Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times, September 14
Image from article, with caption: "Signs of love greet President Trump's motorcade as it passes through Lake Charles, La. earlier this month
Excerpt:
Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, political scientists at Brigham Young
University, reported in their recent paper “Does Party Trump Ideology?
Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” that many Republican voters are:
malleable to the point of innocence, and self-reported expressions of ideological
fealty are quickly abandoned for policies that — once endorsed by a well-known
party leader — run contrary to that expressed ideology. ...
The extraordinary approval ratings Trump gets from his core voters further
reinforces the unwillingness of Republican elected officials to defy him. Among
Republicans who voted for Trump in the primaries, his approval rating in a Wall
Street Journal/NBC News poll earlier this month stood at 98 percent. Among
Republicans who did not vote for Trump in the primaries, his approval rating stood
at 66 percent.
I asked both Barber and Pope of Brigham Young what their thoughts on
American politics are now that Trump has been in office eight months.
Pope argued in an email that there has been too much emphasis on polarization
and not enough on partisanship. [JB emphasis]
While elites — elected officials and party activists — are ideologically polarized,
the best the general public “can manage is a kind of tribal partisanship that does not really reflect the content of the elite discussion,” Pope wrote:
Citizens pick a team, but they don’t naturally think like the team leadership
does. And when Trump tells Republicans to think in a new way, lots of people happily adopt that new position because they were never that committed to the old ideas anyway. They’re just committed to the label. ...
[I]nsofar as elections have become primal struggles, and political
competition has devolved into an atavistic spectacle, the prospect for a return to a
politics of compromise and consensus approaches zero, no matter what temporary
accommodations professional politicians make.
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