Today’s Tom Edsall compendium in the New York Times of political science research on the current state of political polarization features some quotes from yours truly, including the quote in the headline.
Many of you (but not all!) know that my buddy Marc Hetherington and I have written two books about the nature of the American political divide. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, a more academic work, came out in 2009. An updated and commercial version of that work, Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide, came out in 2018.
(and for the cliffsnotes version, here’s me talking to Fareed Zakaria in 2016 about our work).
So, it was nice to see that Marc and I bookended today’s Edsall column. Here’s what Marc said at the top:
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:
Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be —challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.
The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,
is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.
And here’s my punchline quote:
Where does all this leave us going into the 2024 election?
Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided the following answer by email: “When partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people’s basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans.”
Weiler cited poll data showing:
In 2016, 35 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral than Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral. In 2022, those numbers had jumped dramatically — 63 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral, and 72 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral.
In this context, Weiler continued:
It’s not that the specific issues are unimportant. Our daily political debates still revolve around them, whether D.E.I., abortion, etc. But they become secondary, in a sense, to the gut-level hatred and mistrust that now defines our politics, so that almost whatever issue one party puts in front of its voters will rouse the strongest passions. What matters now isn’t the specific objects of scorn but the intensity with which partisans are likely to feel that those targets threaten them existentially.
I sent a slightly longer email to Tom, responding in part to a list of issues he included that are now intensely contested, so I’ll include here what was left out of the Times:
On the one hand, we've long heard from politicians that the upcoming election is "the most important of our lifetime." That kind of stakes-raising is not new, in and of itself. But, as we've been writing about for years, when partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people's basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans. In 1976, the average feeling thermometer rating Democrats assigned to Republicans was close to 50, on a scale where 100 is very warm feelings and 0 is very cold feelings. Republicans responded similarly. By 2016, each party's partisans rated the other party a 30. And by 2020, it was under 20. (and then the Pew information quoted above)
Below the quote above about issues being secondary, I added: ”Trump's recent striking comment to a room full of supporters, after getting big applause about putting his foot down, re: transgender rights - when Trump himself said that most people in the room didn't even know what that was six years ago - was illustrative in this regard. “
(I would add that the fact that the likely GOP nominee is an election denier who won't accept defeat or willingly leave office is without precedent. So, that's a pretty high stake.)
There has long been a furious debate inside and outside academia about whether these kinds of analyses reduce our conflict to a both-sides analysis. I think my writing on this substack makes clear where I stand on that issue. At the elite level, as I’ve repeatedly written, many GOP officeholders have devolved to a level of extremism and reality-denial that does not have an equivalent on the Democratic side. To take a paired example, AOC is one of the most liberal members of Congress. She’s not in general denial about reality. Paul Gosar, on the other hand, is. There’s no Democratic equivalent of a wholesale refusal to accept the results of a presidential election, spearheaded by the party leader himself.
But there is value in trying to make sense of why ordinary people think the way they do about politics. People may (many do) think that Marc’s and my analysis of those questions is reductive, tendentious, etc. But we are trying to understand how and why it is that so many Americans have become so *emotional* about politics in ways that were less true a generation or more ago.
Again, non-troll-y comments welcome.
Interesting insight. Thanks!