Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
the range, scope, and content of partisan politics in political science.
The impact of family, how and in what ways it shapes legislators’ economic preferences, is more observable through qualitative discourse analysis, not roll call analysis, that examines patterns in the content of how legislators talk about, illustrate, and justify their policy responses. By paying attention to family in legislative discourse, this examination unearths the latent layers that underpin the very differences in legislators’ preferences of economy that are the current focus of prevailing political science literature. American party development is thus much more than a story of dueling ideals of state and its role in the economy; it is also, at its core, a competition between dual political ideals of family.15
Differing family ideals, that is, divergences over the nature, function, and purpose of family—what families are for and how they should raise their children—inextricably contain alternative worldviews of economy, society, and state, as captured by Figure 1.16
As depicted in Figure 1, conservative economic and social policy goals, such as maintaining an unregulated economy, lowering taxes, and sustaining free enterprise and individual market-based freedoms, pivot on a conception of family as geared to produce self-reliance (self-reliant adults), all of which form intertwined parts of a conservative socioeconomic vision that seeks to conserve, not upend, existing social arrangements. The book reveals that these conservative goals have largely privileged a valuational political ideal of family (Soul ideal), unmoored from economic conditions, where values, not income, determine family strength. In contrast, the liberal expansive state ideal that underlies the set of liberal economic and social policy beliefs, such as faith in regulated economies, broader distribution of rights and burdens, and greater social equality, hinges on a liberal conception of family as rearing self-nurturing adults, which subordinates self-reliance to personal fulfillment; these ideals form imbricated parts of a more progressive socioeconomic vision that aims to improve existing social arrangements. As the following examination finds, these liberal policy goals highlight, more or less consistently, a Hearth family view that conceives of economic well-being as fundamental to family cohesion, nurturing, and strength, wherein family values are determined by economic condition and are not separable from it.
Figure 1. Political ideologies of family, state, and economy. Creative credit: David McCandless and Stefanie Posavec // v1.0//, October 2009.
The two family-centered worldviews are found to be poles of a continuum upon which Democratic and Republican Party competition at the level of elites has long occurred. In their quest for electoral success, the parties at various times cluster toward one family framework over the other, upholding differing visions of state and its nexus with economy and society. Hearth and Soul political ideals, empirically assembled in this book, are summarized in Table 1.
Through the demonstration of this imbricated framework, the book also revises the conventional understanding of what constitutes party ideology. In contrast to conventional treatments, where party ideology is seen as a coherent constellation of ideas, rhetorical tools, or abstract principles devised for electoral gain and unconnected to material structures or to lived practice and cultural experience,17 here, party ideology is shown as grounded in the family lives and the material and cultural realities of real-life Americans.18 The book does this by focusing on real-life family stories recounted by congressional members during committee hearings to glean which family practices and experiences have and have not been politically valued and highlighted by legislators in their policy discussions as positive or negative family images.19 By analyzing family and policy variables such as the socioeconomic characteristics of these families, the regional patterns of where they reside, and the policies they are used to illustrate, legislators’ partisanship and family (policy) ideals are found to be linked to distinct regional family patterns and characteristics, suggesting that a party’s aggregate family ideology and its social policy agenda are grounded in (or crafted upon) the lived family experiences of dominant factions within their base. The book thus argues that party ideology is the product of not only top-down but also bottom-up forces, reflecting a party’s internal dynamics as nested within the actual family lives, the materiality and culture of those they represent. In this way, it complements existing literature on party polarization that situates increased polarization in the late twentieth century within widespread social and economic changes. Much of polarization literature, however, relies heavily on statistical and quantitative macro-level data, which limits their ability to illuminate how partisan polarization among elites relates to polarization of masses. By highlighting family stories at the heart of partisan policy making, this book connects individualized narratives to coherent partisan positions, uniquely demonstrating ideas as the discursive mechanisms through which family has come to bind party competition among elites and citizens alike, in the wake of massive internal demographic change.20
Table 1. Summary of Intertwining Ideals of Family, Society, and Economy in Hearth and Soul Frameworks
| Hearth Framework | Soul Framework | |
| Political orientation | Liberal | Conservative |
| Family ideal | Materialist: economics essential to family well-being | Valuational: morality/values essential to family well-being |
| Society ideal | Existing social arrangements must be improved | Existing social arrangements must be conserved |
| Economy ideal | Redistributive: broader distribution of economic benefits | Anti-redistributive: opposed to redistribution of economic benefits |
Finally, the family-centered investigation evokes an alternative interpretation of a specific era in party development: the conservative ascendance in the late twentieth century. Similar to recent parties’ literature on conservatism in APD, this investigation finds that conservatives played a more influential role in shaping partisan policy developments across the twentieth century, more than that which is often depicted in accounts that highlight only programmatic expansion.21 This may be in part because family is the subject of examination here, as well because of how this book defines conservatives. Admittedly hard to define,22 conservatives in the following pages are characterized first and foremost as “traditionalists” akin to Rogers Smith’s proponents of the “ascriptive tradition” (i.e., defenders of prevailing social arrangements as opposed to upholders of the “liberal tradition” who seek to broaden political and economic rights). To this extent, conservatives are sometimes “constitutional traditionalists,” advocating a traditionalist view of the Constitution, and at other times they may also include libertarians, defending liberty (of various stripes) above equality.23 In every instance, however, conservatives here seek to conserve prevailing, often gendered and racial, social arrangements and oppose redistribution of political and economic rights (as summarized in Table 1), sometimes invoking a positive state and, at other times, opposing it. Given their close interest in preserving traditional social arrangements, conservatives are found to display a prominent interest in family for all periods of investigation, their interest often invoked by their perception of family as the very unit of social reproduction, seen as uniquely capable of upholding prevailing social orders or upending them. Family conservatives also enduringly turn to family values to highlight their policy positions, displaying a long-lasting affinity to the Soul family approach.
While conservatives most certainly have not always been Republican, and family did not become a Republican policy focus until the 1970s, family and conservatism have had a long and significant relationship, with conservatives playing a more formative role than merely obstructing policy development. Instead, conservatives are the yin to the yang of liberals in family policy development, both reflexive, historically contingent, codependent, dialectical coalitions—neither developing without the other, even when one eclipses the other in certain periods.
Despite