Kornacki cites '90s political wars as start of America’s deep political divide

On the day before the Senate voted largely along party lines to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, MSNBC host and NBS News national political correspondent Steve Kornacki told a National Press Club audience that America's deep political divide began to form more than 20 years ago.

The political wars of the 1990s and Newt Gingrich’s redefinition of the Republican strategy fostered a party-versus-party mentality that fully crystalized in the stark contrast of red and blue states in the 2000 election, Kornacki asserted.

“I’m not saying there was no turmoil, or chaos and wide-scale dissent, in this country before the 1990s," he said at the Oct. 5 book event. "What I’m saying is that in the 1990s the specific thing that happened was that it all synched up with party. There were just very clear and very precise demographic groupings that emerged.”

Kornacki joined Club President Andrea Edney to discuss his first book, "The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism,” and the factors that ignited and continue to fuel America’s political tension.

The rise of Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and the Republican party fighting Bill Clinton, the Republican revolution of 1994, the government shutdown of 1995, the Clinton comeback of 1996, and the impeachment of 1998 into 1999 as “major political wars [that] essentially told the country it had to take sides,” Kornacki said.

He honed in on Newt Gingrich as the key divisive figure who succeeded in changing the psychology of Republicans in Congress.

“The theme was basically, we need to define ourselves, we need to define our opponents and Democrats, and we need to draw a deep and bright line between the two,” Kornacki said.

By the time Clinton came to power with an ambitious agenda, the Democrats “were met with a Republican opposition that had been changed by Newt Gingrich - a Republican opposition that did not want to compromise - and the Republican party strikes gold,” he added.

The media played a significant role in the rise of Newt Gingrich and his antagonistic ideology, according to Kornacki.

In 1984 Gingrich recognized an opportunity in C-SPAN and began giving speeches in the chamber resembling “a Fox news show being produced from the floor of the house,” he said.

This enraged then-Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill, resulting in a political showdown in which Gingrich emerged as victor. This marked “the first time I think there was a momentum to fight the Democratic majority,” Kornacki said.

The evolving media landscape, particularly social media, continues to facilitate the divide along party lines today, Kornacki said.

“Technology evolved in a way that is almost perfectly suited to tribalism,” he said. “You can draw a straight line to what Newt GIngrich did to what Trump is doing with Twitter now.”

He stressed that these platforms cultivate an “us versus them” political mentality by facilitating a definition of party as “who you’re with and also, who you’re not with -- and you’re constantly reminded of who you’re with and who you’re not with and those divisions are constantly reinforced.”

The surge in Republican support of Kavanaugh evidences this trend, he said.

“I think the phenomenon we’re seeing – it’s not necessarily that they feel this great loyalty to Brett Kavanaugh, but that they feel their enemies are being brutally unfair to Brett Kavanaugh and by extension to them,” he said.

He noted the same phenomenon in the election of Donald Trump, stating that Republicans voted for Trump “not so much of who he was himself or what he was for, but who was against him and what that opposition looked like and what that opposition felt like.”

Kornacki is cautiously optimistic about America rebounding from such extreme polarization.

“Human nature in a way got us into this - our tendency to want this kind of thing and the ability of media to let us have it - and of politicians to exploit it,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what it will look like, but maybe we’re smart enough to get ourselves out of it.”

For the time being, Kornacki said that U.S. elections will not result in 49-state landslides anymore.

"We have elections where each party gets at least forty-five percent to start with, elections where each party can get twenty states to start with, where we’re fighting over a vanishing number of swing voters," he said. "The number of people splitting their ticket has never been lower. We have two tribes right now in our politics, and that’s the name of the book: The Red and the Blue.”