Party in the Street

Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas’s new book Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 tries to explain the puzzle of antiwar protests falling greatly after the election of Obama, who mostly continued previous war policies:

In examining war policy positions taken by candidates in the 2004 and 2008 [US presidential] elections, we find that Democratic politicians articulated more fervent antiwar positions than did politicians within the Republican Party, even though there were varying positions among politicians in both parties. Exit poll data reveal that politicians in the Democratic Party benefited during electoral contests from the support of antiwar constituencies. However, when we look at the evolution of actual war policies from the Bush to the Obama administrations, we find more continuity than change. The Obama administration shifted emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, but these shifts were still only a slight redirection of the trajectory set forth by the Bush administration. Given Obama’s continuation of many of Bush’s policies, we would have expected the antiwar movement to react with steady or increased levels of protests. Yet, antiwar protests declined during Obama’s presidency, even in the presence of policies that continued war. We argue that, in order to explain this pattern, a new perspective is needed on the relationship between parties and movements. (p.8)

On the surface, this looks like simple hypocrisy: Democratic party elites exploiting false voter beliefs that Democrats are more anti-war than Republicans. Heaney and Rojas are clear that this belief is false:

Our focus is not on why the antiwar movement failed to prevent – or to end – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We think that the answer to this question is similarly evident: Barriers to policy success for the antiwar movement may have been insurmountable from the start. In general, antiwar movements tend to be less successful in achieving their policy goals than other social movements because they challenge the security interests of state actors and, thus, receive relatively little facilitation from the state. As a result, antiwar movements rarely prevent nations from going to war. (p.7)

But Heaney and Rojas do not phrase their explanation in the language of hypocrisy. They talk instead of identity:

Political actors embrace multiple identities during their participation in politics. When these identities overlap, they have the potential both to amplify party-movement cooperation (when they reinforce one another) and to undercut party-movement cooperation (when they conflict with one another). Thus, the interplay of multiple identities helps to provide an explanation for the dynamics of the party in the street. Drawing upon scholarship in the intersectionality tradition, we hypothesize that partisan identities often trump movement identities during periods of conflict, a tendency that may lead to important identity shifts among mobilized actors. …

Antiwar activists with identities linked to the Democratic Party tended to depart from the antiwar movement earlier than did activists without Democratic identities. Further, … although Democratic Party members generally held an antiwar point of view, their mobilization for the antiwar cause usually assumed a lower priority than mobilization on many other issues, such as health care. … We reach these conclusions after controlling for alternative explanations for individuals’ behavior, such as the possibility that differences in ideology may account for activists’ opposition to war under all circumstances, as opposed to under specific conditions. (p.9)

While this is all plausible, it seems to me rather evasive on the source of the key “reinforcement” and “conflict”. The authors don’t directly say why being anti-war and Democrat reinforce each other with a Republican president, yet are in conflict with Democrat president. Yet if Democrats were actually much more anti-war than Republicans, why is there a conflict between being anti-war and Democrat with a Democrat president? And if voters thought Republicans were no more pro-war than Democrats, why is anti-war reinforced with a Republican president?

When we identify with a party, we tend to be willing to believe its idealistic descriptions of itself, even in the face of consistent and strong evidence to the contrary. We like to think we pick a party because we agree with its positions, but in fact we often change our positions when our party changes its positions, to stay loyal:

At least some members of the mass electorate switch their issue preferences to align with their partisan identification, even when that issue is highly salient to them. … “The fact that partisanship leads to changes in attitudes on issues like abortion, government provision of services, and government help for blacks for many citizens clearly runs counter to the idea that party identification is largely a summary of other evaluations.” …

What does a politician do when she or he is left behind by the party on a key issue? … Politicians are much more likely to deliberately adjust their issue positions to the party’s new stand. … Politicians who elect to leave the group … are met with great scorn by their former colleagues. (pp.77-79)

Added 8p: If they had framed their story more in terms of hypocrisy, they might have asked which media or interest groups tried to tell antiwar protesters the truth before Obama was elected, what reception they received, and why did other big media chose not to tell.

Added 9a: More evidence here that voters change positions in response to changes in which politicians are in power.