Rethinking Who We Are

[Leda Billock]

I'm really not interested in doing business with that clientele," he later told the local TV news station, WLOS. Asked if he thought it was fair to leave a motorist stranded, he replied, "It's not fair, but it's the norm nowadays. It's the world in which we live."

Just so: In our time, polarization has not only grown sharper but has even become its own justification. In the spring of 2018, a poll by the Pew Research Center registered yet another marker in the long series of milestones on the road to ungovernability: Democrats are now just as averse to compromise as Republicans. Only a minority in both parties (46% of Democrats, 44% of Republicans) told Pew they "like elected officials who make compromises with people they disagree with." The essence of the U.S. Constitution is to require compromise as a condition of governing. In rejecting compromise, Americans are rejecting governance. The United States and other countries have been down this road in the past, and the results are never good.

In some respects, of course, there is really not much new about polarization. It has been with us for a long time, and there is a vast political-science literature on the subject. There is also a vast journalistic literature on it, to which I have contributed over the years. But something has changed, which requires a reconsideration of the subject.

More controversial, in the 2000s, was whether polarization was a popular phenomenon as well as an elite phenomenon. Some political scientists, such as Alan Abramowitz of Emory University and Kyle Saunders of Colorado State University, marshaled evidence showing that support in the electorate for relatively centrist positions was shrinking. Another school of thought, led by Stanford's Morris Fiorina, argued that the ideological center had shrunk but not all that much, and that lots of Americans still agreed on many issues. The big change, he said, was that the parties, which once were both ideologically diverse coalitions, have sorted themselves out on ideological lines and offer increasingly extreme candidates to the voters.

Those were the general parameters of the conversation 15 years ago: before the Great Recession, Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, and of course President Donald Trump. Today, the questions that preoccupied us back then remain relevant, but in important respects they have been subsumed by another set of questions. What we mean today by polarization and what we meant then are simply not the same.

To understand how things have changed, we can begin by noticing that what Fiorina said more than a decade ago is still true: The ideological center has shrunk but has not by any means disappeared. "[O]n most issues," Fiorina wrote in 2014, "attitudes continue to cluster in the middle." And yet, the center continues to erode. In a recent analysis of American National Election Studies data, Abramowitz finds that the share of all voters placing themselves in the center of the ideological scale (or unable to place themselves) fell from 49% in 1972 to 35% in 2012. According to Pew, the share of Americans who take mixed ideological positions, rather than being consistent conservatives or liberals, stood at 39% in 2014, down 10 points from the 2004 level (which was the same as in 1994). If party sorting has slowed, it is only because both parties are too pure to be sorted much further.

Geographical sorting, meanwhile, amplifies the effects of party sorting. As of 2016, about 60% of Americans lived in so-called "landslide counties," where either Trump or Hillary Clinton received at least 60% of the major-party vote; the comparable figure was 50% in 2012 and about 40% in 1992.

Consider the Pew figure cited above, finding that 39% of Americans take mixed ideological positions. Peek beneath the surface of that number, and you find that many of these 39% are not ideologically moderate; they are ideologically mixed up. In many cases, they hold an eclectic assortment of extreme positions.

Something analogous is also true of the two political parties. Assuredly, Democrats and Republicans are much more purely left-wing and right-wing, respectively, than they were 50 years ago. Certainly, Republicans are more hostile to government than are Democrats. Ideologically, the parties stand on opposite shores. But they still are far from internally coherent in any philosophical sense. Democrats are divided between market-oriented technocrats and self-declared democratic socialists. Republicans are in the grip of a populist takeover that defies the relatively libertarian, internationalist orthodoxy of their heretofore dominant Reaganite wing. Are the Democrats center-left or socialist? Both. Are the Republicans populist or libertarian? Again, both. We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

And that is really the essence of what feels like a growing division in our country. In 2017, Pew's polling found that blacks' political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites' since 1994, or women's from men's, or college graduates' from non-college graduates'. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans' political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything? To put the point in a less metaphysical way, what if tribalism as such, not ideological disagreement, is behind much or even most of the rise of polarization? What if emotional identification with a partisan team is driving ideology, more than the other way around? To understand and assess this peculiar proposition, we need to expand our toolkit beyond classical political science and into social and cognitive psychology.

It increasingly appears that students of polarization 10 or 15 years ago were barking up the wrong tree. We were looking for changes in ideology when changes in feelings are more important. Several research developments have brought about that reassessment.

One of those is the growing awareness of so-called "affective polarization." This measures not differences in what partisans believe but differences in their subjective feelings toward one another. On this score, the news is pretty grim. As Pew noted in 2014,

Abramowitz finds that affective polarization has increased faster than issue polarization (although the two are intertwined). At least there is something both sides agree on: namely, that they can't agree. In Pew's polling, large majorities (more than three-quarters of respondents) in both parties concur that Republican and Democratic voters can't even agree on basic facts. And there is something else they agree on: In 2016, according to Pew, majorities of highly politically engaged Republicans (62%) and highly politically engaged Democrats (70%) said the other party makes them feel "afraid." When one ponders those and other such findings, one is forced to reflect that the word "hate" is too strong, but it is, alas, in the right ballpark for inter-party feeling right now. What we fear, we tend also to hate.

A second, related development is that of "negative partisanship." It's not so much that we like our own party as that we detest the other. In fact, Eric Groenendyk, of the University of Memphis, finds evidence that people hate the other party partially because they are disappointed in their own party. "[T]hey appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party," he writes. "In other words, they seem to be engaging in the 'lesser of two evils' identity defense." By protecting their sense of belonging, intense partisan animosity performs what Groenendyk has called emotional rescue. The fevered view of President Obama proffered by people like Dinesh D'Souza may have been absurd, but it did serve the purpose of making every Republican leader look better by comparison. If Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, then you had better support whatever mediocre Democrat is on offer.

Fans of opposing sports teams perceive different events in close calls. Fans of opposing political parties perceive different facts and take different policy views depending on which party lines up on which side. Presenting people with facts that challenge an identity- or group-defining opinion does not work; instead of changing their minds, they will often reject the facts and double down on their false beliefs. This is true regardless of educational and cognitive firepower; in fact, super-smart people use their big brains to perform somersaulting rationalizations. "Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive," writes the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Partisans who find ways to rationalize their beliefs get a little hit of dopamine. "Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things."

To some considerable extent, what we are calling polarization in the United States seems not to be ideological or even rational. We may rationalize it on ideological grounds, and it may drive us toward ideological discord, but what we are in fact doing is satisfying a deep, atavistic craving to belong to an in-group and to bind ourselves to our group by feeling and displaying animosity toward an out-group. If group solidarity requires us to perform a 180-degree reversal on, say, free trade or immigration or Russia or North Korea or military action in Syria, we will flip and then rationalize the reversal. If group solidarity requires us to excuse Donald Trump for behaviors far worse than those we condemned in Bill Clinton, no problem. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, we have our principles, but if our in-group doesn't like those principles, we have other principles.

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