Morris Fiorina’s new book is brisk, timely, and insightful. Consisting mainly of essays originally published on the Website of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, it revisits the themes of partisan sorting and polarization explored in the author’s previous work (Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 2004) and considers their implications for our understanding of politics in the era of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Grounded in academic scholarship yet accessible and engaging, Unstable Majorities should interest scholars in other fields and even layreaders as much it does specialists on American politics. I therefore recommend it to a wide audience, ranging from college freshmen to Ph.D. students to professors of political science.
As its preface (p. xvi) explains, the goal of this book is to summarize and synthesize research published in the wake of Culture War, to rebut various lingering “misunderstandings” related to that work, and to comment on the contemporary political landscape. Taken as a whole, the book is less a coherent argument than it is a collection of essays linked by a common theme (partisan sorting) and a common sensibility (antielitism). To the extent that it has a single thesis, it is that many of the most salient features of contemporary U.S. politics—the consistency of voters’ choices across offices and elections, mass disaffection from the parties, the appeal of populist insurgents, the tendency of parties to “overreach” once in office—are the consequence of the growing alignment between partisanship and ideology over the past half century (pp. 15–16). Echoing a long-standing Fiorinian theme, Unstable Majorities attributes these (largely negative) developments not to the shifting attitudes of ordinary citizens but to changes in the choices that elites offer them. In the end, then, Fiorina blames our current predicament primarily on the “political class” of politicians and journalists, and more generally on the smug “protected” who populate America’s liberal, cosmopolitan enclaves—including, one suspects, many of his fellow academics (pp. 204, 207).
The first nine chapters, originally composed in the months preceding the 2016 presidential election, use the ideas developed in Culture War as a lens for analyzing the Obama years and the Clinton–Trump campaign. Chapters 2 and 3 recapitulate Fiorina’s argument that ordinary Americans, unlike elites, have not polarized but, rather, have sorted into the ideologically “correct” party. Chapter 4 discusses the (mostly negative) consequences of partisan polarization and sorting, such as incivility and gridlock, and Chapter 5 considers the concomitant tendency for Democrats and Republicans to “overreach” once they achieve control of government (thus triggering a predictable counterreaction from voters). Chapter 6, disputing the common decision to classify partisan “leaners” as closet partisans, interprets the rise of Independents as a sign of the public’s dissatisfaction with the parties. Chapter 7 considers the “renationalization” of congressional elections, arguing that this return to the historical norm reflects changes in the electoral choices presented to voters by the parties, rather than changes in voters’ attitudes.
The following two chapters provide comparative and historical context for contemporary American politics. In Chapter 8, the author reviews the ambiguous literature on polarization and populism in European politics, ultimately finding few transportable lessons for the U.S. case other than that elite partisan polarization is not an inevitable feature of contemporary politics. Chapter 9 comes to firmer conclusions, highlighting the multiple parallels (some of which, such as “population movement” and “crony capitalism,” are somewhat forced in my view) between the early twenty-first century and the late nineteenth, which Fiorina labels as “the Era of Indecision” for its partisan instability and gridlock.
The final three chapters, written in early 2017, are Fiorina’s effort to make sense of the 2016 election and the first days of the Trump administration. Chapter 10 presents his brief views on a number of election-related controversies, including whether Trump’s victory indicated a major shift in public attitudes (not really), how someone as disliked as Trump could have won (because public antipathy toward Clinton was almost as severe), and whether the media and various campaign events affected the outcome (not much, except perhaps for public backlash against Trump’s overwhelmingly negative coverage in the mainstream media). Understandably, given the recentness of events covered, there is little academic scholarship for Fiorina to draw on in supporting these arguments, though they are, of course, grounded in a lifetime of political observation and research. Chapter 11 continues in a similar vein, considering the role that culture, class, and identity played in the 2016 election. Mostly downplaying the importance of race, gender, and ethnicity (and taking a swipe at the “rising American electorate” thesis along the way), the author instead emphasizes white working-class resentment against the corruption and impunity of economic elites and the condescension of cultural ones.
Chapter 12 concludes with Fiorina’s thoughts on the likely trajectory of the Trump administration. Though hardly a Trump fan, he strikes a less alarmist tone than many commentators, academic and otherwise. The nation has been through worse and survived, he reminds us, and he reiterates that Trump’s victory does not signal the moral bankruptcy of the American people. “Elites are the problem,” Fiorina concludes, not ordinary Americans (p. 218).
In keeping with its broad intended audience, the book seems primarily concerned with engaging with the arguments of popular commentators such as Thomas Frank, Matt Bai, and Peggy Noonan rather than of fellow academics. The main political scientist to receive much critical engagement is Alan Abramowitz (e.g., The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy, 2010), with whom Fiorina has enjoyed a long-running argument over whether the American public has truly polarized (Abramowitz’s position) or merely sorted (Fiorina’s). This is not to say that Unstable Majorities is unmoored from academic scholarship. While it presents little original research, the first nine chapters in particular provide a sure-footed tour of recent scholarship on American politics, and I suspect that professors and Ph.D. students alike will find the author’s gloss on this literature edifying and provocative.
Although Unstable Majorities is at all points smart and reasonable, some of its claims are less compelling than others. I have no quarrel with Fiorina’s well-known argument for sorting rather than polarization, but I think that he underplays the public’s role in sustaining or even exacerbating elite polarization. As Gary Jacobson (“The Electoral Origins of Polarized Politics: Evidence From the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study,” American Behavioral Scientist 56(12), 2010) argues, mass-level sorting has increased the ideological homogeneity of the primary electorates within each party, thus (through both electoral incentives and replacement) fostering extremism among each party’s nominees. (See also Devin Caughey, James Dunham, and Christopher Warshaw, “The Ideological Nationalization of Partisan Subconstituencies in the American States,” Public Choice 176(1-2), 2018).
In its depiction of a moderate citizenry victimized by polarized elites, Unstable Majorities also neglects recent research showing that ordinary Americans are much more willing to endorse extreme issue positions than their representatives are (Douglas J. Ahler and David E. Broockman, “The Delegate Paradox: Why Polarized Politicians Can Represent Citizens Best,” Journal of Politics 80(4), 2018). Finally, though the debate over the sources of Trump’s support is far from settled, Fiorina’s emphasis on economic class is hard to square with the evidence for the primacy of racial and especially immigration attitudes in explaining voters’ shifts toward Trump (e.g., John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, “The 2016 U.S. Election: How Trump Lost and Won,” Journal of Democracy 28(2), 2017).
These quibbles notwithstanding, my overall assessment of the book is extremely positive. Indeed, it has few peers as a brief but wide-ranging overview of contemporary American politics. As such, it is an invaluable contribution to our discipline’s collective effort to make sense of the vexing and perplexing political landscape in which we find ourselves.
