Coalitions based on group identity and partisan fragility

Over the past year or two I have read a couple of treatments along the lines of: Political gridlock is primarily a function of our government design - it is performing as expected by preventing changes that do not have clear and broad majority support. Our system of government was explicitly designed to protect the rights of minorities and therefore, where there is low degree of agreement, there should be little legislation, i.e. gridlock.

In both articles, there was an attendant observation. Since the 1960's both parties have become more ideologically homogenous. In 1965, Democrats had a lot of conservative moderates in their ranks and Republicans had a lot of moderates and even liberals in their ranks. The observation was that it is not so much that Democrats and Republicans have drifted apart, it is that Liberal Republicans have moved into the Democrat party and conservative Democrats have moved into the Republican party. Even though a comparison between parties makes it seem like Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats more liberal, that is wrong. Both parties have become more pure around their ideology. An example is much of the mid-sixties civil rights legislation which could only pass on a bipartisan basis. For example, the Voting Rights Act had a majority support that was made up of significant representation of both parties. Democrats could not have passed the Act without significant support from the moderate/liberal wing of the Republican party.

I accept that the nation hasn't become more polarized, but that the parties themselves have become more homogenous, thus creating the impression of greater polarization.

In the past couple of months, I have read a couple of articles making the case that A) most electoral noise is just that, noise. There are slow trend changes over multiple electoral cycles but that on a current election cycle basis, most differences are simply noise. 2) That as Democrats have become more pure ideologically, that it has made their electoral position more precarious compared to that of the Republicans.

The argument goes that as Republicans have widened their base geographically (but narrowed it ideologically) that they capture a wider set of demographics than do Democrats. Demographics that are voting based on ideas rather than identity. In contrast, the argument goes, the Democrats are becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of specific identity demographics: principally single women, Minorities in general (and African-Americans in particular), Unions (and government unions in particular), the poor, urban residents, and the clerissy (media, K-12, the academy, popular culture). The implication is that Democrats will have a greater and greater challenge compared to Republicans in the future because each demographic has very particular interests which are often inconsistent with and even counter to the agendas of other demographics within the Democratic coalition.

I suspect that this argument of the consequences arising from party homogenization is probably directionally correct but also probably underplays the challenges for Republicans. It is not clear to me that the priorities and agendas of traditionalists, libertarians, small government enthusiasts, fiscal conservatives, and gimlet-eyed classical liberals are all that easy to bridge. But I do accept it is probably easier to bridge than the similar task for Democrats.

There have been a couple of contretemps and articles in the past month that lend credence to this analysis regarding the inherent instability of the Democratic coalition.

One was the notorious and already well discussed implications of the video released by Hollaback (A non-profit and movement to end street harassment), 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman. The intent of the video was to raise awareness about the degree and pervasiveness of street harassment experienced by women. The claim is that "100+ instances of verbal street harassment took place within 10 hours, involving people of all backgrounds. This doesn't include the countless winks, whistles, etc." followed by a solicitation of donations.

What's the problem? We can all agree that street harassment is a real problem and not just for women. It includes not only instances exemplified here but also aggressive pan-handling, begging, raucous exercises of free-speech, etc. Real problems but also ones that bump up against other values such as freedom of speech. In dense, complex cities there is criminal law, then there are civic ordinances and then there is always the temptation to try and legislate manners, which never ends well.

But there has been a fairly vicious backlash within the constituencies of the Democratic party as touched on in the NPR article. The nominal criticism is that despite the claim of 100+ verbal harassments from people of all backgrounds, the video does not support that claim. Depending on your count, there are only about 20 harassments. Within these, they range from concerningly creepy (fellow walking beside the woman for five minutes), to the lude, to the mildly objectionable, to the seemingly innocuous. If these were the worst 20 of 100, then the guess is that the remaining 80 might not rise much above normal city interactions experienced by all residents.

But that's just the nominal criticism. The viciousness arises, and not unreasonably, from the other segments of the Democratic coalition. If this is a video dealing with issues of concern to single women, it might be OK in isolation. However, those concerned about class and race are very vociferous in pointing out that virtually all the haranguers on the video are minority and apparently lower class. So is Hollaback a defender of women's rights not to be harassed or are they racist for showing that the harassment appears to be concentrated among some demographics and not others. This is the coalition fragility that the articles were talking about. All these are real issues but they are much more important to some coalition members than to others. How to reconcile?

BTW, no hot button issue is complete without a satire, in this instance, 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man.

The second example lending credence to the Democrat coalition fragility hypothesis is summarised in Megan McArdle's post, Is Your House Red or Blue?.

It is often remarked that blue cities, full of people who purport to care about affordable housing and reducing inequality, have some of the highest rates of inequality as well as the highest housing prices in the nation. Along comes Trulia with a graph that demonstrates this phenomenon dramatically. The online real estate site compared home prices in local housing markets to the percentage by which President Barack Obama won or lost the popular vote in the 2012 election:

McArdle's commentary teases out a lot of the inherent incompatibilities between the clerisy (gentrifiers), the poor, urban residents, and minorities.

Neither article resolves the hypothesis of Democratic coalition fragility by any stretch of the imagination, but they are consistent with it. However, I think maybe the more interesting formulation might be: Which is more challenging to manage, a coalition of groups based on identity and with individual agendas based on group-interests (i.e. the Democrats), or a coalition of groups based on closely related but not identical ideologies (the Republicans)?