toward a widely shared conviction that the country’s public and private leadership is protecting its own interest at the expense of average (and even comfortable) Americans. The lasting downturn has deepened those sentiments, but it didn’t create them and its end probably won’t dissolve them. Americans increasingly believe they are paddling alone on a treacherous economic sea—which helps explain why they so enthusiastically submerge those in charge whenever they get the chance.
Italics mine. Everything hinges on what “won’t dissolve them” means. Of course, some minimal level of alienation will always be with us. But what Brownstein appears to suggest is that economic growth won’t lead people to revise their assessments of political leaders and government. This flies in the face of 50 years of public opinion data, which I summarized here and especially here. There is a robust relationship between the state of the economy, approval of incumbents at virtually every level of office, and trust in the government as a whole.
Could this moment be different? I am very leery of assuming it is—if for no other reason than people imagine their historical circumstances are somehow exceptional, when they actually prove to be ordinary, predictable, etc. time and again. Lee had a nice post on this tendency. Obviously, I can’t make a precise prediction about how much alienation or distrust will exist in the American public at some future point in time. But I’m willing to bet that however much there is will be strongly conditioned by the state of the economy. We are not doomed to live forever alienated.
[Hat tip to Gary Andres]
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A difference might be that for everyone whose political memory starts after Watergate, median family income has always been almost completely static.
The proportion of voters with any memory at all of a time when the average person was getting better off has been shrinking and shrinking.
You could probably do this with NES data. Generate a variable for each respondent in each year for “What is the average change in real MFI since you turned 18?” and throw it into an existing trust-in-government model.
Or just look and see if there’s a cohort of low-trusters who entered adulthood in the eighties that’s been getting larger. Whether that’s true I have no idea.
Journalists suffer from the magic of 50%. Getting that 218th seat is no different from the 217th, but it makes a huge difference both in outcomes in DC as well as interpretations from the chattering class. Yes, majorities are changing because no party has an enduring popular majority, an oddity for the 1860-1990 period (though the 1880s tried to give it a go), but it still doesn’t change the fact that there’s no such thing as a mandate.
“There is a robust relationship between the state of the economy, approval of incumbents at virtually every level of office, and trust in the government as a whole.”
Why does this “robust relationship” exist? One could argue that politicians’ ability to control business cycles is limited, even with the tools of demand management and economic policy at the govt’s disposal, and at least a portion of the US electorate is sophisticated enough, one would suppose, to understand that. So why should the vast majority of voters routinely blame or credit politicians for matters that are, to a fairly substantial extent (though not totally of course), outside of those politicians’ control? Are the voters transferring or projecting their own feelings of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) without bothering to ask themselves whether the transference is rational or valid? Are voters just creatures of reflex? Do they not think? Or what?
(OK, I’m taking cover from the expected brickbats for this.)
John, can you clarify how you distinguish apparent volatility from “no party can keep a majority?” These seem fairly similar to me.
The economic factors are one reason but I think there’s another issue at play here.
Keeping abreast of current events has always been regarded as an important duty of the well-adjusted citizen. (Not that it teaches you much.) At the same time, the vast majority of people are excluded from meaningful political participation (yay representative democracy). So what’s the point?
I think that how people perceive the standing of the country in the world and their ability to impact political affairs could be a huge source of alienation in the future.
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