WASHINGTON – Only the naive have ever believed that democracy is solely a noble contest over competing ideas, proposals and solutions. Emotion looms large in every human decision, including how we cast our ballots, and smart politicians have always blended appeals to the heart and the gut with their entreaties to reason.
We cherish what might be called the Lincoln-Douglas approach to politics, inspired by the 1858 debates between Honest Abe and “The Little Giant,” Stephen Douglas, when the two candidates went from place to place in Illinois arguing with great eloquence about the future of slavery. But we forget that even in those debates, emotion was often in the saddle.
For decades, political scientists have blasted away at electoral models based primarily on the idea of rational choice. In the most recent and sophisticated entry in the field, “Democracy for Realists,” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that even well-informed and politically engaged voters mostly choose candidates based on their social identities and partisan loyalties. Judging from the 2016 polls, that theory looks pretty good.
And in a brilliant article for Vox, Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation shows how Donald Trump, far from being an aberration from the trajectory of Republican politics, is instead “a historical culmination” of a strategy rooted in racial feeling.
In an increasingly non-white country in which the younger and better educated are relatively liberal on matters of diversity, Trump has divided voters on race and immigration in a way that worked in the Republican primaries but is failing him with the broader electorate.