How Battle Lines Were Drawn - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 16, 2018 5:11 p.m.

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In general, the right has worried more about the demolition of America’s postwar cultural consensus than the left. [JB emphasis] Some of the most penetrating books by conservative authors in recent years explain and lament the origins of America’s unraveling common culture— Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” (2012), James Piereson’s “Shattered Consensus” (2015), Yuval Levin’s “Fractured Republic” (2016). Until very recently, liberals placed far more value on individual expressions of belief and identity than conservatives did. The rise of Donald Trump, though, seems to have given liberals a new appreciation for the virtues of that old commonality.

Neither Sam Rosenfeld, a professor of politics at Colgate, nor Amy Chua, a law professor at Yale, write as partisan or doctrinaire liberals, but both can fairly be said to represent the elite liberal worldview of early-21st-century America.

Mr. Rosenfeld’s “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” (Chicago, 399 pages, $30) treats America’s fraying culture as a problem that the parties themselves created. Midcentury Democrats and Republicans, he explains, were members of loose, baggy coalitions based on local loyalties and historical alliances. The Republicans had long been an alliance of Eastern capitalists and Western homesteaders, among other groups; the Democrats held together urban workers and Southern conservatives via the “Austin-Boston” connection. Even in the mid-1960s you couldn’t tell all that much about a politician simply by knowing that he was a Republican or a Democrat—hence William F. Buckley’s complaint in 1965 that the differences between Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsay were “biological, not political.”

Yet by 2000 those labels told you a great deal, because over the course of a half-century they had both become far more ideologically cohesive. “This is not something that just happened,” Mr. Rosenfeld asserts. “Individuals brought this change about deliberately.”

In 1959, he recounts, a steering committee within the Republican National Committee considered the question of whether the parties should stand for definable principles. One young political scientist who addressed the group, Robert Goldwin, suggested that the answer was no. “It is neither possible nor desirable for a major political party to be guided by principles,” Goldwin argued. These days, Goldwin’s view sounds quaint. Bipartisanship still serves as a kind of longed-for ideal, but in general we like consistency and clarity in our parties—and in our politicians—more than adaptability.

Mr. Rosenfeld chronicles a series of political changes that subjected the two major parties to more and more ideology-driven wrangling and grass-roots activism. After the Democrats’ electoral debacle in 1968, for instance, a committee co-chaired by South Dakota Sen. George McGovern recommended a series of structural reforms that enabled more grass-roots participation in the presidential nomination process. On the right, the aftermath of Watergate led conservatives such as Bill Rusher and Jesse Helms to blame the party’s woes on Nixonian centrism and redefine the GOP’s basic aims. The party had lost its way, they argued, by emphasizing geographical advantage rather than issues-based arguments.

“The Polarizers” tells readers a great deal about intra-party debates over strategy and ideology throughout the postwar period, but Mr. Rosenfeld mistakes symptoms for the disease. He assumes that politics follows culture, but the truth is usually the reverse; politicians don’t determine the culture but respond to it. Americans began separating into two divergent world-views for an array of social and cultural reasons—the rise of the counterculture, the decline of church attendance, economic ups and downs at home and abroad—that had nothing to do with party reforms or the outcome of elections.

Amy Chua doesn’t make that mistake in “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations” (Penguin Press, 293 pages, $28). Her principal contention is that humans are hardwired to trust and esteem members of their own groups over those of others and that this reality should inform our political debates. Both sides in our political wars, she argues—right-wing reactionaries and left-wing radicals, Trump enthusiasts and those who feel his victory was a triumph for bigotry—should first try to understand their political adversaries as members of tribes.

An impressive number of behavioral studies suggests that very young children instinctively trust and sympathize with people who look and act as they do, she notes, and this tendency manifests itself long before they’ve been “conditioned” by society. “Humans aren’t just a little tribal,” Ms. Chua concludes. “We’re very tribal, and it distorts the way we think and feel.”

Before getting to her points about contemporary American politics, though, she surveys a series of what she regards as American foreign-policy disasters—Vietnam, Afghanistan after 9/11, Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Venezuela—and contends that a fuller awareness of tribal loyalties would have saved the U.S. from costly mistakes. Many of her criticisms are valid. It’s unassailably true, for example, that in 2005 Col. H.R. McMaster defeated al Qaeda insurgents in Tal Afar, Iraq, by rejecting the then-U.S. policy of simply killing as many bad guys as possible and instead learning the region’s tribal loyalties and so earning the trust of Iraqis who could help us.

I’m not convinced, though, that mistakes in war and foreign policy can tell us a lot about domestic social and political cohesion. We are not trying to root out insurgents but simply to live together peaceably. Ms. Chua’s analysis isn’t helped, either, by her tendency to bolster her arguments with sloppy assertions. She remarks, for example, that the George W. Bush administration called Hugo Chávez’s brief loss of power in 2002 a “victory for democracy”—it did not. (The words are those of a reporter for the New York Times.) In a section on the supposed tribalism of the right, she mentions the 2017 killing of an Indian shopkeeper in South Carolina as though it were an act of white-nationalist violence, but the suspects now in custody are not white.

Ms. Chua is certainly correct that our political travails are culturally generated, not the work of partisan manipulators in the political arena. But her insights about tribal loyalties are also, as conservative readers will instantly note, not quite as original as she suggests. Edmund Burke famously held that man learns to love mankind by first loving the “little platoon” he belongs to, and conservatives have long faulted radicals of various kinds for fixating on universal values and spurning local and familial allegiances. Even so, Ms. Chua has written a brisk and readable polemic in defense of common sense and deserves credit for insisting, pace her friends and colleagues, that tribal loyalties are vastly more powerful and complicated than today’s elites profess to believe.