America has never been a more polarized society. Congressional bipartisan sponsorship of bills is at an all-time low, citizen hostility towards supporters of the other party has dramatically increased and the disaffected white working-class electorate is embracing an incredibly divisive brand of identity politics.

What brought us to this point? Congress used to pass more bills because of cross-party collaboration, and our society hasn’t always been ideologically and geographically fractured along party lines. Although there is no single explanatory factor, one social trend can help us greater understand this disturbing shift towards a political binary: the decline of trade unions.

Union membership has declined from 20 million in 1979 to 14.5 million in 2013, even though the labor force rose from 106 million to 155 million over the same time period. Free trade agreements like NAFTA eliminated many domestic manufacturing jobs, and manufacturing unions along with them. Additionally, the passage of right-to-work legislation in many states gutted raw membership numbers for most trade unions.

This decline in union membership matters because they are one of the few social organizations where people of all partisan stripes can meet and interact in a friendly environment governed by mutual self-interest. As famously chronicled in Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” most Americans group themselves into ideologically homogenous communities. As such, a conservative member of the working class is only likely to interact with their liberal counterpart through the workplace. But as manufacturing jobs have dried up and their accompanying trade unions have disappeared, people have fewer and fewer venues to discuss politics in a reasonable and practical way. Even small-scale, water-cooler exchanges are necessary prerequisites to the growth of social bipartisanship, and in their absence, stultifying polarization has flourished.
Important to understanding the necessity of trade unions is the idea that many citizens vote to affirm values and self-conception, not a mechanistic set of policy interests. This is why poor whites, who benefit heavily from welfare programs, still vote conservative even though the infamous Ryan Budget proposed significant cuts in entitlement spending. Though the potential de-funding of a program that impacts their material life ought to prompt a switch in party loyalty, it didn’t. The GOP’s focus on issues like civic religiosity and identity politics still resonates with their base’s sense of self. This is also why Trump’s utter lack of consistent policy platforms has not hurt him — his working class base cares more about a politician who reaffirms the grandeur of their identity than one armed with a detailed agenda of working-class friendly policies. Any attempt to un-polarize America cannot be accomplished through rational appeals to common voter preferences, but instead must involve the reconstruction of America’s trade unions and cross-partisan social organizations.

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Email Matthew Perry at [email protected].