“Divided America” Looks at Political Polarization in U.S.
By Jessica Stark
Rice University political science professor Earl Black and his brother Merle, a professor of politics and government at Emory University, have written a new book that analyzes the polarization that characterizes politics in the United States today.
Titled “Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics,” (Simon & Schuster, 2007), the book describes how the regional strengths of the two main parties have split the electorate evenly and produced the current situation, in which either party could sweep the presidency and legislature or be swept aside. The result, according to the Blacks, is a type of uneasy equilibrium that accentuates the influence of specific geographic regions on the Democrats and Republicans and fuels greater ideological fervor.
The book employs survey data over the last half century to analyze the latest trends. Those trends include the dramatic shift of the South from being solidly Democratic to being the most reliable Republican political base, and the corresponding change in the Northeast — once Republican-dominated and now a Democratic stronghold. The Pacific Coast has evolved into Democratic territory in recent years, while the Mountains and Plains regions remain, for the most part, Republican. That leaves the Midwest as the battleground where the two parties wage a continuing struggle for supremacy.