If you say, Disagreement is a social problem, your interlocutor is prompted to respond, I agree. Perhaps that's why, as Thomas Zimmer writes, "The least controversial thing one can do in American politics is to decry 'polarization.'"
Of course "polarization exists as an observable phenomenon in distinct areas and dimensions"; the problem, Zimmer says, is with "a narrative" that "dogmatically demands we put it at the center of our interpretation of the present and accept it as the key challenge the country is facing today." By tending to ignore counterexamples of non-polarization, it highlights "what historian Matthew Lassiter has rightfully criticized as an 'artificial red-blue binary.'"
First of all, many Americans share values, including across liberal and conservative identities. Placing the focus on ordinary American voters who supposedly have diametrically opposed viewpoints (maybe they do, maybe they don't, so what?) may simply serve to obscure the problem that "authoritarian reactionaries [are] taking over one of the major parties." Zimmer posits: "Every serious scholar and observer of American democracy, politics, and history agrees that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would constitute an acute threat to the future of democracy and constitutional government in this country. Would we really be better off if Democrats *didn’t* see him and the party that has elevated him as a major problem?" See here: "One party is dominated by a shrinking white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That's not 'polarization.'"
Secondly, where among ordinary individuals the left-right gap is indeed "very wide, and has been widening," for example "on guns, pandemic response, the question of whether you should accept the results of an election your side doesn’t win or stage a violent coup," the blame doesn't lie on both sides; rather, "this has been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right." So for example, on acknowledging climate change as an urgent problem, "Democrats aren’t moving to an 'extreme' position, certainly not by international comparison – they are getting in line with what is the position shared by nearly all serious experts in the world. Meanwhile, a sizable percentage of Republicans is drifting further away into fantasy land."
Jonathan Haidt explains in a recent essay that we become politically polarized when centripetal or centrifugal forces are imbalanced. These are the forces that draw us together or pull us apart.
“Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks.”
The “good kind of identity politics,” according to Haidt, is exemplified by MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech that ”framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption.” Identity becomes centrifugal “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions” identifying which groups have power over which others and furthermore when you say that they must “fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male.” When students are told to examine everything “in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people....This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.”
Polarization is a problem insofar as it prevents people from working together to maintain a democracy. “Here," Haidt says, "is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life.” Therefore the Founding Fathers of the United States designed a constitution as if it were “a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.” They “built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances. But they also knew that they had to train future generations of clock mechanics. They were creating a new kind of republic, which would demand far more maturity from its citizens than was needed in nations ruled by a king or other Leviathan.” Today, however, “our government is divided into two all-consuming factions, which cut right down the middle of each of the three branches, uniting the three red half-branches against the three blue half-branches”.
Haidt referred to a previous essay in which he argued that polarization was caused by the following trends. In his words:
- The two parties purified themselves ideologically
- As politicians polarized, so did many Americans
- The urban-rural divide grew into a gulf, reflecting diverging interests and values
- Immigration was rising, leading to larger racial and ethnic divisions
- The net effect of all these trends is that partisans dislike one another more intensely
- Meanwhile, rule changes and culture changes in Congress made it harder to maintain cross-party friendships
- The media environment changed, making it easier for partisans to confirm their worst suspicions, and putting greater pressure on politicians to play to the extremes
- As the costs of campaigns increased, politicians have become increasingly afraid of offending their party’s donors
- When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country
- The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship
Nina Khrushcheva has a more specific observation about clock mechanics. She applauded moments in U.S. history where politicians defended the procedural checks and balances even against other pressing moral demands, such as when "Secretary of State Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, despite his hatred of slavery, in order to save the union" and when "Robert Taft denounced the Nuremberg Trials, despite his hatred of the Nazis, to defend the fundamental US legal principle that a person could not be criminally charged on the basis of a retroactive statute." (Both of these examples were featured in President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.) She notes the current initiative in late 2017 "to pass a tax bill that would benefit America’s wealthiest households at the expense of saddling the country with more than $1 trillion in additional debt" and she implies that the process could have benefited from "thorough public committee hearings" and with less willingness on the part of politicians to "trade their honor for the approval of their tribe."
Adam Garfinkle gives seven reasons for the decline of trust in society. The first three or four overlap with Haidt's reasons for polarization.- heterogeneous demographics driven by immigration
- the lack of a "common language to discuss good and evil" and the rise of "Christian neo-fundamentalism"
- less face-to-face interaction due to technology and class segregation
- institutional and bureaucratic failure
- media portrayals of the world as a mean place
- breakdown of family leading to emotional insecurity
- too much state intrusion
Being open to changing one's beliefs according to evidence
Various recent studies have found that American conservatives are more likely to share fake news, more prone to self-deception, and less likely to change their beliefs in response to evidence. They use simpler language and many of them are falling prone to authoritarianism. This is discussed in a July 2020 New York Times article.
Starting fights
Legal actions for political purposes can worsen polarization. In May 2018, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said: "It's important that we not exacerbate the dysfunction and the polarization in the society that helped Donald Trump rise to power in the first place." He explained that impeachment needs to be an action taken to rectify a specific abuse. "If we were to use the impeachment power simply as a substitute for buyer's remorse, saying 'We thought this guy was terrible, but he's even worse,' if we were going to use it against ambient badness, rather than clear abuse of power — we would really use the impeachment power to undermine, rather than save, our democracy."
Being guided by polarization
Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman conducted studies in 2014 and 2016 showing that Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change exist but they tend to support whatever policies are backed by their own party.
YouGov opinion polls in August 2018 found dramatic differences between Republicans and Democrats regarding opinions toward the n-word slur against black people. 90% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton, but only 53% of those who voted for Trump, agreed that white people should never use this word. Trump voters were even less likely to use the word "racist" to describe this behavior; while 86% of Clinton voters agreed that "it's racist for whites to use" that word, only 33% of Trump voters thought so. And while 86% of Clinton voters "wouldn't vote for [a] candidate who said it," only 26% of Trump voters held themselves to the same standard. The Washington Post story points out that, only twelve years previously, this gap barely existed; then, "55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans said that the n-word was offensive."
The United States is polarizing faster than other countries
In early 2020, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jesse Shapiro, Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, showed research that (according to a news release from Brown University) "present[s] the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in 'affective polarization' — a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined — the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden." The study shows that "polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased."
The US is polarizing asymmetrically
"Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. And much of the extremism in the GOP has been tactical, where some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guardrails as to what is permissible." (Julian Zelizer, CNN, Dec. 20, 2022)
Local journalism matters
Marc Ambinder wrote for MSNBC on Nov. 5, 2020:
there is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers. If you live in a town with a thriving local news ecosystem, you are more likely to vote.
Reporting
Norm Eisen discussed journalistic norms, telling Chauncey DeVega for Salon in May 2022:
"That [old] norm deems that if you're going to provide one side of the story then you have to provide the other side of the story. If something happens, you need to report it neutrally. Editorializing is for the editorial page. The inferences, the interpretation, that doesn't go in the news. But if you have a norm-transgressing figure like Donald Trump, then those journalistic norms have to adapt to that circumstance. We can't be static. That is why journalism in this country is stuck."
At first glance, reporting both sides might seem to reduce polarization. But maybe it's the opposite, since it keeps people stuck in a "debate" that perhaps they don't need to be in. If one side is clearly better (however "better" is defined), then what needs to be done is accept the recommendation of the side, take some action, and move forward, while continuing to listen to objections (if made in good faith) and maintaining nuanced awareness of the situation.
To be clear, I don't think there's much value in being performatively uptight about this stuff anymore. The world's a nightmare. Be a human being. Reporters who spend most of their time trying to convince everyone they've lobotomized themselves are the ones lying to audiences. https://t.co/irTOrtkrIT
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 18, 2023
Please see The Conspicuous Absence of White Identity from Yascha Mounk’s “Trap”, Dannagal Young, 3Streams, Oct 20, 2023. Young refers to a
"well-documented process of partisan 'social sorting' following the parties’ racial realignment, as Americans from distinct socio-demographic groups came to identify more with one of the two major political parties, leaving us with a Democratic party that is racially and ethnically diverse, suburban and urban, secular and agnostic, and culturally liberal, and a Republican party that is more homogeneously white, Christian, rural, and culturally conservative.
And while the sorting has certainly happened on 'both sides' its outcome has been decidedly asymmetrical, resulting in a Republican party whose homogenous identity alignment gives them exceptional 'group fit.' And when people 'fit' nicely into their social identity category (they look the way most of their team looks, worship the way most of their team worships, live where most of their team lives, and live how most of their team lives), their social identity becomes salient. When an identity is salient, it is easy to leverage, activate, and mobilize through identity threats."
Responding to an October 2023 profile in the New York Times, here's A.R. Moxon talking about the meaning of safety (No Beliefs, Just Intentions, The Reframe (Substack), Dec 17, 2023): One family in the New York Times profile "needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government." The other "wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time..." Moxon continues: "And I’m told the problem is that both sides are polarized, and both sides actually want the same thing, even though they can’t get over their disagreements over silly politics."
Urban-rural divide?
"Over the past 30 years, the American political landscape has been characterized by a growing divide between rural and urban voters, almost as if they’re on two opposing teams, according to Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
But the divide is confined largely to white Americans, Mettler and collaborators have found in an examination of the racial and ethnic facets of the trend.
When it comes to politics, Black and Latino residents of rural America differ far less, if at all, from their urban counterparts than do non-Hispanic white residents, the researchers report.
* * *
“A Rural-Urban Political Divide Among Whom? Race, Ethnicity, and Political Behavior Across Place” published in Politics, Groups, and Identities on March 31, with a summary of the findings appearing in the United States Politics and Policy blog of the London School of Economics, June 7. Mettler is corresponding author, and co-authors are doctoral students Trevor E. Brown, Marissa Rivera and Gisela Pedroza Jauregui.
— Growing rural-urban divide exists only among white Americans: Kate Blackwood, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell Chronicle, June 20, 2024
There are more surge voters than swing voters
Anat Shenker-Osorio says that the importance attached to "swing voters" is based on "median voter theory...a very old political science idea...[that] rests on the notion of the electorate as a fixed group of people. And so someone presumably occupies the ideological center of it."
In reality, though, "the composition of the electorate changes in every election," and the people in the ideological center (however exactly we may understand that) aren't the most important group to reach, if the question is how to win the election. There are always many people "who have never voted before, whether they've just aged into the electorate, never voted before because they just became naturalized, never voted before because they didn't feel like it, or are very unreliable voters." If they can be persuaded to vote, they're "surge voters" (new voters), and there are many more of them than there are "swing voters."
Five things Harris — and you — can do to close the deal Messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio on five dos (and don’ts) for the Harris-Walz campaign’s critical final sprint. The Ink. Oct 26, 2024
Sources
“The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities.” Jonathan Haidt. City Journal (Manhattan Institute). Dec. 17, 2017.
"Profiles in Cowardice." Nina L. Khrushcheva. Project Syndicate. Dec. 18, 2017.
"In Way Too Little We Trust." Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest. December 13, 2017.
I treat "both sides" and "down the middle" as a kind of mainia, a force that can take over the news mind, presenting new ways not to make sense. For reasons obscure, Amazon is doing a live election night program with Brian Williams as host. Here's @oliverdarcy.bsky.social on what might go wrong.
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen.bsky.social) October 30, 2024 at 8:46 AM
[image or embed]
Scientists
I don't normally do this, but since I am very concerned about this Science letter www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... by the NAS president on the political polarization around science that is making the rounds. So let me say my 2c 1/
— Tobia Spampatti, PhD (@tspampatti.bsky.social) November 15, 2024 at 1:43 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment