Tag: Sam Rayburn

Summary: Here is an interesting review of an important book about the polarization poisoning our politics. Principles, Parties, and Polarization James Bowman reviews The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era by Sam Rosenfeld (assistant professor of political science at Colgate). Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were both forces to be reckoned with in their respective parties and had to be conciliated – often by what was called “balancing the ticket” – when it came to choosing candidates for national office. Even as I sat in that classroom, however, the parties were beginning what Bill Bishop has dubbed “The Big Sort.” The Democrats were to take the lead, after the upheavals of 1968 and Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon, in purging their (mainly Southern) conservative bloc – which Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” had been designed to welcome into the Republican party. It had been anticipated by Paul Butler’s chairmanship of the DNC in the 1950s – and, before him, by the Progressives of the Woodrow Wilson era, for whom, Rosenfeld writes, “making the parties more cohesive and programmatic was bound up in a broader reform project aimed at adapting America’s cumbersome and antiquated constitutional structure to the needs of a modern industrial and military state.” Butler’s efforts on behalf of what he called “party government” or “party responsibility” and what James Q. Wilson called “amateur Democrats” had been successfully opposed by the party’s professionals of the period, especially by the bosses of big-city political machines (referred to euphemistically by Rosenfeld at one point as “nonideological patronage-based organizations”), as well as by Southern Democratic leaders in Congress – Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson in particular. This must be part of what accounts for the acrimonious “polarization” of today’s political culture, though that seems too mild a word to describe what we see routinely hurled by each side against the other on Twitter. Back in Paul Butler’s day, says Rosenfeld, “consistent majorities of Americans” did not want ideological parties. In response, the scandalmongering has become so routine that even if Trump were, as he is so often said to be, the most scandalous president in our history, no one not committed to one side or another in the political wars could ever know it, since that kind of claim and counterclaim is just how we do our political business nowadays. For More Information Ideas! For more information see inequality and social mobility, about political polarization, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these…