Hard Times by Kellerman Barbara

Author:Kellerman, Barbara [Kellerman, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

17

DIVISIONS

CONTRARY TO POPULAR OPINION, not everyone is persuaded that Americans are divided—that they are “polarized.” Political scientist Morris Fiorina has found that while Americans are “closely divided,” they are not “deeply divided.” His research suggests that the reason we split in elections, or sit them out, is because we, the majority of the American people, “instinctively seek the center.” It’s the base—the base of the Republican Party and the base of the Democratic Party—that “hangs out at the extremes.” Even on an issue as contentious as abortion, Fiorina asserts that most Americans are not militants; they are not implacably and irrevocably committed to one of the two opposing camps, one prochoice and the other pro-life. Rather they are somewhere in the middle, likely to be “content with compromise laws” whenever such laws can actually be passed.1

But, Fiorina is in the minority. The overwhelming majority of researchers, reporters, pollsters, and ordinary Americans believe that the American people are deeply divided: ideologically, demographically, economically, regionally and religiously, and divided as well on many of the most important issues of the day. The number of recent books (and articles) with titles conveying divisiveness is daunting. Here is a sample: Desmond King and Rogers Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America; Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism; Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It; Douglas Schoen, Hopelessly Divided: The New Crisis in American Politics and What It Means for 2012 and Beyond; and E. J. Dionne Jr., Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent.2 To be sure, the United States of America was more divided in the past than in the present. We are talking here about class and “culture war”—not civil war. Still, the sense that the nation is fractured is pervasive, contributing to leaders feeling hapless and followers frustrated. This is, I hasten again to add, an issue facing not only political leaders but, in addition, corporate leaders, educational leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, and leaders in the various professions—all having to grapple with leading in a nation increasingly more heterogeneous than homogeneous.

For the purposes of this discussion I divide the divides into two groups—general and specific. My purpose here is not to deconstruct the various schisms or even completely to catalogue them. It is simply to point to a component of context—divisiveness—that complicates the exercise of leadership.

General Divides

Divided by Income

We have seen that Americans now split roughly into the extremely prosperous 1 percent and the far less prosperous, or not at all prosperous, 99 percent. The 1 percent benefit, handsomely, from U.S. income growth; the 99 percent do not. As mentioned, 99 percent of Americans are actually worse off today than they were a decade or two ago. There is, moreover, little or even no upward mobility. “Whether because of blatant nepotism or

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