The Portland Trip
From The West Wing (Season 2, Episode 7)
Categories:
Run time: 2:01
Clip Description: Republican Congressman Matt Skinner, who is gay, discussing why he is a Republican and what it means to be a Republican.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for discussing concepts of political compromise and political party platforms.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip talks about political compromises and how political parties have utilized platforms to facilitate dialogue.
Discussion Questions
- Skinner belongs to a party whose platform is against him on something that is not abstract in his life. Under a two-party system every voter buys a bundle: you accept positions you dislike in order to get the ones you want. Where is the line between reasonable bundling and betraying yourself — and who is entitled to draw it, the voter or the party that assembled the bundle?
- Single-member districts with plurality winners tend to squeeze out third parties; that is the usual reading of Duverger’s law. If it holds, then American political disagreement gets pushed inside the two parties rather than between three or four of them. Is that a feature — coalitions have to be built before the election, in public, and the winner already represents a broad slice of the country — or is it a way of denying people a real choice while calling it one?
- Name the position your own party or side holds that you privately think is wrong. Now say what it would take for that single issue to move your vote to the other side. If the honest answer is that nothing would, then your partisanship is tracking something other than the sum of your policy views — identity, trust, who you think the other side is. Say what it is tracking.
Assignment
Party platforms are primary documents and nobody reads them, which is exactly why this works. The American Presidency Project hosts major-party platforms going back to the nineteenth century. Pick one issue and read the same party’s plank at two conventions roughly twenty years apart. In two to three pages, describe precisely what changed in the language, and argue whether the party was following its voters or leading them. The requirement that makes it hard: you must identify at least one place where the party moved in a direction your general theory of that party would not have predicted, and explain it rather than explaining it away.
For AP Students
AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 4: American Political Ideologies and Beliefs
Topics: 4.7 Ideologies of Political Parties; reaches 4.3 on changes in ideology
Skill: Concept Application (1.C): compare principles, policies and behaviors
A Republican congressman who is gay explains to a skeptical staffer why he is a Republican and what he takes the party to stand for. Students arrive believing parties are ideologically uniform. Two minutes of someone explaining why he belongs to a party many of them assume would not want him is the fastest correction available, and it does not require the teacher to make the argument.
Discussion questions
- State his account of what being a Republican means, in one sentence, without editorializing about it.
- A party is a coalition rather than a single position. Name two groups inside either major party whose priorities pull against each other, and say what holds them in the same party anyway.
- If your views line up with one party on economics and the other on social questions, what should you do on election day? There is no right answer here; defend whichever you pick.
Short activity
Place yourself, then place the parties (10 minutes). Two axes on the board, economic left to right and social liberal to conservative. Students anonymously mark where they sit and where they think each major party sits. Collect the slips and plot them. The spread among students who identify with the same party is the lesson, and seeing it on the board lands considerably harder than being told that parties are coalitions.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.