A Contrast in Polarization

In recent years, political polarization in the United States has escalated to unprecedented levels. Take Congress, for example. As Princeton Professor Francis E. Lee explains in her Insecure Majorities, “for much of the twentieth century there was little contest for majority party control of the House or the Senate…it was conventionally understood that Republicans stood at a competitive disadvantage in the contest for control of national governing institutions.”¹ However, since then, the Republican Party has taken strong steps forward and emerged as a competitive foe to the Democrats. In fact, following the 2024 election, Republicans now hold a majority of seats in both the House and Senate.

Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty also uphold Lee’s claims in their book chapter titled “Causes and Consequences of Polarization.” According to the two, there has been a “steady and steep increase in polarization of both the House and Senate”² over the past 40 years. They conclude that it is extremely unlikely for a reversal or reduction of polarization to happen, which means gridlock will continue to be an issue within Congress.

But, in examining the history of the Democratic and Republican parties, one finds that the polarization that has intensified in the United States now is a very different kind of polarization than that of the past.

History of the Democrats

I recently attended a talk at Wake Forest University where one of the speakers, Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin, discussed the history of the Democratic Party. The old Democratic Party, going back to when it was founded in the mid-19th century, found its base by campaigning as America’s anti-institutional, pro-labor party. Democrats stood for individual rights and state sovereignty, but were originally limited to white men. As time went on, the party began to expand and become more inclusive. In the 1920s, the party struggled electorally, but activists like Eleanor Roosevelt helped expand political participation into the New Deal era. By the end of the Second World War, the party was a coalition of many groups. Still, they were able to recenter around advocating for those most negatively impacted by the Great Depression. They also took on the role of the Party of Civil Rights as that movement emerged in the mid-20th century. As this happened, and the party grew its base, it also began to lose those who originally had made the party: working-class white people.

History of the Republicans

The other speaker, Vanderbilt History Professor Nicole Hemmer, discussed the Republican Party. Hemmer focused on the changing of the party between 1964 and 1980. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the Republicans were directionless. Seeing the Democrats who took a firm stance in supporting the movement, Richard Nixon and Alabama Governor George Wallace garnered support from white pro-segregation southerners. This base was upset with the Democratic Party’s siding with the movement and felt like their interests were being directly opposed. Nixon’s plan to switch the party of this specific demographic was called the “Southern Strategy.”

According to Gene Zubovich, many Christian Evangelicals “framed human rights in the same way as other conservative constituencies did: as anticommunist, antisecular, focused on religious freedom, and concerned about Christian persecution.”³ The Evangelicals were a major target of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, as tons of them were poorer whites now fed up with the Democratic Party. From this point on, the party decided to take both a conservative and populist approach, which led directly to the Reagan administration. After two presidencies with which the public was unsatisfied (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter), Reagan was elected into office, and he immediately transformed the economic policy ideals of the Republican Party. Reagan was able to take contradictory elements that various Americans cared about and blend them. He appealed to the individualist, capitalist, and conservative successfully, and it worked. Reagan also began the rhetoric criticizing Democrats for not being the “America first” party, a claim that continues to be a point of contention between the two parties today.

The Parties During the Civil Rights Movement

Polarization today is not the same as it was in the past. During the 1960s, there was significant bipartisanship in the United States, but it was a different kind of bipartisanship. In light of the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Democratic Party aligned itself with the movement, while the Republican Party aligned itself with the opposition. According to Rory McVeigh, David Cunningham, and Justin Farrell, it was KKK activism that “raised the salience of conflicting interests in the civil rights struggle and exacerbated deep divisions among community members in local settings.”⁴ The authors found that the Klan was the driving force in Southern realignment. Counties where the Klan was spreading white nationalist sentiment experienced increases in voting Republican. To this day, those counties still vote Republican more than counties where the Klan was not active. Of course, during this period, there was a divide in issues over race that mainly caused voting preferences to shift. In fact, Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson was allegedly quoted as saying, “We have lost the South for a generation” in 1964 after he signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

Looking at the state of the United States today, Johnson was correct. In 2024, the southern states overwhelmingly voted for Republican nominee Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign through the Make America Great Again movement appealed to this same base of working-class white people who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party following the Civil Rights Movement. Though perhaps not in the South, Katherine Cramer describes her experience talking with working-class, white citizens in a small Wisconsin town. She learned that rural areas foster resentment for urban areas because they receive more attention and resources, while rural communities are neglected by elites.⁵ Cramer’s findings are crucial to the understanding of Trump’s victory in 2016 and now 2024, as this feeling of being ignored by elites is something that Trump was able to leverage for support.

Economics in the Appalachian Valley

John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley - Revisited explores Appalachia – an area full of small, rural towns that voted for Trump overwhelmingly. Gaventa illuminates how “patterns of desperate poverty and inequality persist”⁶ in the rural area. Poverty rates in the four counties that cut across the Appalachian Valley range from 22% to 38%, while the national average is 15%. The counties were also hurt by being former coal-mining regions, as jobs in mining have largely gone away and been replaced by technologies that offer few jobs while devastating the environment. Because of this, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was particularly appealing to these people. There used to be a better America that the rural counties had seen. Trump promised to restore economic prosperity to these communities, specifically in 2016, when part of his campaign was an emphasis on bringing back coal mining as a big part of the American market. But, even after he was elected president and did nothing to revitalize the industry, his support in Appalachia remained high. It was more about the principle of having someone finally communicate their needs, and not neglecting them completely, that caused the change.

The Right and Education

Apart from financial problems, Appalachia faces educational problems: “Education levels are low, and while high-school graduation rates have improved, the number of college graduates is only some 40% of the national average.”⁷ This is yet another contributing factor to Trump’s ability to win over this crowd. Part of the “elite” crowd includes university-educated people and professors. Many members of the MAGA movement have become increasingly critical of school and university curricula, claiming that they are indoctrinating people to join the left. The late Political activist Charlie Kirk, a huge champion of Trump in both 2016 and 2024, wrote a book titled The College Scam: How American Universities are Bankrupting and Brainwashing the Future of America’s Youth. Kirk argues that professors at universities are teaching students progressive agendas without including conservative perspectives.⁸ Kirk’s rhetoric is a direct attempt to appeal to communities like those in the Appalachian Valley, which see lower levels of educational attainment and income. In a 2024 piece by Frederick Hess, Michael Q. McShane, and Ruy Texeira titled The Party of Education in 2024, the three comment on this, stating how “as it becomes more of a working-class party, the GOP has ever less reason to defer to the cultural pieties of education elites and ever more cause to insist that early childhood and higher education be accessible, affordable, cost-effective, and attuned to workforce realities.”⁹ These conservative politicians and activists have shifted their focus to attacking the current education system because of how fed up the working-class white population is with the systems in place.

Trump Our Savior

In Gaventa’s chapter, he says that “much of rural America has also become more like this region (Appalachia), what I and others have called the Appalachianization of America.”¹⁰ As much of America becomes more similar to Appalachia, they become more likely to blame their lack of education and economic prosperity on the elites who neglect their communities. In turn, many voters have turned to Trump because he’s promised to represent their ideals while in office.

Gerlinde Groitl’s 2017 piece “Donald Trump: A Populist in the White House” explores Trump’s appeal to these groups. Groitl explains how, while in 1960 about 80% of the population was white, that number has dropped to about 65% as of 2015. “Particularly among whites and – most importantly – older white men, there is a vague fear of and defensive attitude towards this development. This may also be due to the fact that white men have been losing influence since the 1960s.”¹¹

While it is clear that whites have been losing influence as the country has become more progressive, Trump’s appeal is not solely for the working-class white man. While the parties were polarized based on race in the 1960s, Trump has now united his supporters with an emphasis on class. The working-class evangelicals from rural areas are undoubtedly a huge base of support for Trump, but his ability to unite people over class conflict is directly displayed by the support Trump received from Latino voters in the 2024 election. An article by Gladys Gerbaud, Chase Harrison, and Khalea Robertson revealed that 42 percent of Latinos voted for Trump in this most recent election, which broke the record for the most Latino votes for a Republican presidential candidate in United States history.¹²

So, why are Latino people moving to the right? Well, an article by Maria Isabel Ayala titled The State of Research in Latino Academic Attainment begins by stating that “Latinos have lower median incomes and higher poverty rates than Asians and whites.” She also explains that there is a “disparity that exists in college enrollment and completion rates, particularly between Latinos and whites.”¹³ When this is considered, it makes sense that Trump appeals to the Latino population. When looking at economics and education, Latino communities aren’t significantly different from the communities in rural Appalachia. By appealing to those groups, Trump was able to substantially win over the Latino crowd as well.

Conclusion

All of this is to say that while the Democratic and Republican parties may have been significantly polarized in the 1960s, and are still significantly polarized today, the cause of that polarization has shifted. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement set the two parties head-to-head over the conflict of race. The Democratic Party, which in previous years had stood as just the party of the working class, became the party of Civil Rights, fighting for the rights of Black Americans. While many Northern Democrats supported this, Southern Democrats both felt abandoned by the party and actively supported opposition to the Civil Rights Act being passed. In response, the Republican Party swooped to capture the vote of rural Southern Democrats, turning it into a bipartisan battle over race.

But today, things are different. As the Republican Party has adopted the Make America Great Again movement, placing Trump at the forefront of the party, working-class Americans have begun to associate him with economic prosperity. Both in 2016 and 2024, many Americans were feeling frustrated with the elites who were controlling key systems. Trump was able to capitalize on these frustrations by appealing to the groups who felt completely neglected.

In the 1960s, Polarization was substantially influenced by racial differences. Today, polarization is substantially influenced by class differences.

References

Frances E. Lee, Insecure Majorities, University of Chicago Press, (2016), 18. ↩︎
Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization,” Solutions to Political Polarization in America, Cambridge, (2015), 21. ↩︎
Gene Zubovich, “Christianity, Human Rights, and American Political Polarization,” Cambridge University Press, 69-73. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-american-history/article/christianity-human-rights-and-american-political-polarization/FC196B1D4B38D5C051711BF141BE2F0F ↩︎
Rory McVeigh et al., “Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome,” American Sociological Review, Vol 79(6), (2014), 1146. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280218226 ↩︎
Katherine Cramer, “The Contours of Rural Consciousness,” The Politics of Resentment, The University of Chicago Press, (2016). ↩︎
John Gaventa, “Power and Powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley - Revisited,” Authoritarian Populism in the Real World, (2021), 83. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003162353-4/power-powerlessness-appalachian-valley-revisited-john-gaventa ↩︎
Gaventa, “Power and Powerlessness,” 83. ↩︎
Charlie Kirk, The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth, Winning Team Publishing, 2022. ↩︎
Frederick Hess et al., "The Party of Education in 2024." Education Next 24, no. 2 (2024): 1. ↩︎
Gaventa, “Power and Powerlessness,” 83. ↩︎
Gerlinde Groitl, “Donald Trump: A Populist in the White House: Background and Perspectives,” Federal Academy for Security Policy, 2017, 1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep22150 ↩︎
Gladys Gerbaud et al., “How Latinos Voted in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election,” AS/COA, (2024). https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-presidential-election ↩︎
Maria Isabel Ayala, “The State of Research in Latino Academic Attainment,” Sociological Forum 27, no. 4 (2012), 1037. https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-presidential-election ↩︎