WinLoseorDraw has been reading Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein. He recommends it, highly. The author re-enforces many of the opinions expressed on this blog with scholarly and professionally conducted research. Imagine that.
WinLoseorDraw found a two page Interlude, located appropriately in the middle of the book (page 135), which summarized what Mr. Klein has written up to that point.
What follows is that two page Interlude, starting with paragraph two and with parenthetical interjections by WinLoseorDraw:
The human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference. It takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity,….. (Mr. Klein has cited studies that show any random separation of people into two non-distinct groups is all that is necessary for a group identity to take hold.) Quote continued: and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups. (Also extensively backed up by numerous valid studies) Quote continued: The deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we become to make sure our group wins. Making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everybody so long as they maximize our group’s advantage over other groups. (As in the current political environment.)
Quote continued: The parties used to be scrambled, both ideologically and demographically, in ways that curbed their power as identities and lowered the partisan stakes of politics. (Klein is referring to the political environment leading up to and including the 1950’s.) Quote continued: But these ideologically mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America’s peculiar, and often abhorrent, racial politics. The success of the civil rights movement, and its alliance with the national Democratic Party, broke the equilibrium, destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, and triggered an era of party sorting.
That sorting has been ideological. Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn’t true in, say, 1955. The rise in partisanship is, in part, a rational response to the rise of party difference—if the two sides hated and feared each other less fifty years ago, well, that makes sense; they were more similar fifty years ago.
But that sorting has also been demographic. Today, the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural, and psychological lines. There are many, many powerful identities lurking in that list, and they are fusing together, stacking atop one another, so a conflict or threat that activates one activates all. And since these mega-identities stretch across so many aspects of our society, they are constantly being activated, and that means they are constantly being reinforced.
All this is happening in an era of profound, powerful social change. A majority of infants born today are non-white. The fastest-growing religious identity is no religious identity at all. Women make up majorities on college campuses. Soon, a record proportion of America’s population will be foreign born. Groups that are rising in power want their needs reflected in politics and culture, groups that feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they’ve had, and this ve had, and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties. Obama’s presidency was an example of the younger, more diverse coalition taking power; Trump’s presidency represented (or represents) the older, whiter coalition taking it back.
(Skipping part of the next to last paragraph and continuing the quote): I want to show the feedback loop of polarization: institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on.
Polarization isn’t something that happened to American politics. It’s something that’s happening to American politics. And it’s getting worse. (End quote).
Proposal: Let’s stop identifying as one thing and not the other. The next time the ideological bus stops to let you on, just keep on walking.
Here is a paste from Wikipedia on Obama-Trump voters: “A study by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group found that 9.2% of Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016.[1] According to the American National Election Study, 13% of Trump voters had voted for Obama in 2012.[2] Some analysts have argued that these voters had a disproportionately large impact on the 2016 election because they were concentrated in key swing states in the Midwest, while others have said they were actually “Obama Republicans” rather than Democrats to begin with.[1][3] A May 2017 analysis by Global Strategy Group estimated that Obama-Trump voters accounted for more than two-thirds of Hillary Clinton’s loss.”
I suspect that polarization is over-stated and that hyperbole is one way to blast through the dense infosphere. I think polarization was worse 1968-1970, and it was objectively much worse 1861-1865.
Jim:
My first post on Why We’re Polarized covered the first half of Ezra Klein’s book. I have the hand-drafted summary of the second half of the book (The what we should do chapter) ready to go. You may find it interesting. Look for it, possibly later today.
The fact that there are Obama-Trump voters (or Trump-Obama voters) does not surprise me. It is in fact great support for much of what I have been saying in this blog. Our beloved fellow citizens have made such a mish mash of Political identity that it would be a lot better to start all over again. This problem is aggravated by one very important human trait/flaw. Once we see ourselves as part of a team, we do not get off, and we will reconfigure the facts to suit our own needs relentlessly. We are too damn loyal to our own half-baked opinions of the best way to be an American.
Now, as for your final paragraph, I disagree vehemently that polarization is “over-stated”. I agree with Mr. Klein that polarization is wildly understated in some ways. I mean that you hear many people saying that we are polarized, but people like you and me are not really hearing the message. We treat it like the wind rustling occasionally through the trees.
I completely agree with your comment about hyperbole. I have a friend who taught literature for many years, and he has taught me the value of humor and creative exaggeration. However, Mr. Klein and I are not talking about just any old kind of hyperbole. We are talking about the kind of hyperbole that butt-headedly mis-represents the facts. Mr. Klein and I agree that this mis-use of free speech happens way too much and on both sides of the political spectrum.
Mr. Klein’s thesis compares today to the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. I can’t remember any specific mention of polarization in the 1860’s, but I do think you would find his description of the 50’s-70’s and today to be very persuasive. I do.
Here is another view.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/?utm_campaign=imprimis&%3Butm_source=housefile&%3Butm_medium=email&%3Butm_content=feb2020partisandivide&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_zjiYbvYzhXoxmJ2X0WlG0CmiCJGYldvZfYVDrnslEOgM6QHKdyA0Ugh0vWXWERLjxYK2-2cdNZu8XqpkYSdVH3V9d1w&_hsmi=83394192
Jim:
Thank you for the link to the Imprimis essay by Christopher Caldwwll. WinLoseorDraw does not see it, as you have said, “another view.” Presumably you meant “another view” differing from the work of Ezra Klein expressed in the post entitled Why We’re Polarized. Even though both authors discuss polarization, Klein focuses on party polarization and Caldwell on societal polarization.
WinLoseorDraw has already summarized Mr. Klein’s perspective. For the benefit of any readers, WinLoseorDraw will do the same for Mr. Caldwell, a writer with some impressive credentials: He says that American society is split and that the causes are threefold: Working class bitterness over college deferments during the Vietnam War, new single women’s attitudes conflicting with traditional married women’s attitudes, and the backlash of reverse discrimination caused by the heavy-handed implementation of the Civil Rights Act.
Perfect corollaries to everything Mr. Klein had to say about party polarization.
Mr. Caldwell’s comment about the inequities of the Vietnam draft might very well be a source of partisan group dissatisfaction. Some veterans might see an inequitable system was at work back then and still today. That possibility is certainly worthy of further consideration.
Mr. Caldwell’s comments about the two tribes of women is interesting, although WinLoseorDraw is sure we could find lots of cross-over in both camps. Basically Mr. Caldwell is saying that the women’s movement of late, has had some negative consequences. If he says that face-to-face with some women WinLoseorDraw has the pleasure to know, he should then duck, quickly. The point is that seeing the women’s movement as good or bad, is short-sighted and polarizing either way. Well worth further discussion.
The same comment above applies equally well to a debate about the benefits and detractions stemming from the Civil Rights Act. WinLoseorDraw would say that the Civil Rights Act was totally justified and, in fact, inevitable; but he can agree with Mr. Caldwell that the implementation has also caused much in the way of injustice and, worse, partisanship and polarization. Mr. Caldwell calls the Civil Rights Act the cause of a so-called “second constitution”. He apparently believes the Civil Rights Act, or at least the faulty implementation of it, is something of a threat to our Democracy. WinLoseorDraw says, “Slay the bigger dragon first. Then go after the smaller ones.” But then we have to decide which is the bigger dragon.
Jim: The fact that you see Mr. Klein and Mr. Caldwell as having different views may indicate that you may not fully realize that the specific issues are only symptoms of the overall problem. The problem is that one half of the American populace thinks the other half is causing all the problems, and vice versa.
By the way, WinLoseorDraw regrets that he has not yet posted the second post on Why We’re Polarized. Soon to come, and he hopes you and our readers will have much to say about it.