ice depolarizing american mind abridged

8/10/2019 ICE Depolarizing American Mind Abridged

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DEPOLARIZING THEAMERICAN MIND

HowAmericaCanGrowBeyond ItsCurrentlyPolarizedPolitics

Abridged Version, October 2014

BySteveMcIntosh,J.D.,andCarterPhipps

NOTE: This paper is an abridged, introductory version of the Institute for Cultural Evolutions longer white paper Depolarizing the

American Mind. For a more in-depth analysis including a summary of our proposed Synthesis Platform and a Polarization Test, read

the long paper at www.culturalevolution.org/campaign-issues/political-polarization/

POLITICAL GRIDLOCK INWASHINGTONis one of the most troubling problems faced by America today. The

polarized state of our democracy has been called a wicked problem because there are multiple causes but no clear

solutions. The costs of polarization, however, are easy to recognize. As a result of this logjam in the legislature, action

on other pressing problems is stalled. Important issues such as income inequality, climate change, budget deficits,

campaign finance reform, immigration reform, and tax reform all remain unaddressed.

The problem of political polarization is now being analyzed by some of Americas best minds and a variety of

proposals to reduce the gridlock have begun circulating in the marketplace of ideas. Some proposals call for a

revitalization of the political center through the formation of a third party that represents independent voters.1Others

recommend action at the state level that employs ballot referendums to disempower partisan control over primaries

and congressional redistricting.2Still others argue that polarization results from the corrupting influence of money in

politics, which causes legislators to answer more to special interest groups and large campaign contributors than tovoters who favor bipartisan compromise.3Many of these proposals tend to assume that the problem lies with the

parties or structural elements within our political system. Polarization, in other words, is seen as unrepresentative of the

peoples will. However, as Harvard professor Jill Lepore points out in a recent article in The New Yorker, if polarization

happens first among the electorate, and only later in Congress, then voters are driving it, in which case it is

representation.4


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Here at the Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE) we are in favor of many of the proposals that have been

advanced by others, but our focus is on understanding the cultural roots of the problem and envisioning the cultural

solutions that could emerge. We believe its critical to address the ideational divide that exists within the electorate

itself, which is ultimately producing the polarized representation that Lepore identifies.

WHAT IS CAUSINGTHE POLARIZATION?

While our gridlocked government may be at least partially representative of a polarized culture, there are few who are

happy about the results. And it seems like the default assumption, and the position often repeated in the mainstream

media, is that both sides are responsible, which leads to the

conclusion that the appropriate remedy is for politicians to

simply meet in the middle and compromise for the greater good.

Both parties are not, however, equally responsible. Political

scientists attribute much of the current polarization to theRepublican Partys shift to the right over the past twenty years,

even while Democrats have remained in relatively the same

center-left position they have occupied since the Clinton

administration. Arguing that conservatives have a covert interest

in maintaining polarization, political scientists Matthew Nisbet

and Dietram Scheufele conclude that the responsibility to overcome the current situation rests primarily with liberals:

If liberals respond to the provocations of the Right with rigidity, vitriol, outrage, and a growing

unwillingness to compromise, they only strengthen the hand of their opponents . . . . Conservatives,in this sense, are playing a long game, happy to starve the beast and delighted by dysfunction, even

when they control the government. For this reason, as liberals unwittingly conspire to turn Americanpolitics into a zero-sum game, conservatives win even when they lose.5

At ICE, we agree that the responsibility for overcoming polarization falls primarily to liberals and progressives. But

our reasons differ. We believe that the causes of polarization are in fact to be found not just in the Republican

retrenchment of the past twenty years, but in the liberal and progressive flowering that happened in the decades before

that. We argue it is the perceived threats posed by the cultural developments that began in the 1960s and 70s that have

pushed many Republicans to move further to the right.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Americas liberal consensus became destabilized by the rise of a distinct countercultural

worldview, which ICE identifies by the defined term postmodernism (used in the general sense to refer to Americas

progressive cultural demographic and not in the more narrow academic sense). This progressive postmodern

worldview burst onto the political scene with all the promise and excessescharacteristic of new movements. As

millions began to identify with the values of this worldview, it changed the political dynamics of the country

permanently. The post-war consensus that had informed politics for the previous decades was effectively broken.


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