Despite George Washington’s plea for “no entangling alliances” in his farewell address, foreign policy, and military and economic intervention have been a staple of U.S. partisan politics since the 18th century.
University of Oklahoma political scientist Peter Gries traces how the public’s divide on international affairs is actually rooted in much deeper ideologies in his new book The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs.
Foreign policy usually doesn’t play a major role in presidential elections (the Vietnam War in 1968 and 1972 is a notable exception), but international issues can deeply divide Main Street voters participating in primary elections – where even though their percentages are small, their political views tend to skew extremely liberal or extremely conservative. Gries says the Pentagon and the business community would love to see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified, calling it important for national security and U.S. economic interests.
“And yet, I think 35 Republican senators blocked its passage last year,” Gries says. “Why? Because their constituents, the primary voters who elected them, are very fearful of the UN. They do not trust international treaties.”
Read The Introduction To Peter Gries’ Book The Politics of American Foreign Policy
Even when foreign policy initiatives receive wide bipartisan support, like support for Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Crimea, the broader discourse is still politicized. Gries says President Obama is still slammed consistently by GOP opponents for being too soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“That is not just partisan posturing,” Gries says. “I actually think that when our senators and other elected representatives make these kinds of arguments, they’re reflecting deeper ideologies that they hold, that are actually reflective of the primary voters who elect them.”
Gries’ research showed a clear distinction that Republicans and most conservatives support the use of military force much more than liberals and Democrats, who tend to favor diplomatic solutions. But he says those averages paint too broad a portrait, with President Obama the most notable example of a group of Democrats he calls “forceful idealists.”
“He’s not one of these kids of the hippie generation who will not use force in any circumstance. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he argued that there’s evil in this world, and sometimes force is needed,” Gries says. “There were conservatives in the administration who counseled against him doing what he did in Benghazi. He went out beyond what our allies wanted to do – Britain and France – because he was concerned about a genocide, he was willing to use force.”
Gries serves as the director of OU’s Institute for U.S./China Issues, and started this entire project when his early survey work showed American attitudes about social issues like abortion fit with American attitudes about China.
“That didn’t particularly surprise me given that China’s one-child policy has gotten a lot of press,” Gries says. “But then I discovered that culture war issues like school prayer would also track onto attitudes toward China. So that got me more and more interested. Is there something deeper and ideological here?”
Take one example: communism. Much like the “forceful idealist” group Gries says President Obama falls in to, he found that the attitudes about China were rooted in Americans’ opinion on communism – with disparate groups like libertarians (who tend to not like any government, period) and Christian conservatives (who aren’t fans of atheist governments) finding common ground.
“What you find is this pattern of different kinds of liberals and conservatives sometimes disagreeing with each other, but usually agreeing,” Gries says. “And it depends on how many different kinds of liberals and conservatives agree in their disagreement, basically, that determines how strong these overall differences are between liberals and conservatives.”
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Peter Gries, welcome to World Views.
PETER GRIES: Thank you for having me.
GRILLOT: You have this very exciting new book out, The Politics of American Foreign Policy. This book explores partisanship in the United States, and how liberals and conservatives are divided over foreign affairs, foreign relations. So why write this book, Peter? Your background is in China, and we're going to get to that, but what motivated you to write this book about American foreign policy, and what divides American citizens on these issues?
GRIES: Well a bunch of things. To really sit down and write a long book, you have to be pretty motivated. So it was one of those perfect storms where there are a lot of things going on. Part of it is that although we all recognize that partisanship affects elites in Washington over domestic and international issues, there's more contention over whether that partisanship is rooted in ideology or not. And there's a long history within my discipline, political science, of downplaying ideology and arguing that the American people are not really constrained by ideology in their attitudes. That instead what really drives their thinking and their voting is just partisanship in terms of identification with a party, almost like rooting for the Red Sox. What I found in my public opinion research and my surveys, and in the research that's been done in social psychology over the last 10 years, is that actually a lot of things that appear to be purely partisan are actually rooted in deeper ideologies.
GRILLOT: So you just mentioned social psychology, and that's where I want to go next. This is obviously a work heavily influenced by the discipline of social psychology. Why, from that perspective, and I think that's what's really interesting about the book, and what you brought that's really different, is looking at ideology and partisanship from that more psychological point of view. People's backgrounds, experiences, but more than that, too, right? Tell us about the psychological impact here.
GRIES: The book is basically an exercise in applied social psychology. So a lot of the methods that are different from existing studies on the impact of public opinion on foreign policy in the United States, they really don't have that approach. So it's one thing that makes it different. The key thing, methodologically, is just that psychologists really care about measurements. That allows you to understand abstract ideas like ideologies and identities in a way that political scientists tend to be more concerned with easy-to-measure things, like did you vote for Obama or Romney? But concerned instead about other things, like sampling, that matter a lot for predicting electoral outcomes. So what I tried to do is bring together the strengths of these two different disciplines in terms of their survey methods. But I also sought to build on an interest in ideology that has emerged in psychology over the last decade or so. A lot of that gets at how ideologies are the product of nature and nurture. If we're raised in houses that are more liberal or conservative, that can shape our development of our ideologies, but there's also recent research that suggests that some of it is genetic. There's certainly research that shows that given that our brains are very plastic, that they evolve and change over time, they've actually shown that certain parts of the brain, for example, I think it's part of the amygdala that's associated with threat response, are actually slightly different in size between liberals and conservatives, reflecting the fact that conservatives tend to be more sensitive to threat. But the book is less about the causes of ideology than the consequences of ideology at the level of the American public. So this kind of goes back to a bigger policy consequence of this argument, which is basically what scholars have been saying. Elites are polarized over foreign policy, but actually Main Street is not. I think it's kind of patting oneself on the back as a scholar and a non-Beltway politician, and saying "We Americans are moderates, and it’s just our politicians who are nuts." Well, what my survey revealed, and I think other work has as well, is that Main Street is divided too. What's interesting is that because of gerrymandering, and ideological self-sorting over the last decade or so, we increasingly live in a country that is dominated by deep red and deep blue states and congressional districts. And that's the majority of elected politicians in this country. They don't have to worry about the general election. Which, in effect, means that the median voter, or the average voter in a district is irrelevant. All they care about is being reelected in the primaries within their own parties. So what you're looking at is a very small percentage of the American population that matters in the typical election. It's the 10 percent of people who show up for primaries, and those are the extreme ideologues. Then their views get translated into public policy.
GRILLOT: So I want to go back for a second to something you just said about brain function, and the biological or the genetic issues at play here. Because I want to make sure I'm clear on this. I understand measuring attitudes and beliefs and "Do I believe in equal rights for homosexuals? Do I believe in this or that?" Those kinds of ideas and beliefs that come from our background and experience and our nurturing part of our lives. But you mentioned brain function and the genetic part. Where does that come in, in terms of how the function or the structure of the brain helps us understand whether you're a liberal or a conservative? And then if that's the case, then how can you even deal with that? Isn't that another one of your conclusions? Is that these are things that are very concrete and can't be changed? Views, beliefs, attitudes, and beliefs can be changed. They may be slow to change, but they can change. But obviously brain function and this type of thing can't be changed, right?
GRIES: Well, no, I don't think that's quite right. I think what neuroscientists have discovered is that the brain is quite plastic, I guess that's the metaphor, is that it can be shaped. Not radically and quickly, but it can slowly change. But this is an aspect of the research that I'm not that familiar with, and is not that central to the book. I'm more interested in the consequences of these ideological divisions on Main Street, rather than their origins. But my understanding is that basically these differences have been shown to be actually reflected in physiological attributes. I gave the example of a certain portion of the brain actually being larger in one ideological groups - conservatives - rather than in liberals. Similar kinds of research have done things like they've measured skin conductance. That's a reflection of sweat. So they do things like they give you that puff that you get when you go to the eye doctor right in your eye, and they see how much you sweat...
GRILLOT: Yeah, the glaucoma test?
GRIES: Yeah. Those kinds of things where they startle you. Basically they've shown that conservatives have a stronger startle reflex than liberals do. That reflects a greater fearfulness about the world, or a set of beliefs that have to do with the world being a dangerous place. So to the extent that you have these kinds of deep down emotional reactions, those are then going to be reflected in your beliefs. In many ways, that's the core of psychology, the cause and effect that I have laid out there. From an economics perspective, being emotional is seen as a deviation from rationality. And that's our normal language in English. We talk about "women must be bad because they're emotional." So emotions, these things are bad. It's our Enlightenment tradition. But what psychologists have shown is that you can't be rational without emotions. And in many ways what we're doing is we're putting emotions first and saying that our gut reactions to a lot of stimuli are really what guide our beliefs, our behaviors, and we only after-the-fact, if we're bothered to, post facto rationalize and give explanations for the things that we do. So a lot of it really is about gut reactions and trying to understand how they influence attitudes and behaviors.
GRILLOT: So as you said then, elites, we all know that there's a partisan game going on there, a significant amount of division, ideologically speaking, but as you said, the general population as well, Main Street is divided. But in terms of the impact of that. We're talking about foreign affairs. Foreign affairs is not something that the general population, and the focus on Main Street, at least this is what the polls tell us, right, that this is not necessarily part of today's politics, American politics, that matter all that much to the average citizen? So you've shown that there's some division. Does that really matter, then? In terms of the consequences of that, does it really matter in terms of outcomes in foreign policy?
GRIES: Right. This is a great question. I guess when we look at the level of things like the big outcomes in American politics like presidential elections, usually foreign policy is not a major issue. Now it can be in certain contexts, such as during the Vietnam War. It played a major role. So the salience of foreign affairs in presidential elections can vary substantially. But these attitudes that the American people hold can have an impact on a whole range of issues that impact lots of different groups of Americans that is less big, and visible than presidential elections. To take a couple of recent examples, there have been several international treaties that have been up for ratification in the U.S. Senate recently. UNCLOS is the law of the sea, and that's something that our Pentagon and our business groups are passionate that we need to pass for our business interests and for our national security. And yet, I think 35 Republican senators blocked its passage last year. Why? Because their constituents, the primary voters who elected them, are very fearful of the UN. They do not trust international treaties. Or say you have someone in your family who is handicapped and they want to travel outside of the United States, or you're a veteran who has been injured in war, but you want to go to Canada or Mexico. Well, the U.S. has not ratified the UN treaty on the disabled, either, because the Republican senators are doing what their primary voters voted for them to do, which is to oppose any kind of international treaty. So these attitudes among the extreme ends of Main Street do end up shaping the behaviors, I believe, of our elected representatives, even when they're more discreet, influencing specific policy outcomes, and not necessarily the most visible thing, which is our presidential elections. In which case, it's usually only one of many variables, and usually, to be honest, not the most important.
GRILLOT: I have to ask this because it's so contemporary, but one of the issues we're facing today in foreign policy, of course, the situation in Ukraine, and Russia. And this is an issue that seems to bring together a very divided, not only Congress, but the public. Is this something that would bear witness to your argument here? That fear, if you will? Or what is it that would help us understand what might unite us in terms of our foreign policy approach?
GRIES: Well, whenever the nation is under attack, you see a rally-around-the-flag effect. That's something that's been well-documented in social psychology. So after 9/11, the whole country got together and did things that actually, later, when things calmed down, we tended to start arguing about again, such as the PATRIOT Act. This particular case, with Russia and Crimea, you may be seeing the glass as half-full, while I may be seeing it more as half-empty in the sense that I've seen a lot of partisanship on Capitol Hill, with Republicans like John McCain and others arguing that the president has been much too weak...
GRILLOT: But they had the most bipartisan vote on this issue, and support for Ukraine, than we've had ever in this Congress, right? So at least it played out in a vote, the most bipartisan vote we've had yet.
GRIES: Right, but unfortunately that tends to be the exception to the rule. And if you look at the broader discourse, I think what you've seen is that Obama has just been slammed consistently by his Republican opponents for being too soft, and arguing that people like Putin only understand one thing, which is force. And that is not just partisan posturing. I actually think that when our senators and other elected representatives make these kinds of arguments, they're reflecting deeper ideologies that they hold, that are actually reflective of the primary voters who elect them. My survey was very, very clear that Republicans and conservatives on Main Street are much more supportive of uses of military force than liberals and Democrats, who are much more supportive of diplomatic solutions to crises in foreign affairs. Now that said, those are averages that say all Republicans against all liberals. There are different groups among Democrats and Republicans. So for example, Obama himself actually fell into a cluster of Democrats that I ended up calling "forceful idealists." So he's not one of these kids of the hippie generation who will not use force in any circumstance. In fact, I would call him a kind of more in the Niebuhr tradition of Christian realism. Even in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he argued that there's evil in this world, and sometimes force is needed.
GRILLOT: And the evidence has shown that he's used...
GRIES: Exactly. Look at Benghazi. That's a very clear example. There were conservatives in the administration who counseled against him doing what he did in Benghazi. He went out beyond what our allies wanted to do - Britain and France - because he was concerned about a genocide, he was willing to use force. So even though we can make these very broad generalizations that Republicans support force more than Democrats do, within each party there are subgroups. In terms of Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they actually fell in the group of Main Street liberals that I would call "forceful idealists" who were willing to be active, go out into the world, and use force when necessary.
GRILLOT: Well, I have to end this conversation with really where I began, and that is mentioning that your main area of expertise and interest is in U.S.-China relations.
GRIES: Right.
GRILLOT: Obviously as a well-known experts on Chinese politics, tell us about how we feel about China. How is it that conservatives and liberals agree and disagree about China?
GRIES: And this is sort-of how it all started. I was interested to discover in some of my early survey research that American attitudes toward issues like abortion tracked onto their attitudes toward China. And that didn't particularly surprise me given that China's one-child policy has gotten a lot of press, and I thought maybe a lot of Americans knew about that. But then I discovered that culture war issues like school prayer would also track onto attitudes toward China. So that got me more and more interested. Is there something deeper and ideological here? And that's what eventually led me down the road to write this much broader book about how ideology divides Americans, not just on China, but on the entire world. It was basically when I discovered that no one else had written this book, and that the pollsters and the predominant scholars in American public opinion were arguing that ideology doesn't matter, that I felt I needed to write the book. In terms of China in particular, I think the data that I analyzed in the book is pretty overwhelming that the differences between liberals and conservatives on China have a lot origins, but probably the core mediator that accounts for the difference is different attitudes toward communism. That's really over-determined across different kinds of liberals and conservatives. That was a big part of my book as well, is I wanted to go beyond treating all liberals and conservatives, or all Republicans and Democrats as the same. We know that's not true from our daily lives, but the survey research hasn't really reflected that yet. In the case of attitudes toward communism, what you see is, for example, people who are high on libertarianism, they don't like communist governments simply because they're governments. They don't like the American government, they're certainly not going to like communist governments. But then they're also, for example, Christian conservatives don't like communist countries too, but it's not because of their government, it's because they're atheist. So basically what you find is this pattern of different kinds of liberals and conservatives sometimes disagreeing with each other, but usually agreeing. And it depends on how many different kinds of liberals and conservatives agree in their disagreement, basically, that determines how strong these overall differences are between liberals and conservatives. So there was a large difference between liberals and conservatives on China. But there was a massive difference on the UN. Smaller differences on other countries, but it has to do with these different, almost alliances, between different groups of liberals and conservatives lining up against one another.
GRILLOT: Fascinating work, Peter. Thank you so much for joining us today and discussing it. I appreciate it.
GRIES: Thank you for having me. I'm a big KGOU fan.
GRILLOT: Thank you so much.
