The Grateful Dead and other voters
The son of a rabbi and a sociologist and a massive Grateful Dead fan, Julian Zelizer is a historian who looks at American history from a number of different angles. When I anchored my show on CNN International I always tried to get Julian on as guest because he often had a holistic and, importantly, a judicious assessment of some of the more crazy days during the Trump presidency.
As journalists, we often record the first draft of history. It’s professors like Julian who then put our words and observations into a broader context, and fit the facts of day-to-day journalism into a historical pattern. He dislikes the word 'unprecedented’ to describe what’s happening in American politics. “Where everything is unprecedented, everything's brand new, and there's absolutely no context for what's going on, as a result, people have lesser of an understanding of current events.
We now know that Trump’s ascendancy and presidency was not an aberration in 2016. He's back, and whisker away from a second term. Julian tries to understand Trumpism as part of a radicalization of the Republican party. "If you just study Trump in isolation, you don't really get 2024.”
Julian believes the roots of polarization, culture wars and a distrustful electorate go back to 1974. Richard Nixon and Watergate, he says, is the fault-line. “It was a rupture and ‘74 was important, not just the year in itself, but it's a culmination of many sources of friction that have been happening. Battles over Vietnam, battles over the presidency, battles over how Americans saw politics and government.”
Electorate lost trust in institutions like the government and the promise of a robust middle class. Instead, out of the dust of Watergate emerged strong centralized parties and media amplified by a strong campaign finance system that thrives on discord. After 1974, he says America remade itself and its institutions to foster division rather than to push against it.
I was interested to hear his views on single issue voters. This was something that was new to me when I covered my first US election in 2016. I’d repeatedly hear people say they’d ‘hold their nose’ and vote for Donald Trump because he would deliver a single ideological wish for them - tougher border control, or a more conservative supreme court or an anti-abortion legislation.
Many Trump voters agree he is a morally-compromised man who brings out the worst instincts in America but they’ll vote for him just because of that one, single issue. I don’t understand that thinking; to me it is like buying a basket of rotten fruit because you liked the look of one cherry. To Americans though, this is the way they roll in election time.
More often than not, the single issues are points that are not political game-changers in other countries. No other Western democracy has such an agonized divisive debates about abortion, books, guns or religion to the extent I’ve seen in America. Why?
“In the 70s at the heyday of feminism, the argument was that the personal is political.” Julian says that concept is now baked into American politics, especially when the bogey-man of Communism was vanquished at the end of the Cold War. Since the 1970’s, private and personal issues such as reproduction, gender, Christianity or what books your kids read have been hyper-politicized by both liberals and conservatives.
The ‘personal is political’ is not just played out in the bedroom but also in the kitchen with bread and butter issues. The cost of living and inflation might just be the single biggest issue that will decide this election. Immigration too. It just depends who you talk to.
Voters will vote only because of ONE of those issues. Strategically that’s what matters to the parties - finding what issue fires up a voter in a specific area. Localized pin-pointing of your own personal bugbear is how the presidency is won.
“Politicians play this stuff up. They focus on these narrow issues that are going to get segments of the electorate,” says Julian, “So you're doing slivers of voters. And so it's appealing to find these single issues that might, you know, change X number of voters in a state like Michigan, as opposed to searching for grand issues.”
I’m a little closer as to figuring out why Americans are so divided - the electoral system encourages voters to get fired up about one thing rather than the common good. Narrow interests triumph over wide commonalities. Take this basic structural fact and then add social media, AI and big data to amplify the aims of narrow interest groups and you have a divided country unable to see the bigger picture as well as a set of national leaders who don’t subscribe to coalition thinking.
One thing I don't think will change, whether Harris or Trump wins, is the division. Polarization is baked in, and here to stay.
Join me,
Robyn
