Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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patriotic; all are mutable and capable of change depending on the actors and contingencies of each historical period. A key motivation behind charting family political development is thus to assemble the shifting compositional elements of politicized family frameworks (their ideals of state, society, and economy) and to simultaneously trace the partisan dynamics of these elements through time—how the parties borrow from, build upon, and/or reverse each other’s elaborations from one period to the next.
This longitudinal investigation into family, as an evolving and composite partisan institution, reveals its three developmental stages across the past century. In the earliest, most amorphous, stage of the Progressive Era, the significance of family to party competition is shown as muted by prevailing constitutional boundaries between national and state legislative powers. However, even then the book demonstrates how family served to tie contrasting sectional visions of American state, economy, and society in policy, albeit in a loose, less cohesive way. In the second stage, in the midcentury post–World War II period, the investigation finds that family began to assert its presence more visibly within partisan debate, emerging for the first time as a significant national policy issue, central to the well-being of the nation. At this time, sectional differences, even more than partisanship, are found to have shaped family’s political relevance, insofar as southern Democrats constituted a powerful third bloc, separate from nonsouthern Democrats and Republicans, in advocating their ideals of family. In the final, late twentieth-century period, extending from the late 1970s and arguably into our own, the book demonstrates family as crystallized into a central polarizing issue between the two parties, acting as a vital force to guide and shape Republican and Democratic divisions over policy and electoral constituencies.
In an observable sense, family has thus progressively increased its impact on American party politics, ultimately emerging as a lightning rod between the two political parties. However, insofar as family binds together ideals of state, society, and economy, and these ideals have varied across geographical regions and often parties, it is more useful to envision the political relevance of family in a far more durable way. This is best understood by way of a loose chemistry analogy: at a visceral level, water appears progressively “weighty” when transformed from a gaseous, to a liquid, and then to a solid state, yet its compositional elements (hydrogen and oxygen) remain in all three states. Similarly, although the form (nebulous then forming and finally crystallized) by which family has impacted party development has altered considerably and progressively, its ideational components (and political function) have remained the same. Through the three periods of analysis, the book reveals that family has served as the means by which political groups have reproduced ideologies of state, society, and economy as also race and gender. In this sense, regardless of its historically contingent electoral or policy salience, family remains integral and indispensable to the study of American political development.
The book thus makes two primary theoretical claims regarding the importance of families to American politics: the first asserts that family shapes party competition in important and overlooked ways, necessitating a fresh look at the conceptual understanding of party ideology and providing an alternative explanation for the late twentieth-century conservative ascendance; the second elevates family as central to the study of American political development (APD) and, in so doing, speaks more broadly to the significance of ideational political change. The following sections discuss each of the two claims in turn and how each contributes and/or modifies existing literature.
Family and Party Competition in American Politics
There is now a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the importance of family to American politics.3 Several works demonstrate the significance of family as a political institution, underlying and driving debates over morality, culture, and society.4 Political scientists also document the impact of family and parenthood on voting behavior, political beliefs, and public opinion,5 and recent works suggest motherhood, in particular, as an important frame for organizing political participation and influencing political attitudes.6 In the field of public policy, Patricia Strach demonstrates three ways by which family directly shapes policy: as a criterion of eligibility for goods and services, as an administrator that distributes goods and services to its members, and as a normative ideal to gain support for a policy position. She asserts the political significance of family ideals, a central focus of this book, stating that policy makers “hold and incorporate into policy very real and concrete assumptions about what constitutes a family, what roles members of families may be expected to perform, and what families can expect from the state.”7
The political significance of family political ideals or ideational frames is also central to works by historians Robert Self, Rebecca Edwards, and cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Collectively, the authors demonstrate that competing family ideals shape policy and political ideologies through a variety of mechanisms: (a) they serve as underlying assumptions or cognitive frames consciously or unconsciously invoked by parties and policy makers when crafting policy (Lakoff), (b) they act as rhetorical tools/justifications purposively used to gain support for policy positions (Edwards), or (c) they form “political projects” or policy objects actively pursued by dominant political coalitions (Self).8
Despite the growing prominence of family in public opinion and political behavior literature and, more recently, in APD work, family remains overlooked in American politics scholarship on parties. In parties’ literature, partisanship is conceptualized and measured narrowly—as Democratic and Republican ideological and policy divergence over the economy,9 such that American party competition is understood as operating along a liberal-conservative dimension,10 where liberalism implies an ideology of an expansionist state, positively intervening into the economy for redistributive purposes, and conservatism a negative state philosophy, privileging free enterprise and market-based individualism. Typically, the two political parties, particularly at the level of elites (legislators), are thus viewed as falling on either side of the liberal-conservative divide, and the history of party competition is described in terms of their varying support for a liberal or conservative economic ideology. For instance, Larry Bartels, in demonstrating the continued class bias among voters contrary to accounts that privilege the importance of moral or cultural issues, claims, “Economic issues continue to be of paramount importance in contemporary American politics as they have been for most of the past 150 years.”11 Even among works on political parties that do demonstrate that American party politics also involve struggles over social, racial, and cultural ideologies,12 there too, none analyze the significance of family, in particular, as shaping partisan alignments.
This book aims to do just that. It contributes to the American politics literature on political parties by connecting party development to family, demonstrating the impact of family on ideological divergence and political party competition. It argues that family has been at the root of partisan divisions over economics and culture and challenges the existing artificiality of the economics-culture dichotomy by uncovering deep interconnections between political ideologies of state, economy, and family.13 In this way, it modifies the underlying framework or premise for charting the development of liberalism, conservatism, and their association with the two parties, particularly at the elite level but as nested in mass-level demographic and cultural change. For instance, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s seminal D-NOMINATE and DW-NOMINATE models highlight economic ideological differences between liberals and conservatives in Congress, for and against economic redistribution, as the one enduring dimension that explains congressional roll call voting from 1789 to the end of the twentieth century. This book suggests that the focus on liberal and conservative economic ideologies obscures the important role of family ideological divergences, which shape that very economic division in the first place. Far from a separable “cultural” issue, distinct and subordinate to economics, whose presence may be validated only as an alternative dimension, family instead maps onto views for and against economic intervention, often serving as the very justification for or against redistribution. As others have argued, albeit from the perspective of race, “political science accounts stressing redistributive issues are not wrong, but they do not capture the range of goals and members in the modern (party) alliances.”14 By demonstrating the claim that family shapes party competition even on issues of redistribution, as also