[image_credit]REUTERS/Leah Millis[/image_credit][image_caption]President Donald Trump[/image_caption]
The title of the event, “Democrats and Republicans Don’t Just Disagree — They Hate Each Other,” gave away the main finding in advance.
U of M political scientist Larry Jacobs moderated, and the speakers were political scientist Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru.
This is about Trump, but not just about Trump.
Years ago, polls started finding that, while the portion of U.S. parents who would be upset if their child married someone of a different race or religion was falling – and, by the way, they are still falling — the portion who would be upset if their child married someone of the “other” political party had started rising. And it is still rising.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the level of fear and loathing that was defined by party identification was much lower, but it’s been rising since the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s now higher than any other factor, including race, Iyengar said, to the point that “partyism exceeds racism” and powerfully affects our social lives and our daily interactions.
In fact, he said, “the top predictor of who dates whom is political identification.”
As best as political science can measure, “animus is equal across party lines,” political scientist Shanto Iyengar said, meaning the disdain of Republicans for Democrats and vice versa is of similar size and intensity.
Partisan identity has become such a powerful element of overall identity that partisan rancor should be viewed not as any kind of show but as “real animosity based on real identity,” he said.
Ponnuru, a long-time conservative but a frequent Trump critic, agreed. Partisanship, and specifically negative partisanship (meaning the dislike of Republicans by Democrats and vice versa), is the major glue holding both parties together, he said.
In other words, Republicans disagree on many things, but the one thing they share is fear and loathing of Democrats. And vice versa. Those on each side of the partisan divide believe that their own side is larger than the other. If their side loses an election, which might challenge such a belief, the losing-side partisans are quick to assume the other side cheated.
Asking someone whether hydroxychloroquine can cure COVID-19 is not much different from asking them their partisan identification, Ponnuru said. He recalled that when, in front of Democrats, he stated the obvious truth that Hunter Biden profited mightily in his business dealings because of Joe Biden’s high-ranking political positions, the automatic response of Democrats is usually to bring up the business benefits to the Trump children of their surname.
Ponnuru couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump, so he voted for Evan McMullin, a conservative never-Trumper who ran for president in 2016 on the Constitution Party ticket and gave Trump-averse conservatives a way to avoid voting for Trump.
But Ponnuru remarked that he was struck by how many people he knows who “voted for Trump with great trepidation” because of all the negative things they knew about Trump, but now, “having made that choice, don’t want to hear” negative stuff about what Trump says or does. They don’t want their noses rubbed in his flaws, Ponnuru said; “they just want reinforcement” that makes them feel OK about having voted for him.
In my interactions with people, when it comes to discussion, I find little difference between the denizens of Fox News and Right Wing Radio, and the consumers of CNN/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo, in their inflexibility and intransigence.
That said, I do not hate my fellow Americans. I do however have a very deep antipathy toward the leadership of BOTH parties, dividing and conquering the People, and their crony elite in Banking, Health Care, Military, Media, and Corporations generally.
Sort of like how this CARES bailout is a $6 trillion bipartisan giveaway to a bipartisan elite “meritocracy”, but somehow regular Americans who claim Dem or Repub can’t really see it.
I wouldn’t be quite so harsh. $1T of that money is going to direct payments to individuals, enhanced unemployment benefits, state governments and hospitals. That’s much needed relief at this time. I agree that the other $5T is more likely to trickle up than down.
About half of that first trillion has already trickled up. As to the other 5+ Trillion, it can’t “trickle up” when Congress and the Fed hand it directly to big corp and big bank executives, as they have already made clear they intend to – even if the major media message is, all the bailout is all about workers….
The Big Question is: Why?
Few would dispute the findings that partisan identity has become so divisive. But who can explain why? It used to be that we could agree to disagree, have long arguments over policy, and still be friends. Years ago a girlfriend’s friend’s fiancee worked for the Center for the American Experiment. He and I could atgue policy for hours – and have a good time doing it. I don’t know any conservatives today who I could do that with.
Why?
Why? Because we don’t share the same facts or common goals. People can have different opinions on policy if they have the same facts and common goals.
We also need to be careful to believe that the post-WWII expansion from 1950-2000 was “normal”. We have dealt with division throughout our nation’s history.
Homo Sapiens, like most primates, is tribal.
What is changing is the way tribes are defined.
When Americans were more religious, that was what set the boundaries. Polish and Irish Catholics in Chicago had to have their own churches, and to many Protestants, Catholics were not Christians and therefore only semi-human.
As Americans become less religious, tribal boundaries are shifting to politics (modern travel and communications are widening the geography of tribalism).
Parenthetically, it would help if people like political scientists would learn something about ethology and psychology to understand the biological underpinning of the phenomena that they’re analyzing.
Why? I think it directly correlates to the infusion of religion in politics.
Look at how common it is to equate politicians with the anti-Christ. When the “other” can be cast as evil, it makes it sinful to even consider the other side.
It also allows for extremist beliefs. “Anyone who disagrees with me hates America.” “You’re either with us or against us.” It’s common to see politicians faces with targets superimposed on them. Those who call themselves “pro-life” carry assault weapons while protesting measures that save lives.
When your party becomes your religion, all is lost.
For one thing, you’re looking in the wrong places for conservatives who want to have an intelligent debate. Try reading the American Conservative or The Imaginative Conservative. Discussions there tend to focus less on Why All Democrats are Evil, and more about the effect of modern capitalism on the human soul.
Years ago, I had some connection with a couple of the people involved with the Imaginative Conservative, so there may be some tribal loyalties of my own at work there.
They don’t want their noses rubbed in his flaws, Ponnuru said; “they just want reinforcement” that makes them feel OK about having voted for him.
Kind of says it all don’t you think? Failure to admit a mistake only makes the mistake worse. Some folks will walk around the rest of their life with that toilet paper hanging from their shoe rather than admit it is there. And, what is it we can do to help them? Can’t have rationale conversations with irrational people. I think the Fox news, right wing conspiracy theorists etc. of the world deserve a lot of credit for creating this alternate world narrative. They are convincing rationale folks to be irrational, and line their pockets at the expense of a, “united” States, and are proud of it, And they call it patriotism! .
Just as to a hammer, everything else is a nail, to a political scientist lots of divides will somehow be partisan. For myself, I am a Democrat because I am concerned about health care. I am not concerned about health care policy because I am a Democrat. Maybe with have a health care divide.
What did Ponneru say when he was asked why he couldn’t “bring himself to vote for Hillary”? Was it really just the party label?
At my place of work there generally is a need for the amount of money coming in and the money going out to be in some kind of harmony. Hopefully, most often, more coming in than going out. Which leads to increased wages and hiring. It some times does go backward and we try to be patient and try to figure things out because it is our experience that recovery occurs.
In almost certainty, we are entering a period of more going out than coming in. We had planned reduced work hours and some full time furloughs to prepare for this. The PPP has enabled us to postpone this for now.
So William, I apologize for being a part of the crony elite in Banking, Health Care, Military, Media, and Corporations, but it is nice to issue paychecks each week and retain employees thanks to the CARES Act and the PPP.
Sometimes smart guys in the moneyed elite have good ideas, for all:
https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-fed-chief-floats-forgivable-loans-for-small-business/568904022/
For years the Republican party was an uneasy alliance between the rich country club set and the populist base. The rich portion gave lip service to the base, without giving them results, and things went along. Then the Tea party, denial of expertise and science, and eventually Trump came along releasing the Kraken – they can’t get him back in the box, but are kind of going along for the ride.
The divide is pretty obvious, and has increased all over the country in the decade that I’ve lived here in Minnesota. As a former Republican, now left-leaning independent, my 2¢ in terms of explanation is that the parties themselves have changed, and I see that as an underlying reason why “party identification” has become a flash point.
Years ago, “liberals” wanted to try out new ideas, while “conservatives” preferred the tried and true. Democrats were the party of spending, often for very good causes, while Republicans were the party of fiscal discipline, often for very good reasons. Both parties pretty much ignored the presence of native Americans, people of color, and the LGBTQ community when it came to public policy.
Little or nothing of those old policy standpoints remains, and it shows in the quality and substance of the arguments people have in person and in print. Democrats are now sometimes the fiscal disciplinarians, while Republicans, especially in the Trump era, have forfeited any claim they might have had to fiscal restraint. Republicans, who used to very much personify “Live and let live” tolerance, are now society’s official prudes and self-appointed moral guardians. “Political correctness” is no longer something practiced exclusively by your loony left-wing neighbor. It’s now also evident in your equally-loony, right-wing Uncle Bob, fuliminating at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
We live in interesting times…
You may have heard of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.”
I think you’re definitely on to something. Back in the good old days, the two major parties distinguished themselves mostly on economic issues, and even there, there was not a lot of daylight between the two. On social issues, such as racial discrimination, there was not a lot of consistency. The pre-Reagan Republicans favored the ERA, while Minnesota’s main opponent – Florian Chimelewski – was a DFLer. When the social and cultural issues started coming to the forefront, the divide became too sharp.
Let’s take a look at the commentariat. A lot of people we see on TV make a living from politics in ways that don’t actually have much to do with political issues. They get paid for tv appearances by the networks, or they are subsidized by various entities to go on television to advocate certain points of view. The upshot is that when they are being interviewed, they aren’t telling you what they think, they are telling you what they are paid, directly or indirectly, to say. They know if the depart from the party line, they will both lose their income, and their slots in the media, because they will no longer the “balance” the media is looking for.
We see this with Ponneru. He makes his living as a right wing commentator. He is paid to edit an unprofitable magazine, he writes books no one reads, he appears at seminars around the country. It’s a living.But what happens when one of the parties nominates for president, a guy who is clearly unfit for the job by any normal standard? Does he do the entirely reasonable thing and vote for and speak out for the other, perfectly competent, candidate? Of course not. Despite the fact that that would be a reasonable, and indeed patriotic thing to do, that simply cannot be done because anyone doing that would lose the comfortable earning streams that go to reliable political commentators.
Make no mistake about it; one party embraces religious authoritarianism, is anti-science, anti-government, xenophobic, and focused sharply on increasing the wealth gap. The other party is mostly not that. When the battle lines are drawn, the latter brings a knife to a gunfight, which has led to minority rule – a problem that in the long game has brought down other societies.
It seems to me that we do hate each other, but hate on one side results from fabricated narratives about race, gender, nationality, culture, and facts themselves. The other side, frustrated by this denial of reality, actually has something to hate: hateful behavior.
Another very good piece of work and comments too. I’ll be interested to learn the outcome of the illegal rallies, especially in Madison on Friday. All the hypocrisy on display 6’ apart. All Lives Matter, Pro Life, Pro Birth on display to tout their selfish agenda. Where will the Death Panel folks stand?
I work for a builder here in NW Montana, he’s a pretty conservative guy, like most folks in our valley. His wife is on the Mpls Federal Reserve Board, which since her appointment, I’ve seen a slow change in both of their views. While we haven’t talked politics, we have certainly talked policy, and that has been very interesting, and while we differ, we don’t hate each other for it.
I was invited to a talk by Neel Kashkari a few weeks ago, he was talking to the Chamber, and there were a lot of bankers in the room too. Again, pretty conservative, but some of the ideas floated by Kashkari were very progressive. Nobody got up and left, and while there were some questioning of his proposals, I would say that for the most part, people listened, and maybe took home a little different look. It’s a start.
Riddle: “What do you get when you put three political scientists on a panel?”
Answer: “Nothing of value.”
At every turn, political science presents itself as a purely descriptive discipline, incapable of analysis or normative insight. Each commenter above me has something far more insightful to say than anything that Mr. Black reports from the panelists.
Fifty years ago, the Republican party decided to construct its base out of those whose fear and ignorance could be exploited by an authoritarian appeal resting on creating enemies and inciting hate toward them. After fifty years of implementing this approach, the Republican party now self-selects reliably for authoritarian followers and, necessarily, the Democratic party self-selects for those who are not. Republicans hate Democrats, because they are inculcated in a view in which the world consists of the clan, and the others who threaten, and who therefore are to be feared and hated. For Republicans, indeed and by definition, it is about “identity.” Democrats hold animosity toward Republicans (anger, not hate), not because they are Republicans, but because they are doing everything in their capacity to bring a fragile human civilization a couple of thousand years in the making down around us and our children. The tribalism is on one side. The symmetry ritually invoked by the chattering classes is lazy and wrong.
As a footnote, it is fitting to see that Ponnuru voted for a third party: a political scientist without the most basic understanding of what civic obligation entails in a democratic society.
Great comments, but for me this (and the observation by Mr. Tice) is the answer.
Beginning in the 1960s, the American conservative movement created a tribe of ever-increasing virulence and self-righteous intensity, with the unstated goal of making things easier and more profitable for the already wealthy (who funded the movement). “Conservatism” (in a less offensive form) finally attained political control with the election of St. Reagan in 1980.
By degrees, those that disagreed with what the American right was industriously creating became (by default) the other “tribe”. They can now be better described as the “non-conservatives”. Their opposition rankled conservative leaders, and the chosen strategy to combat the non-conservatives was use of bitter invective, which was ramped-up by the horrendous Newt Gingrich in the early 90s.
With every political defeat, today’s conservative tribe never moderates, never re-thinks its positions, it only doubles down in its (almost faith-based) ideological intensity, necessarily making the resistance of the (dumbfounded) non-conservatives even stronger. And with the “victory” of the monstrous Trump, conservatism has reached the point that it doesn’t make the slightest pretense of attempting to unite the country or seek any type of consensus. Instead it operates solely on the principle of maximum division. A know-nothing authoritarian creature like Trump was the necessary and logical endpoint of conservatism.
That conservatives can tell themselves they are “really” in the political majority after both of their 21st Century presidents achieved the office only by means of the (anti-democratic) electoral college is yet more proof of their unreasoning and irrational intensity. The intellectual hoops they have to jump through to convince themselves of this nonsense gives the game away.
The “non-conservatives” can see that the conservative movement is leading us off the cliff, simply by objective examination of the climate situation alone, (leave aside a dozen other issues). Whereas conservatives believe “lib’ruls” are leading us off the cliff because some Sean Hannity clones told them so!
If I understand your comment, you seem to be saying that the Right’s increasing tribalism and hatred for the “enemy” is a response to the resistance of the non-Right. If that’s what you’re saying, I don’t think I agree. If anything, I think the non-Right is characterized by its passivity over the past 50 years to the steadily advancing authoritarianism of the Right. The hate of the Right’s political base isn’t founded on a reality, it’s founded on the messages of the Right’s leadership identifying a sequence of enemies to be hated. The non-Right has stayed about where it always has been, in a bell curve around some “center” and imperfectly seeking to trundle toward a better future, laboring of course under the largely unstated condition that society may act only if the action benefits the wealthy few as much as or more than everyone else.
I also subscribe to a generational concept as regards the Right. The first generation – the chamber of commerce and country-club folks – initiated the authoritarian strategy cynically, for its efficacy. The second generation were the grifters (the Gingrich/DeLay generation) who appeared once the credulous were gathered for the fleecing under the Republican banner. The third generation are the true believers – those who came of age under the authoritarian appeal and found it congenial on its own terms. The Republican leadership now is composed of grifters and authoritarian true believers: there is nothing about the public good or public service underlying their notion of holding office, there is only power and private advantage. All the leadership of the Right knows about governing, then, are the same old tools of manipulating the base to hold onto power. Tribalism is the hammer, and all they can do with it is hit the nail harder and harder.
Let’s just say that ‘political science’ is an oxymoron.
This is about the Trump, whose live is entirely about self interest. Republicans imposed him on the country and now totally support him in all of his awfulness. What is there to like about that?
Partisanship makes people disregard the truth — instead everything is only a matter of whether your side is good and the other side is bad. Lets say you pose the question “why are there not more tests” and many will take it as a snipe against Trump. Likewise some may say our stay-at-home policy is going too far, and many will accuse you of being a knuckle dragging idiot. This is little more than a culture of contempt.
I watched the webinar on Wednesday. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j4M7mqaeSE although it isn’t as interesting as the discussion here.
Larry Jacobs did not challenge anything either panelist said, as I recall, which seems to be a serious failing in most American journalism. When Iyengar, the Stanford political scientist with the “deep research,” equated Sean Hannity with Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell as examples of equal bias on both sides, he lost me.
Yes, the bias on left and right is clear and significantly driven by media’s economic models that turn conflict and outrage into dollars. It is also a huge problem that this precludes much serious and honest debate about complex issues. There may be conspiracy theorists on both ends of the spectrum that gum up the works, but there is no comparison between the fake news spread on the far right and the fact-based, but uncomfortable realities on the left. I agree with Ray Schoch and Charles Holtman’s analysis and recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter Letters from an American. She follows the thread of today’s news back through American political history and validates the interpretations put forth on the progressive side of the debate. I have yet to see anything from the conservative side that can counter her research-based narrative.