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Time English (United States) Language 2 Action

00:00

Maybe you’ve noticed:

00:01

The echo chambers are loud.

00:04

The divisions, wide.

00:06

Our Fox News dads and our MSNBC moms

00:09

may as well be living in different dimensions.

00:12

And our majestic eagle friend is looking…

00:14

way less majestic than when we last saw him.

00:17

You okay there, Baldy?

00:18

Stop picking at your feathers, you’re only gonna make it worse.

00:22

So, how did we get here, screaming at each other across

00:26

an ever-growing cavernous divide?

00:28

And what does that mean for the fate of this country?

00:32

Hi! I'm Kousha Navidar, this is Crash Course,

00:34

and we’re answering

00:35

Big Questions on U.S. Government.

00:38

[THEME MUSIC]

00:42

While it’s true that the media

00:44

we consume contributes greatly

00:46

to our super-polarized political culture,

00:49

To understand the full scope

00:51

of what’s going on,

00:52

we have to take an even wider view,

00:54

because this thing we’ve got going on

00:56

goes back a long time.

00:58

For decades, there’s been a widening divide between

01:01

the two major political parties in terms of political ideology –

01:05

where people fall on the spectrum of beliefs

01:07

about how society should work.

01:09

Very simply,

01:10

from left to right,

01:11

liberal to conservative.

01:13

And when we say liberal and conservative,

01:16

we’re not actually talking about Democrats and Republicans.

01:19

At least, not yet.

01:20

Liberal really just means

01:22

falling on the left side of our political spectrum.

01:25

These folks tend to support

01:26

more government involvement in people’s lives.

01:28

Conservatives, on the right side of the spectrum,

01:31

want the government to conserve the status quo,

01:35

which usually means less intervention both socially

01:38

and economically.

01:39

So, for example, a liberal person

01:41

would probably support government-funded healthcare,

01:44

while a conservative person

01:46

might think that’s something better left to private companies.

01:49

In a centrist political culture, most voters hold moderate views,

01:53

falling somewhere between liberal and conservative.

01:56

Sure, you’ve got your fair share of leftists and right-wingers,

01:59

but the largest cluster of voters are hanging out in the middle.

02:03

And in an election, they could swing either way.

02:06

But in a culture of political polarization, like ours,

02:10

voters are camped out

02:11

farther away from each other in their views.

02:14

These days, we tend to think of the political spectrum

02:17

as falling along party lines,

02:19

with “liberal” meaning the same thing as “Democrat”

02:21

and “conservative” meaning the same thing as “Republican”

02:24

– with a vast, seemingly uncrossable canyon between them.

02:28

But the left-right divide between the parties wasn’t

02:31

always this clear-cut.

02:33

So what happened?

02:34

To help explain this,

02:35

let’s head over to my colleague, historian Buff.

02:39

Just Buff. That’s his whole name.

02:42

[BUFF] Hi there, Kousha.

02:45

[KOUSHA] You are not what I was expecting.

02:48

[BUFF] What do you mean?

02:49

[KOUSHA] Don’t worry about it, Buff.

02:50

Go ahead, friend.

02:51

[BUFF] You got it, Kousha.

02:53

Well, back in the day,

02:55

political parties didn’t really mean

02:57

the same thing they do now.

02:58

There were liberals and conservatives sprinkled

03:01

throughout both parties.

03:03

I’ll give you an example.

03:04

In the wake of the Civil War,

03:06

in the period known as Reconstruction,

03:08

who do you think led the charge to expand voting

03:11

and civil rights for Black Americans?

03:13

It was liberal Republicans from New England.

03:16

And who do you think instituted Jim Crow laws

03:19

that made it harder for Black Americans

03:21

to exercise those rights?

03:23

It was conservative Southern Democrats.

03:26

In fact, the voting records of Southern Democrats

03:29

in Congress skewed significantly more conservative than their

03:33

Northern Republican brethren until well into the 20th century!

03:37

And here’s an interesting way that shows up:

03:39

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson,

03:43

himself a Democrat,

03:44

signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

03:47

The act made it illegal to discriminate

03:49

and segregate by race in public spaces,

03:52

and it generally enjoyed pretty bipartisan support in Congress.

03:56

But the folks who didn’t support it?

03:59

Most weren’t Republicans–

04:01

they were Dems from Johnson’s own party.

04:04

When white, conservative Southern Democrats saw

04:07

Democratic presidents like LBJ and his predecessor, JFK,

04:12

embracing civil rights legislation, it sent a message:

04:16

Democrats became the party

04:18

more associated with the civil rights movement.

04:21

So those conservative Democrats

04:23

steadily left the party for the Republican party

04:26

(or died out– Congress was pretty old,

04:29

even back in the 60s).

04:31

Meanwhile, those liberal Republicans decided

04:34

to fully align themselves with the party of civil rights,

04:38

and made the swap over to the Dems.

04:42

Back to you, Kousha. [bumps mic – whispers “sorry”]

04:45

[KOUSHA] Thanks, Buff.

04:47

That is just one example of how party alignment shifted

04:50

during the mid 20th century,

04:52

giving us the system we know today,

04:54

with Democrats being pretty universally liberal,

04:57

or left-leaning,

04:58

and Republicans being pretty universally conservative,

05:01

or right-leaning–

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