Is the GOP Solely Responsible for Political Polarization?

I talk with 'Shameless' author Brian Tyler Cohen, who blames Republicans and a complicit media for our mucked-up politics.

I recently interviewed Brian Tyler Cohen for Open To Debate, a wonderful nonprofit devoted to ‘bringing multiple viewpoints together for a constructive, balanced, respectful exchange of ideas.’

Brian is an immensely popular YouTuber, MSNBC contributor, and author who comes from the progressive Democratic left. At just 35 years old, he's amassed over 3 million subscribers at YouTube and has sat down with everyone from Joe Biden to Al Franken to AOC to Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris. Whether you agree with his politics or not, Brian is representative of a rising generation of political commentators and activists who are using new forms of media to build an audience and try to affect elections and cultural battles.

We talked about political polarization, the upcoming election, and his new book Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy. His argument is that Republicans and a GOP-friendly media (not just Fox News but The New York Times and outlets that conservatives denounce on an hourly basis!) are the main forces driving legislative and political dysfunction over the past several decades.

I don't agree with that--I think there's plenty of blame to go around, which helps explain why neither party can maintain a majority for more than an election cycle or two. I agree with Stanford’s Morris P. Fiorina, who says the historically unique “unstable majorities” we’ve experienced this century accurately reflect both the lack of national consensus on what citizens want the government to do and the major parties’ inability to move toward the center the minute they gain legislative control. On a certain level, I find it comforting when a party takes control of the White House and Congress and then loses control of the legislature over the next election or two. Inevitably, parties lose control because of the laws they pass! That’s democracy, right? And it’s worth noting that voter turnout is way up this century, especially in presidential election cycles. In 2000, just 50.3 percent of the voting-age population showed up at the polls. In 2020, 61.5 percent did. Our current world may just be what real democracy looks like.

If the two major parties have been shrinking compared to independents (and they have), the reputation of the legacy media has been too. Per Gallup, the percentage of us with a “great deal” of confidence in TV news and newspapers is in the single digits (the same is true of Congress, by the way). Who can blame us, right? At the very least, the speed with which the legacy press and leading Democrats went from asserting Joe Biden’s cognitive competency to completely throwing him under the bus can’t be blamed on Republicans.

Which isn’t to say that the Brian isn’t on to something when he dumps on Republican politicians and GOP-friendly cable news for fanning the flames of discord. It’s worth recalling, as he does, the ways in which the mostly forgotten Newt Gingrich transformed how politics got done in the ‘90s and ushered in an era where magazines and members of Congress like Bob Dornan spent time analyzing the value of Bill Clinton’s deductions for giving away old underwear.

Despite—or perhaps because of—our differences, I enjoyed talking with Brian. Here’s a link to the YouTube version of our conversation. Below that are links to various podcast versions of it too. You may also catch this on your local NPR affiliates—Open To Debate (which used to be called Intelligence Squared US) gets distributed throughout the country that way.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.