Why Is American Politics So Divided?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:02

This week, as Donald Trump prepares to officially take over as the 47th President of the United States, I want to explore the American political divide. How has the MAGA movement been able to gain traction and dominate Republican politics? What are the mechanisms driving the two party system?

And ultimately, why is American politics so divided? Welcome to America A History Podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by a postdoctoral researcher for digital democracy at European University Vidrina.

His new book, Party Transformation in Congressional Primaries, is out now. And we'll link to that in the show notes for any of you who want to buy that as well. Welcome to the podcast. Dr.

Mike Kalban, thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure to have you on the show.

In fact, I was just saying before we start recording this, we've had a little bit of a politics hiatus over Christmas, which I think everyone deserved. But now we're back, the inauguration is happening, and I think everyone is talking about Trump again.

Maybe they didn't ever stop with everything that's been going on, but I think we need to just sort of dive into this because American politics is quite unique in a lot of ways. So I'm just hoping just to sort of kick off, if you could tell me a bit about how we got to the two party system that America has today.

Mike Cowburn: 00:01:50

Yes, absolutely. And it's an interesting story.

If we, if we go back to say, the, the middle of the 20th century, we have the same two parties that we have today, but they're very differently constructed. Both the Republicans and the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century are these kind of broad coalitions that contain a lot of ideological diversity.

And what I mean by that is that we have these kind of, particularly in the kind of northeast of the country, these rather liberal left of center Republicans and, and then particularly in areas like the south, we have these very conservative white Democrats. And so we have the two party system that on the face of it looks somewhat similar to today.

ientists wrote this report in: 1950

tially, they're saying in the: 1950

And so the report really is a case of be careful what you wish for, because it's really, obviously all of the things. You read this report today, and you think, God, they really. They really got a lot of the things that they wanted and then some.

And this was, you know, the leading political scientists in America of the day. And so what basically happens in that intervening period really starts around the kind of responses to the introduction of civil rights legislation.

So from then on, Republicans in particular, especially after Nixon, they have this approach of targeting white Southerners with explicit racist appeals.

artisan polarization from the: 1970

da, we can think about in the: 1990

In contrast, the Democratic Party has not radicalized in the same way. Conservatives, especially Southern conservatives, do sort themselves out of the party and usually become Republicans, Republicans.

And the party has become more progressive on a number of social issues, particularly things like women's rights or gay rights. But on economic policy, we don't really see this kind of wholesale shift to the left.

timeline, for example, in the: 1990

And so when we talk about kind of what's changed in the party system, we sometimes use these terms like polarization, which kind of implies that both parties have done something. And I think it's really important when we're trying to look at these things, to identify that this has been a very asymmetric process.

And if we're going to understand it, we need to really understand what's underpinning these asymmetries and what's happened there.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:32

It's interesting because, you know, I think we can look at the sort of. The recent sort of shift in. In these sort of two main parties in a second.

But I think what I sometimes think surprises other people who don't know about the. The history of US Politics is that the Republicans, back in the day, we're talking, you know, civil War times, they were on the side of abolition.

They were fighting for the causes that mattered most to the North. So actually, when you say that there wasn't a lot of difference between the parties ideologically, that's probably kind of true. Right.

It's only really until the last few decades that we've really seen that shift because the Republicans have taken their politics so far to the right.

Mike Cowburn: 00:06:18

Absolutely. And we can think about the kind of structural underpinnings of that a bit more. And I think we're going to get onto that later in the conversation.

But I think that's really important that, that these parties are not existing in this. They're not operating under the same set of incentives, basically.

And so the American political system has enabled this in a number of fairly interesting ways.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:45

What do you think it is about the Democrats that make them so reluctant to embrace this kind of socialist agenda? Almost because it's worked very well for the Republicans to lean into that kind of hardcore base.

And it's how the MAGA movement has really kind of proliferated. But the Democrats aren't doing that. And yet if it's all just about winning votes and winning elections, you'd think they'd be more inclined to. Right.

Mike Cowburn: 00:07:11

So structurally, it's very difficult to operate as a challenger force from the left in American politics. So we can think here about the key institutions that underpin American elections.

So we can think here about the rural bias in the Senate, we can think about the Electoral College for the presidency, and we can think of the distribution of voters and plus gerrymandering in the House of Representatives. Now, all three of these key institutions therefore have right now a Republican bias in them. So that means that Republicans are advantaged.

We've seen that in two presidential elections in the 21st, 21st century where the winning Republican candidate does not even get the most votes. But these differences are even more reinforced when we start to look at the intra party politics on the left.

So if we think about Democratic voters being, say, for example, comparatively poorly spread out among the country, well, that system, that pattern is even more true among kind of progressives or Democratic socialists. These voters, these people who want to support these policies, are disproportionately clustered into a very small number of House districts.

So yeah, you do end up with the squad or, you know, the squad plus a few others.

But it's very difficult for this movement to say, okay, we have a broad geographic base across the United States and this therefore is a, is a strategic move that we should make.

And so what you get is a Democratic Party that is disproportionately responsive to white moderate voters, particularly in places like the upper Midwest, who have this huge amount of power in the, in the current electoral system.

And so it really makes it very difficult for Democratic Party like activists, if we want to use that word, or people with further left positions to, to kind of take over or capture the party in the way that, say, the Tea Party was, was very able to do. Because if we think about who the Tea Party Tea Parties were, well, they were fairly broadly spread out across America.

They weren't just clustered in a few little House districts. And so they could, could really push the party in a broad way. And then the party, well, the party then tries to respond to that.

it, when we get to the end of: 2015

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:01

Kind of started touching on this.

But what are the challenges then in having a system where the choice has really been reduced to Democrats or Republicans, you know, because it does feel to me like there are independent candidates out there and there are third parties out there, but they don't have the traction, they don't have the money, they don't have the power. So it really does come down to either or.

And then you kind of start just thinking about it just really becomes about the internal politics within the Democrats and the Republicans. Right. And is that, is that a good thing?

Mike Cowburn: 00:10:33

So I think normatively, this is a debate we're having in political science, in academia at the moment.

So there are people out there, there are well respected scholars out there, people like Lee Druckmann, whose solution to this problem is more parties. At the moment, the problem we've got is exactly as you identify.

There are a bunch of people out there who end up voting Republican despite, despite having major problems or significant reticence around a decent chunk of what they're trying to do.

I would contend that the problem is less about the number of parties and more about the connection between the parties and the kind of institutional setup. So the institution of American democracy has this incredibly loose system of rules and norms that parties have traditionally adhered to.

So this is what Zibla and Levitsky in How Democracies Die would call institutional forbearance. And what that basically means is that politicians exercise restraint and they don't use their power to kind of reinforce and get more power.

And to me, the kind of breakdown and the area of interest or greatest concern is this kind of dimension. And I think there are potentially multiple ways to solve it, one of which might be having more parties.

But it seems to me that having more parties, getting to a system with more parties is just very difficult and is just a big uplift.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:08

Is there really a difference, do you think, between having more political parties versus just having more choice of candidates within the two main parties?

And, and, and if it's the latter, you could argue the Republicans are actually doing that very, very well because people have chosen Trump and that's kind of democracy playing out successfully, right?

Mike Cowburn: 00:12:32

Yeah. So I think we've got here then, then kind of this, this argument around how do we, how do we move forward from here?

And so what we, we see in a commonality around not just in the United States, but also in other kind of consolidated Western democracies is this level and this commonality around distrust of the system and this kind of distrust of the system that leads to an inability for politics, for politics or the institutions of politics to provide meaningful solutions to the pressing political questions of the day.

So whether you think that the, the main issues in politics are things like climate change and inequality, like say, those on the left do, or if you think it's about immigration and white identity, as I would contend that the, the kind of, the central pillars of the MAGA movement and the, the right in American politics are now you can make a, a coherent argument to say that the established political order is not addressing those challenges in a way that is satisfactory to you, and then at that point it no longer makes sense to keep supporting those kind of those systems.

And so did you end up with a bunch of people channeling their efforts into what I guess we would call movement politics that are designed to reconfigure or reorient the political system? And that might take place, as we've seen, within the Republican Party, from within the party.

And I think you could also, a bit closer to home, think about somebody like Jeremy Corbyn, who's doing a similar thing, who did a similar thing from within the Labour Party, or.

And so essentially using the existing party apparatus to meet those objectives and goals, or if we think of other examples like Marine Le Pen reform with Nigel Farage or the RFD here in Germany, what they're essentially doing is challenging these party systems from the outside and trying to reconfigure it in that way. And so, starting from the question of political trust, I think is an important piece.

And if we look at polling data from basically any of these countries, we see this just massive collapse in political trust.

And so I think that's a kind of more coherent explanation than potentially we sometimes get into this debate around, is it economics, is it racism or xenophobia? Well, these things come from somewhere and these things, I think, are kind of linked by this question.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:16

It's interesting, though, because we're talking about political trust and yet there still seems to be more success with these.

We know we're talking about sort of movement politics here with these figures, you know, like Marine Le Pen, like Nigel Farage, like Jeremy Corbyn, like Donald Trump. They still have more success in kind of infiltrating the big parties than they do in starting their own movement.

And yet if there was such a trust issue in politics, why is it that ultimately people still gravitate towards the parties that they know and apparently have been let down by enough to distrust up until now?

Mike Cowburn: 00:15:53

Yes, and I think this has been, I guess, one of the most successful pieces of political maneuvering that Trump has been able to do. In particular, Trump has simultaneously been able to channel anger at the Republican Party that was also present there in the Tea Party movement.

By the way, if you are, when, when you, if you look at these studies, people like Rachel Blooms, excellent study on the Tea Party, she goes out and interviews all these people and they really hate the Democratic Party, but they also hate the Republican Party. And so Donald Trump's ability to like, build on that kind of Tea Party mentality of saying, yep, the, you know, the swamp.

When he talks about the swamp, he doesn't just mean the Democrats, but he's also simultaneously able to continue these, these collaborations where he needs them with Mitch McConnell, with all of these kind of established figures within the Republican Party, and, and basically have it both ways. And that's been a, been from his perspective, you know, one of the key points of success.

ent, well structured party in: 2015

We have this, we have this kind of seminal study from the early, early 21st century called the Party Decides, where basically it's saying that, yeah, really, the people behind the scenes still pick the presidential candidates. And the authors of that book, which is released pre Trump basically made the argument that the party just never chose.

It wasn't that Trump beat the party candidate because the party candidate was not clear. Was it Ted, was it Ted Cruz, was it Jed Bush? All of these different people had at different times the appearance of being the party candidate.

But because the party never coalesces, it's just unable to kind of fend Trump off. And, I mean, you could maybe argue a similar thing about the initial Corbyn selection, although he does obviously win with a, with a big majority.

But maybe if the establishment Labour Party had seen the writing on the wall, they wouldn't have put up three candidates against, against the one.

And they would have said, oh, okay, we're, we're in a, you know, ideological battle for the future of the Labour Party and we need to be kind of coherent around what, who we think is our candidate for that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:28

Yeah. And it's interesting.

One thing that I think Donald Trump, you know, love him or hate him, one thing he's done incredibly well is in every campaign, and I'm talking, you know, candidacy campaigns within the Republican Party, he's been able to isolate himself from everyone else.

So it's not, as you sort of touched on, it's not about, you know, Donald Trump has a sort of 1 in, you know, 10 chance, depending on how many candidates there are. He actually has a one in two because it's him versus the rest of the party.

And it's, do you, do you want the establishment, do you want the system and the norm, or do you want someone who's going to represent, you know, the people as he kind of pitches himself? And it's amazing how he's able to do that, isn't it?

Mike Cowburn: 00:19:12

Exactly. This is. This has again been a very successful feature of, if we want to call it, Trumpism.

And again, when you actually look under the hood, many of the policies that he is advocating are very, very unpopular.

We've seen, you know, in the wake of the Dobbs abortion decision, we've seen a raft of states vote to keep, you know, even very red states, places like Kansas, who have voted to say no, in our state, we're going to keep some abortion rights.

Even this, even just a few months ago in Florida, on the day that they overwhelmingly voted to nominate Trump, there was also an act and they didn't quite pass, to keep abortion rights, but that was only because it needed to have 60%, but 57% of Floridians who voted voted to keep abortion rights enshrined, despite managing at the same time to comfortably send their Electoral College voters towards Trump.

So his ability not only to disconnect from the establishment Republican Party, but also from unpopular political positions does not seem to affect him in the same way. And again, whether this is, and it does appear to be something specific to Trump when Trump has endorsed these other candidates.

So particularly we saw in: 2022

And there was a point in: 2022

And, of course, what does the party do at that point? Well, you go back to the devil, you know, I suppose, and Trump becomes newly ascendant.

Liam Heffernan: 00:21:13

you'd have asked me in early: 2023

Mike Cowburn: 00:21:24

But again, we can think about what was bad about that campaign. So, you know, launching on as it was then Twitter, and it all doesn't really work. Elon Musk.

Well, Trump now has a dysfunctional relationship with Elon Musk, and people don't punish him for it. You could do the same things as Trump, and it just lands differently.

And so these politicians who try and do Trumpism without Trump really struggle because people connect them back to, okay, well, what policy issues are you talking about? And all these other things. And they think, well, no, we actually don't want this.

imaginary since at least the: 1980

This person who has just been there in the public consciousness, in the public imaginary, for such a long time that it gives them more kind of flexibility, more leeway. And he's just not really understood as, first and foremost being a politician.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:33

Donald Trump has never been. He's not a lifelong staunch Republican. He's. He's. He realized that that was. That was where his best opportunity to be elected was.

pated in, you know, the early: 2000

But there's we've talked about this on the podcast before this this kind of really odd pivot that happens in American politics where you go from running for the candidacy and having to appeal to the party base to then winning the candidacy and then having to run the national presidential election and having to then appeal to a national electorate. Tell me more about this, because you've studied this a lot and you know, it forms a lot of your book.

So what are these mechanics that are playing out in the primary season here, and how does it affect this whole system?

Mike Cowburn: 00:23:31

Yeah, absolutely. So the book focuses actually on congressional primary elections, but many of the same patterns hold across in the presidential primary.

So just to make sure everyone, all your listeners understand, I'm sure that I'm sure they already know a lot about US Politics, but we're getting quite into the weeds here.

So though we have us, the US Presidency has a primary season where all of the different states, in different, in a certain order, nominate which candidate they would like to be the presidential candidate for a given party. We also have a somewhat similar process happening in Congress.

So if, say, we both wanted to be, I don't know, the Democratic candidate for New York's first district in the United Kingdom or in most European systems, the party just sorts this out and makes a decision that says, yep, you've been in the party longer, you've never, we don't know who you are, we pick you. Whereas in the United States, this is an entirely separate election. And it's these elections that my book focuses on.

And I'm basically making two central claims in the book. And so the first of those claims is that these elections, so congressional primaries have fundamentally changed in the 21st century.

So I call this primary transformation. And then the second claim is that these changes matter in terms of affecting the parties. So I call this party transformation.

ll of these elections between: 2006

They're kind of low salience.

They're normally about things like, oh, I've got kind of a bigger name in the district, or, you know, people, and people are lending their support, support to people within these, often on a very personal basis of like, oh, yeah, I literally know this person. He's been in the party for 20 years or whatever. And over time, these Contests come to be dominated by intra party differences.

And so I construct these two categories around primaries that I call factional and ideological primaries. So factional primaries are where the different candidates are getting support from different parts of the party.

So most obviously in kind of recent years, people like Justice Democrats or our Revolution supporting you kind of from the left in the, in the Democratic primaries.

And then I also construct the second idea of ideological primaries, where the candidates are framing their differences to one another in explicitly positional or ideological terms. Now, of course, those things are related not, not one to one, but there's clearly a, an alignment there.

d of my period of analysis of: 2020

And primaries for Congress are commonly said to matter because they contribute to this, this process of polarization which I kind of slightly problematized in the, in the first part of our discussion.

But the common wisdom here is that they contribute to polarization because the people who vote in these contests are way more to the left in the Democratic Party or way more to the right in the Republican Party. So the candidates have then got a set of incentives to appeal to these voters. And this logic sounds, sounds sound.

Unfortunately, whenever we look at the data, there's just no ideological difference between these two, between these voters and other voters.

And we're also making some pretty big assumptions about these voters that, you know, that they can meaningly position candidates ideologically despite not having any party labels.

And so what I show in the, in the second half of the book is that the primary process does matter, but it doesn't matter in the way that we think it does. So basically the process itself offers these candidates incentives to move to the left in the Democratic Party and the right in the Republican Party.

But these incentives are primarily connected to the interests and preferences of other elites within the party and to a lesser extent, candidates perceptions of voter positions.

So it's not that the voters, it's not that this is a bottom up process emanating from the voters, but is instead actually a story about party elites and kind of other party actors.

So that's really the contribution of the book in kind of the two parts of the descriptive change and then kind of how this descriptive change matters, just being a slightly more nuanced picture than is commonly conceived in kind of the media.

Liam Heffernan: 00:28:35

It feels like from everything you've just explained, that the primary system.

And this whole system that sits underneath the top level elections is just a really acutely designed process that can be managed very tightly by the main parties to understand what their electorate was want, who they want and how they can appeal to them.

And to me that seems like it's become so sophisticated and so complex and so expensive that actually America's kind of locked into this two party system for life now. Like, how is it even possible for another party to kind of infiltrate that?

Mike Cowburn: 00:29:19

No, I completely agree that this is a key feature of that keeps the two party system going. Because if you want to change the party, you just do it from within. It doesn't make sense to try and construct your own apparatus.

But the point you make about money here is really crucial.

And so I made the point when we were speaking a minute ago that the part that the voters in these primary elections do very poorly in terms of distinguishing between two same party candidates, you don't have party labels on these primary ballots. You've like really got to do your research if you want to know the policy positions.

However, the groups that are contributing money within the party, they know the difference between these candidates because it's in their interest to work out who is more aligned with their positions. And so these groups will then give money to the candidates that are most supportive of their position. And so what you end up getting is.

And so, and we know that money matters in American politics in all ways. And so what you end up getting is what I call non ideological benefits of being highly ideological.

So it's not that the voter sees your name on the ballot and says, oh, okay, yeah, this person is way to the left, the way to the right. It's that they go into the to vote and they say, oh yeah, I've seen a million road signs or yard signs with this person's name on it.

They must be a good candidate, they must be doing a good job. And so the process through which it can matter is just a bit more obfuscated than we've kind of traditionally thought is my contention.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:00

Yeah, and I also wonder how this sort of tug of war plays out between the kind of closed door conversations that happens between candidates and their donors versus this sort of riding the wave of public perception as well. Because we saw it play out with Desantis. Actually, as soon as he lost the public, he lost the money. But you also need money to win people over.

And with the right investment and the right campaign, you win that public trust and votes. It's a really kind of odd and careful Balancing act, isn't it?

Mike Cowburn: 00:31:37

Yeah. And we can also think about this in terms of, you know, how the political elites perceive things as well.

So if you, you know, if you're a member of Congress and you have things to worry about. Well, we know that both states and the districts themselves are getting kind of ever safer in general elections.

A smaller and smaller number of these seats flip parties in the general election.

And so if your incentives are moving away, if you basically know you're going to win your general election anyway, then what do you have to worry about? Well, what you have to worry about is an intraparty challenge. And now very, very few incumbents actually lose primary elections, but a few do.

A few of them do. And the perception among members of Congress is that this is a big risk. This is something that they need to take very seriously.

Even if the, even if the, the likelihood of them actually losing through this process is very small.

They see what they see, you know, two to four of their colleagues kicked out of Congress each cycle, each, each two year cycle because they lose in this way. And they think, huh, well, I don't want that to be me next time. And so they adapt their behavior.

And so then in this way we are, we do end up with ever growing polarization.

And so this, this idea that members, the political elites themselves perceive this as a, as a, as a threat and as a problem therefore alters their behavior. And so we, I show in the book that basically over time, if you receive a certain type of primary challenger, you basically move away from the center.

You, you, if you get these factional challenges, you change your behavior than what it was the previous Congress.

And also even within an election cycle when it comes to being within the time of the primary, then you want to communicate very partisan positions during that period of the primary election. And they don't move back. Basically, they communicate these positions and then they worry that, oh, okay, I don't want to look like I'm flip flopping.

I want to maintain these positions. And so having moved, they then maintain the position, position.

So there are these kind of underlying mechanisms that are just a bit more complicated than we previously realized as to how primaries can matter.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:58

Throughout our discussion, it feels like, you know, we, we wanted to talk about how divided American politics is or, or isn't.

And yet we, we have ended up talking a lot about the systems, the processes, the procedures, the, the, the, the, the, the mechanics behind all of that.

And it just makes me think, is American politics really divided in a sort of policy sense or is it really just about parties now going into self preservation mode and making sure they just win elections however they need to win them.

Mike Cowburn: 00:34:34

So I think, I don't want to be too glib here, but I do think, particularly if we're talking about elites, there are very big meaningful differences. So at the level of political elites, there is a huge contest going on about kind of the meaning of America.

And so I think the historian Thomas Zimmer puts it in something like whether we want America to be a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. And that is like a really big existential question, who gets included in America's democracy? And also these questions are really hard to overcome.

It's not like we're having a, a conversation about, I don't know, the marginal tax rate or something like that. Well, we can find a compromised position. We can somewhat satisfy both sides.

Like, there isn't a satisfying answer to both sides, these big existential questions. So at the elite level, America is deeply, deeply, deeply and meaningfully divided.

But I think what you're really asking here is, are Americans divided? And so then here we get into a more nuanced answer, I think.

And the first point I always like to talk about, and I always tell my students this, is that most Americans do not spend much time thinking about politics by virtue of if you sit in one of my classes, or dare I even say if you listen to this podcast, you are deeply weird. At some level, you are spending your free time choosing to think about politics. And this is not something that most Americans are doing.

So I always like to give the example of, like, if you can think of something that you literally never spend any time thinking about. So the example I give to my students is I never think about salsa dancing. Salsa dancing does not enter my world. I never, never think about it.

And that's about how about one third of Americans think about politics. It never enters their realm. It never comes up. They do not think about it.

And so then I ask them to imagine something you very occasionally or rarely observe or think about it. And so for me, that might be something like marathon running.

So when the London Marathon is on or when the Olympics happens, okay, I'm like somewhat exposed to marathon running, but like, the rest of the time, I am not aware of this and not thinking about this in my life. Well, that's about another one third of America you've got right there who spend about that amount of time thinking about politics.

But the difference is that unlike salsa dancing or marathon running, the people who barely pay any attention to this also get a say. They also get to participate and they also get to determine the outcome in a way that does not apply to salsa dancing or marathon running.

And these people have a whole range of reasons as to why they prefer one person over the other. And they definitely are not kind of consistent in their policy positions and all of this kind of thing.

And so we're in the, we're in that final third, the weird third that really spends a varying time kind of engaging in this to various degrees of intensity. And so, yeah, we're living in a very strange time, particularly in American politics. But we can also see this in comparison to other countries too.

And here in comparison to other countries is really where the kind of two party system stands out of America. So what we've seen in most consolidated Western European democracies is a fragmentation of the vote.

So Labour just won a huge majority on 34% of the vote.

And then in many countries, like I live in Germany, we now have this three party coalition government because no two party combination is getting you enough of the vote. And we're going to have that again when we have our elections in February.

But the difference in the United States is the same thing is happening, it's just happening within the two party system. And one of the key institutions funneling that through the two party system is the primary process.

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:39

Yeah, I'm gonna put my, my, my cynical hat on here and say that I think that analogy is great to sort of explain how people think or probably don't think much about politics. But I do think that politics is driven by values and by ideology and people care as certainly Americans care very deeply about certain things.

And you know, there's, there's a lot to discuss there, you know, bearing of religion and all of that and whatnot. But anyway, Americans have very strong opinions about certain things.

I would argue from my incredibly uninformed position that the top of the, these sort of political establishments are very aware of that.

And actually elections just become a big branding exercise to package up politics into a very potent ideology that, that can be fed to the right people in the right way to win elections.

Mike Cowburn: 00:39:41

So I don't, I don't disagree with any of that.

And I think what we're talking about here is, is that these people in these, these, should we say, these other 2/3 of the, of the American population, many of them do have these strongly held preferences in certain areas, but they do not perceive those preferences as necessarily having, having anything or having much to do with politics. They do have these deeply held beliefs but they see them as almost apolitical.

And so that's where the, the kind of, the point that you're making comes in and becomes incredibly important. Because then how do you translate this preference into politics?

Even things that might appear very obviously political to, say, you or me, Many Americans are living them in a way that they do not perceive as political.

And so the role of the campaign then is to engage with these agenda items, or whatever we would call it, again, looking at it from a formal political perspective, is to then put that into a way of making sense about the world that they could integrate these other deeply held beliefs into.

Liam Heffernan: 00:40:50

Yeah, that's interesting.

So to sort of bring this all nicely together with everything we've discussed, you know, how, how divided is American politics really, and how does it compare to other countries?

Mike Cowburn: 00:41:05

Yeah, so, I mean, I think it really depends on what level we mean here. So whether we're, if we, if we're talking about the elite level, I would say, yeah, American politics is very deeply divided.

And it is divided on issues of substance. It is divided on big issues of substance about who gets to be an American, about a whole kind of a level of identity around the whole country.

That is, that is completely salient. However, when you then move down to this, this lower level, there are still differences.

But whether people perceive these differences as being political or as being about politics also is much more, kind of debatable, much more contested.

But I would also say that, you know, when we think about some measures such as, you know, like, would you be happy if your friend or son or daughter married someone from the opposing political party, we do have data that show that these numbers are much, much higher. People, to varying degrees, prefer to live or not live with near other people of the opposing party.

But that is because these party labels have in some sense transcended kind of the issues, and now they're about much more than that, and they are themselves this, this question of identity.

So someone like Liliana Mason's fantastic work has really documented this systematically to say Americans do care about parties in particular or partisanship in particular, because it has come to stand in for so much other stuff.

The idea that if you tell someone you're a Democrat or Republican, they can likely, you know, list off a whole different bunch of things about you that takes place. So, in short, yes, it is. And unfortunately, kind of getting us out of this is a lot more complicated than we might otherwise imagine.

Liam Heffernan: 00:43:03

And yeah, certainly something we will be unable to solve in a 30 minute podcast, but nonetheless has been really, really Fascinating to talk to you, Mike. So thank you for joining me for this.

And for anyone listening to this episode, we're gonna put loads of links in the show notes also especially to Mike's book as well. So if you wanna find out more about everything we've talked about, you can just click the links and do that.

Mike, if anyone wants to connect with you directly, where can they do that?

Mike Cowburn: 00:43:33

Yeah, so I'm on Bluesky, MikeCoburn, BSky Social, or you can look at my Find Me on my website, Mike. And again, yeah, feel free to then reach out and connect with me over any of those platforms. Fantastic.

Liam Heffernan: 00:43:48

Wonderful. Thank you again. And you can find me on X just about, but also Bluesky and LinkedIn. Just search for my name and you will find me.

And if you enjoy this podcast, please do leave us a rating and a review. Wherever you're listening to this, give us a follow as well so that all future episodes appear as if by magic in your feed.

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Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.