How backlash came to define American politics, and what it means for the future of public policy

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Whether we're talking about reproductive rights--

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- Abortion access is the law of the land in Ohio.

- Abortion will likely remain a driving force heading into the Twenty Twenty-Four election.

- Immigration.

- The poisoning of the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poisoned--

DAN RICHARDS: Or political candidates themselves--

- If he were to become elected president again is a campaign of retribution and anger and hate.

DAN RICHARDS: There's one word that seems able to describe more and more of our politics these days.

- The backlash was intense.

- Now facing a backlash in their home state--

- Backlash, and we're in the middle of that.

- Facing massive backlash after the bill barely passed the House. Here's ABC's David Wright.

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DAN RICHARDS: But what exactly is backlash? Why do certain policies, candidates, or movements coming from the left or the right incite such strong negative reactions and create powerful counter-movements? And why does it seem like now our politics is so defined by this political force.

The growing threat of backlash is a byproduct of dissensus and polarization. On many issues, we just don't agree as a country about the direction of policy change. That was Eric Patashnik, a political scientist at the Watson Institute and author of the book Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age.

In it, he presents a framework for understanding political backlash, why it happens, how policymakers can avoid it, and what it tells us about the state of our politics. The book is focused primarily on backlash against public policy as opposed to, say, backlash against cultural movements or individual politicians. But as you'll hear, they're all deeply intertwined.

And as Eric explains a clear theory of political backlash is crucial for effectively crafting legislation and running services and, ultimately, building a more stable and healthy politics. So, on this episode, the causes of our backlash politics today and how to make government work better, given that these forces don't appear to be going away anytime soon.

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ERIC PATASHNIK: So let's start with a definition of backlash. Here is Eric Patashnik. A backlash is a sharp adverse reaction in politics. When policymakers change existing laws or programs, they usually hope that their efforts will build political support. Backlashes happen when these policy moves instead trigger widely noticed resistance among organized groups, voters, or the general public.

And perhaps it might be helpful to just list some examples because we've sure had a lot of episodes in recent years. You can think of the backlash against the Affordable Care Act or against President Obama and the Democrats attempt to create the cap and trade program to combat climate change, the backlash against managed care plans back in the nineteen-nineties, the populist backlash against the Wall Street bailouts during the Great Recession, the Labor Union backlash against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. And, of course, more recently, we've had the backlash against lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DAN RICHARDS: And as for what causes it, Eric explains that backlash movements need three things to grow into a real political force.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Motives, means, and political opportunities. So motives-- well, motive is really does the change in the status quo give ordinary citizens or organized groups an incentive to try to counter mobilize.

And that's more likely to occur when policies impose costs on geographic groups or organized constituencies, when policies are perceived as providing benefits to other groups that are seen as undeserving in some way or when policies threaten the values or institutions to which people are strongly attached. When any of those things happen, there's at least a potential for backlash.

DAN RICHARDS: Perhaps it's a demographic of people who are going to experience higher taxes or a region of the country that's going to lose certain types of public investment. There are lots of negative ways that individuals and groups can be affected by public policy.

ERIC PATASHNIK: But that's not enough just to have a motive. There needs to be some kind of ability of a group of people to engage in politics, whether through voting or protesting or writing their member of Congress and complaining.

All of those things don't happen automatically. They take political resources. They take money. It takes knowledge of how the political process works. And so the means for counter-mobilization is also very important.

DAN RICHARDS: But even if a group is motivated and has means to organize and make their voices heard, for a backlash to really take effect, there's a third ingredient that has to be present.

ERIC PATASHNIK: And then, finally, the political opportunity structure. If there's a group that has a grievance about the direction of policy change, a key question for backlash politics is will their grievances be amplified by external actors in their political network.

DAN RICHARDS: Do other groups, other politicians, other activists see a potential backlash as having a political payoff for them?

ERIC PATASHNIK: When there are other groups that are going to join the side of the targeted constituency, that makes it much more likely that backlash is going to start building some momentum and really get attention in the public sphere. And so what I argue is that when means motives and opportunities come together, you're much more likely to have forceful counter-mobilizations.

DAN RICHARDS: Let's look at a piece of legislation and a backlash against it to see how these forces really work in practice.

ERIC PATASHNIK: The Affordable Care Act is certainly a great example.

DAN RICHARDS: The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare was President Obama's signature legislative achievement. It overhauled the US healthcare system and helped bring health insurance to millions of Americans. But before it was even passed, there were clear motives, means, and opportunities for a backlash against the law. Let's start with the motives.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Even though it did expand benefits to many people, it also imposed visible losses on groups, the most notorious of course is the individual mandate when government was basically saying, you have to get health insurance or else you're going to face a tax penalty. There was an element of coercion there.

Even though there was a good policy justification for it, for many Americans, that looked like it was trampling on their individual freedom. It looked like kind of big brother, big government. We also had efforts in the law to impose other taxes, the so-called Cadillac tax on expensive health insurance plans, the medical device tax.

The law did impose some new regulatory standards. And so, as a result, some-- what some people thought as sort of low quality health insurance plans no longer qualified. And that did lead to the cancelation of some existing health insurance plans, and that created a huge, huge firestorm.

Finally, in addition, even though the ACA did not cut Medicare directly-- in fact, it actually expanded some Medicare benefits, it did reduce reimbursements to doctors and hospitals under Medicare. And so even though there was no direct cut to Medicare, there was a lot of fear that the ACA would harm the existing Medicare program.

DAN RICHARDS: These real material changes provided the motivation needed for a backlash to start.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Health care is super personal for people. This is their personal life. And so even if a new program, a politician could argue like this is going to be better in the end. People get very skittish, and so any change makes people nervous.

DAN RICHARDS: As for the second ingredient in a successful backlash or counter-mobilization means many of the constituents affected by this law were politically organized, whether we talking about health care providers or senior citizens who could be affected by changes to Medicare, this law affected numerous groups that had political power. But what really pushed this backlash frenzy was our political environment.

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- Political opponents of President Obama and of the Democratic Party, in general, saw tremendous opportunities in fanning the flames of backlash against this bill. When one party basically says this is our signature policy move and the other party entirely says no, that makes it very likely that backlash will last because parties-- political parties are great organizations for keeping battles over legislation going.

- Those are the sort of political opportunities you were talking about there was a huge motivation in among Republicans to weaponize.

- Absolutely, it was.

- Which is exactly what President Obama's opponents did.

- All of Obamacare is immoral. All of Obamacare has resulted in human suffering.

- Angry voters filling town halls. Millions of Americans worried about losing their coverage.

- Critics have tried to press the idea that the proposed reform would lead to government-sponsored euthanasia of the elderly.

- The important thing to remember is that's just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama's. And that is Obamacare.

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DAN RICHARDS: The polarized context made it extremely powerful to keep sustaining this backlash. For President Obama's political opponents, this backlash paid off in more ways than one. First off, Republicans were able to undo or prevent the enactment of some of the policies in the Affordable Care Act.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Some of the provisions of the ACA that were most antagonizing that they viewed as the most problematic are no longer on the books,

DAN RICHARDS: But there were arguably even bigger payoffs for the Republican Party.

ERIC PATASHNIK: The backlash against the ACA especially helped the Republicans gain more than 60 seats in the Twenty Ten midterms. It was a historic blow out, one of the largest since the nineteen thirties. Republicans regained their House majority.

And so they really leveraged that backlash for direct electoral victory. And so, from the standpoint point of Republicans, you ask them, you know, was this worth it? I think they would say politically in the short term, and even for a number of years, it absolutely was.

DAN RICHARDS: It's worth saying Republicans were never able to successfully repeal the ACA. And, in fact, their efforts to do so in the following years led to its own political backlash. If you want to learn more about that story and, in general, what made Obamacare so durable in so many ways, you can read all about it in Eric's book. But what's maybe most remarkable about the story of the ACA is how, over the last 15 years, that type of counter-mobilization has become more and more common in so many different realms in our politics.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Backlash forces have expanded and diffused over time. One of the things I do in the book is I use New York Times articles about backlash episodes since the nineteen sixties. And my research assistants and I combed through the back pages of the times and developed a database of more than two thousand articles about backlash episodes since the '60s.

And what we found was, in the nineteen sixties, backlash forces were incredibly powerful. I mean, this was a moment when the country was for sure dealing with powerful backlash to the civil rights movement to the Civil Rights Act of Nineteen Sixty-Four, voting Rights Act. But backlash was largely concentrated in the civil rights arena.

I don't know that we're having the same level of intensity of backlash today in more recent decades as then, but what has changed is that it's diffused, and so now we're seeing backlash forces arise in almost every domestic policy arena from education, environment, immigration, trade, and others.

And so one of the things I try to do in the book is understand this. Why is it that backlash has become such a common feature of our politics over the last several decades? And I think that there are three factors.

First of all, polarization. The two parties today-- Republicans and Democrats-- are very far apart. It's not the case that we have no bipartisan law making anymore. That's false. We still do, but the two parties have drifted apart.

And so centrists and moderates have kind of disappeared from both parties, and polarization has given an incentive to party leaders to use backlash-- mobilizing backlash against the proposals of their opponents as a way to rally their own bases, gin up their bases, and also direct attention away from the fissures within their own parties.

DAN RICHARDS: But it's not just polarization that has led to this spread of backlash politics. There have also been social and cultural transformations within our country over the last few decades that have primed many Americans for this type of politics.

ERIC PATASHNIK: I think, particularly for young people today-- college students, people don't quite realize how much American society has changed in recent decades. In my own view largely for the better, but these have been dramatic changes. Our population is much more diverse due to immigration-- more racially diverse.

We have seen growing acceptance of overall gay rights of changes in gender roles, all sorts of changes. Many Americans support these changes. Public opinion has moved left on a variety of social issues, but these changes have also been disorienting for some Americans, particularly white Christians, less college educated from more rural communities, those that believe in more traditional norms about gender, about family, about religion, our society has become much more secular. And so as a result of these changes in society, there are a lot of Americans who, as one author put it, feel increasingly like strangers in their own country.

DAN RICHARDS: A third reason we're seeing a backlash and mobilization against laws everywhere we look-- simply put, over the last century, our government has gotten bigger.

ERIC PATASHNIK: As federal government has taken on this greater responsibility, intervening in areas that previously were left to the private sector or civil society or, in some cases, local governments, it's pulled more and more groups into the polity. And some of those groups are not supportive constituency. Some of them are backlashing groups.

DAN RICHARDS: So we've looked at a lot of the causes of backlash and the causes for its sort of spread in our society lately, and I want to turn now to how backlash relates and interacts with other parts of our politics. So maybe to start, you write how policy backlash is not inherently a conservative movement. It's a force that happens across the political spectrum, but that it is perhaps more inclined to be used by conservatives. Why is that?

ERIC PATASHNIK: Yeah, so I think when people think of backlash, they normally think of reactionary movement, white backlash to civil rights, and certainly empirically. It is true most backlash comes from the right, and there's a good reason for this. Most changes are attempted changes in the policy status quo are coming from the left.

In general, when we see public policy changing, it often involves expanding government's role in some area or increasing spending. It's rare that we're eliminating programs. It's rare that we're scaling back entirely government's existing responsibilities. And so when there are groups that are upset with changes in the status quo, it's more likely to be from the right. But backlash per se is not inherently a conservative or a progressive phenomenon.

DAN RICHARDS: And, in fact, as Eric explained, as conservatives have come to dominate more and more of the United States government in Congress in the Supreme Court under Trump in the White House.

ERIC PATASHNIK: You know, today, we see threats to reproductive rights to strong protection of minority voting rights in some states to a chipping away of the boundary between church and state and erosion of existing municipal gun regulations a variety of threats from the right. Where these threats are quite real, we are seeing more and more counter-mobilization and backlashing from the left.

DAN RICHARDS: This relates to another topic I wanted to discuss, which is the role of race in backlash. As you write in the book, some of the biggest, most profound instances of backlash were, of course, during the Civil rights era and then during Reconstruction after the Civil War backlash to the Reconstruction. And those are the two biggest transformations in how race is treated in America. What role do you see race playing in the politics of backlash, and how did it factor into your work?

ERIC PATASHNIK: Sure, so it would be absolutely impossible to account for the backlash phenomenon in American political history without acknowledging the major past and current role of white backlash. We saw a tremendous backlash against civil rights during the nineteen sixties. We saw a backlash against that reached a crescendo both during the Obama administration, the Trump administration. These were moments when race and the meaning of American democracy were at the forefront of our politics.

A prime motive, I think, for policy backlash that I discuss in the book is the perception that government is providing benefits or protections for, quote unquote, "some undeserving constituency." And negative racial stereotyping has played a key role in perceptions of deservedness, which groups deserve to receive new programs or protections from the federal government.

And so, absolutely, I think race is a key ingredient in reactionary white counter-mobilization against changes in government's role. At the same time, though, I do argue in the book that to reduce all of backlash, the entire backlash phenomenon to white backlash is to oversimplify the causes of a great deal of counter-mobilization activity.

That's important to understand-- the Union environmentalist backlash against free trade deals, the backlash of social conservatives against gay marriage and abortion rights, and even the backlash of the business sector against some consumer product safety regulations.

So backlash often shows up as white reactionary backlash in the United States for deep historical reasons, but the relationship that race plays in any given backlash episode, I think, is contingent, and it varies both over time and across issue area.

DAN RICHARDS: Going then to the example we looked at in more detail in the Affordable Care Act, there was, I think, a lot of discussion during Obama's administration about the role race played in reaction against anything he did as president and how he was judged and evaluated as president.

I guess looking back at your research for this book or the history more broadly, do you see-- how do you think about the fact that this uniquely profound backlash was over a policy enacted by America's first Black president? Where did race fit into it, if at all?

ERIC PATASHNIK: I don't think there's any doubt that backlash was intensified because President Obama was America's first Black president. That's for sure a key factor, but I do think at the same time the policies itself fed into the backlash. The fact that there was a major health care reform bill that threatened some people's existing health care arrangements, we've seen that across administrations, whether there's President Obama or President Clinton, President Biden, and others anytime there's efforts to change health care that people are relying on that can lead to a counter-mobilization.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to turn to how your sort of framework and analysis in this book can help us think about the chaos we are likely to see over the next year in American politics. And let's start with former President Trump. I think many people, especially on the left would say that he is a sort of embodiment of backlash-based politics.

And in his first campaign, he was really pushing against specific policies, whether it was immigration policies or free trade policies. But this time around, it feels like he is less focused on particular policies and more about some sort of personal retribution and vengeance as he-- the words he uses. How do you see him deploying backlash in this current campaign, and how has it changed compared to his first campaign?

ERIC PATASHNIK: It's a great question. So President Trump rode into office on a wave of backlash. And as you mentioned, he certainly leveraged the anti-globalization backlash to good effect. I think one of the things that people haven't quite appreciated about President Trump is he does have an intuition for issues.

So he did perceive, for example, that globalization was imposing perceived economic and cultural costs on a mobilizable constituency in Twenty Sixteen, even though many economists argued that globalization was creating tremendous benefits for the country-- lower consumer prices, that immigration has had enormous benefits for the country's workforce and our productivity and our economic growth.

President Trump did perceive that there were some left-behind communities. And so he was able in Twenty Sixteen to attack free trade and immigration in a way that previous politicians hadn't. He did use that to powerful effect in Twenty Sixteen.

Now, where is he now? I agree with your statement that he's primarily seems to be a campaign of kind of retribution and personal vengeance. He's still stoking beliefs that the Twenty Twenty election was stolen, but we are seeing him use policy issues a little bit, and it will be interesting to see, assuming he gets the nomination, whether that continues or changes.

He's absolutely doubled down on anti-immigration rhetoric. He's using rhetoric that's extremely vile, dangerous. And so he still feels that there is an anti-immigrant backlash that could be mobilized that would be helpful to him.

And so I think Democrats are vulnerable on the immigration issue. Biden's vulnerable on that issue, and Trump does have a really sharp nose for his enemy's vulnerabilities, and he does smell a weakness there. And so he is still pushing that.

DAN RICHARDS: On the other side, where do you see progressive-based backlash fitting into the Twenty Twenty-Four campaign. Is it going to be advantageous for Democrats to be pushing back in ways we've described?

ERIC PATASHNIK: Absolutely. I mean, the key issue is abortion. Abortion has become a tremendous political liability for the Republicans for decades. Conservatives have wanted to overturn Roe v Wade, and it was kind of politically costless for them because they knew that the decision wasn't going anywhere in the short run. And so they were free to sort of use their rhetoric to attack it.

But now that it's a reality. Now that we have the Dobbs decision and that Roe has been overturned, this has become very, very difficult for Republicans because most Americans do support reproductive rights under most conditions, perhaps not all conditions, but it is not the case that the Dobbs decision is supported by a majority of the public. It's not.

And so that is a huge, huge problem for Republicans, especially as a number of red states have continued to erode access to abortion. We may see what the Supreme Court will do with access to abortion by medication and the availability of drugs necessary to make it accessible for ordinary citizens.

The more that Republicans continue to push on talking about a national abortion ban or restricting the access of middle-class women, the more that, in other words, something that will impinge on the daily lives of ordinary citizens, the worse the issue is for them.

And so I think that they are in a difficult position. They need to find a way out, but they can't do it so easily because they still have-- part of their religious base wants a national abortion ban. And it's handing Democrats a tremendous issue, and I think the Democrats will continue to use it for all it's worth.

DAN RICHARDS: I wonder too if there's something in the way Trump and Biden are both campaigning that's inciting a potential backlash against a deeper sense of Democratic erosion. There's not necessarily a policy but, I think, President Biden is pointing to things like January 6th and Trump's rhetoric that there is something Americans would lose from a Trump presidency.

And Trump likewise is claiming he's a victim of political persecution. And to the extent, he's convincing his followers of that. They're both weaponizing the very idea of a functioning democracy. Do you see that as sort of fitting into this framework as well, even though it isn't a specific policy?

ERIC PATASHNIK: What both sides are really focusing on is precisely not what I can do for you if I win, but what would be lost if I lose. And so, for the Democrats, they're talking about the loss of democracy. They're talking about the loss of freedom, the loss of reproductive, that the America that we've known won't be here.

And for President Trump and Republicans, they're talking about, in some ways, the loss of the American social fabric, where white Americans, working-class Americans, less college educated Americans, you can put whatever group you want under religious Americans where they feel comfortable and in control.

And that if I'm not elected, that America is gone forever. You'll be governed by aliens, by some elites-- for the Trump side, you'll be governed by left wing cultural elites who hate you, and your way of life will be gone, and immigrants will be running America. And for Democrats, democracy will be a thing of the past.

And so both are using the threat of loss, not only about specific policies, but about a broad set of understandings, things that we counted on in the past, relied on took, for granted that we no longer will be able to. And that's what's going to make, I think, this campaign such a contentious one because loss and fear of loss are such powerful motivators. And when you have both sides fearing that an election defeat would not only be a negative in terms of some specific policies, but something much broader, it's really going to lead to strong mobilization.

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DAN RICHARDS: In Twenty Twenty-Four and beyond, the forces that have brought backlash into the center of our politics appear likely to continue and possibly grow, but it's important to remember backlash can also play a constructive role in government. Here's Eric.

ERIC PATASHNIK: There is a positive side to backlash, which is, if government is imposing costs, not respecting the opinions and priorities and values of groups, the ability to counter mobilize to say, hey, no, we don't like this. As long as those actors are respecting the rights of other groups and are peaceful, that's at the heart of pluralist democracy. And so backlash, I think, is an important opportunity for expression of intensity of feeling.

At the same time, backlash can result in blocking solutions to collective problems. Backlash per se is not good or bad. What it is, though, I think, is a factor that those that want to design good policies and want to see those policies endure and become embedded and successful need to think about strategically, not necessarily to change their goals but to be mindful of them.

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DAN RICHARDS: On that note, let's end with an example that's not like the others. A policy that despite its wide reaching effect on society and despite our polarized political environment hasn't incited significant backlash. Depending on your politics, that is either a good thing or a bad thing. I'm talking about the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Inflation Reduction Act, also known as the IRA, was passed in Twenty Twenty-Two and is arguably President Biden's signature legislative achievement. There's a lot in the bill, but perhaps it's best known for being the biggest investment in fighting climate change that the US government has ever made, which on its face sounds like it should be ripe for a backlash movement, that it could maybe become Biden's Obamacare going into Twenty Twenty-Four -- a political liability.

But so far, that doesn't seem to be the case. To understand why, you need to look back at earlier efforts by Democrats to create legislation that could help fight climate change.

ERIC PATASHNIK: The cap-and-trade legislation that was discussed during the Obama administration, that was going to be an effort to deal with climate change by creating a new market system for tradable emission permits.

DAN RICHARDS: Cap and trade-- you probably heard a lot about it in the Twenty-Twenties if you followed politics of climate change. However, you probably don't hear as much about it anymore.

ERIC PATASHNIK: It was one that a lot of economists said was a great idea-- very cost-effective, very efficient. So it's sort of all the experts said it was great, and yet Tea Party groups and the petroleum industry, and others really saw it as a threat both to profits of industry and too much government.

Ordinary Americans were fearful that it was going to lead to higher electricity prices. And so that backlash contributed to the drubbing that the Democrats had in the Twenty Ten midterms. And the backlash had long-lasting consequences. We didn't make very much progress at the federal level on dealing with climate change in the next decade.

DAN RICHARDS: But policymakers, climate activists, and politicians-- they learned from this failure, what Eric and other political scientists called policy learning. And partially, it was because of the backlash for people involved in climate policy and politics.

ERIC PATASHNIK: It led to, OK, that approach is not going to work. How can we make some incremental progress, significant progress-- and won't solve the whole problem-- in a way that is less likely to spark such strong counter reactions?

And so, in the Inflation Reduction Act, what we saw essentially was providing subsidies to renewable energy to solar panels and to efforts to sort of green the economy. Basically, we're using now in the Inflation Reduction Act carrots rather than sticks.

There was policy learning there. And, in fact, President Biden, on the whole with the important exception I would say of immigration, has avoided sparking some of the policy specific backlashes that both Bill Clinton and Obama had to deal with in their re-election campaigns. Even though the means and the political opportunity structure are still there because we still have polarization, we still have those groups have a lot of resources can counter mobilize.

There are still some groups that would like to get rid of some of those provisions. They may attempt to. We'll see, but it hasn't been able to provide the same public incentive for the counter mobilization as the cap and trade because it used a different set of policy tools.

DAN RICHARDS: So, in that sense, it's an example of how experiencing backlash itself can help government to ultimately get better at achieving certain goals if it's done thoughtfully to the extent one wants climate change legislation.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Yes, there were lessons learned there, but let's keep in mind these were painful lessons. This was a lesson that caused the Democrats to lose a tremendous amount of political power for years and it stalled progress for nearly a decade at the federal level.

So, yes, you know, lesson learned, but wouldn't it be better to try to learn those lessons more cheaply, more easily, more effectively? And so for policymakers that would like to do that, I'd say read my book and try to avoid the election losses.

DAN RICHARDS: I was just going to say that could be a quicker way than trial and error.

ERIC PATASHNIK: Exactly.

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DAN RICHARDS: Eric Patashnik, thank you so much for coming on and talking with me on Trending Globally.

ERIC PATASHNIK: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zach Hirsch. If you like Trending Globally, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too.

If you have any ideas for guests or topics, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again that's all one word trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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