Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It seems to me that a sharp decrease in split-ticket voting would indicate an increase in the polarization of the electorate itself, rather than any effect produced by gerrymandering.

Good grief. Did I just write that?

The old Dixie split ticket voting (CD donk / Repub prez) is down from a high in the 60-70's of 40% to a mere 13% today -- practically random error range.

There are no more isolationists, no more protectionists, no more populists; Socialists and Commies are found only in vestigial sectarian pockets, like Gaelic speakers in Ireland. Nobody has a good word to say for unions, and indeed the union movement itself appears to be teetering at the edge of the grave. Republicans and Democrats beat the drum in rock-solid synchrony for air strikes on Iran, and vie only in the fulsomeness and fatuity of their panegyrics to Israel. The "left" cultists of Daily Kos and the "right" machiavels of the DLC disagree only about whether the Kosniks should be allowed into the party treehouse.

So what do people mean when they wag their heads gravely and deplore "polarization"? What are they referring to? I suspect it's just the shrillness of the rhetoric deployed about the sub-microscopic, Brownian differences in vocabulary and emphasis, the angstrom-scale positionings and repositionings of elected officialdom and the parties.

An academic friend of mine once observed that the intensity of struggle in a university English department was always in inverse proportion to the importance of the issue. The less consequential the stakes of victory or defeat, the more vicious and sanguinary the battle. A question of access to the Xerox machine would evoke more rancor and malice than the average fleet action.

Where politics is not really about anything except the organizational rivalry of two opportunist factions, perhaps it's necessary to keep cranking up the volume just in order to keep people's interest.

In this light, I'd think the decline of split-ticket voting has more to do with the unanimity of the parties than with anything you could really call "polarization". In the heyday of the split ticket, a significant chunk of the electorate seem to have picked a President on one set of criteria and an Congresscritter on a different set. The organizational and ideological differentiation of the parties, slight as it was even then by world standards, offered at least some opportunity for this kind of a-la-carte dining.

Nowadays, though, the parties are just "brands". They're both imperialist, globalist, statist, elitist, and corporatist -- just as Coke and Pepsi are both mostly sugar and carbonated water. With the parties, as with soft drinks, brand loyalty certainly exists, but it's based on third-order differences -- a touch of the soft pedal on gay marriage, say, or a tepid, timorous hint that it might be nice if women could decide whether to have babies or not.

Having nothing else on which to base their decisions, people make their brand choices based on these trace flavors, and having made them, there's no reason to vary the diet. Nobody drinks Coke by preference in the morning and Pepsi in the afternoon.