13 thoughts on “Affective polarization”

1. A libertarian would thereby imply that the actual stakes (gov’t programs and subsidies, tax code, regulatory control) are important to increasing affective polarization.

   Is that true, or is affective polarization caused by issues that are not related to the real operations of government? Also, has a libertarian approach to gun control in the US compared to other countries caused us to have more or less affective polarization around guns than we would otherwise?

2. But this has nothing at all to do with the winner-take-all political system in the US.

3. People seem to be enjoying their polarities; I wouldn’t expect them to change while they’re having fun.

4. A libertarian would say that in a libertarian world, with less at stake in politics, affective polarization could be reduced.

   .

   It might be the opposite. It depends on what is meant by this ‘affective’ term, and what you mean by something being at stake in politics.

   Let’s say “at stake” refers to a concrete personal interest which will definitely be helped or harmed depending on which party takes power. In that case, you don’t love your side mostly because it’s your side, but because it is the manifestation of similarly situated members of a class organizing to promote and defend their interests. If the interests stayed the same but the parties flipped positions on that matter, the individual still has the same interest at stake, and might flip too.

   On the other hand, when the issues are largely symbolic and, from an objective and practical perspective, more or less inconsequential, then there’s very little “at stake”, and these social psychological urges have more space for influence.

   Consider dedicated sports fans, which is often used as a example of the “tribalistic mentality”. What really “at stake”? Well, for a fan, the emotions of your side beating the other side, mostly. Bragging rights, vicarious pride, not being humiliated by the other guy’s bragging. “U.S.A! U.S.A!” But these situations still create genuinely strong, bonding feelings of common association.

   On the other hand, walk into a Las Vegas betting parlor where the pro gamblers are placing big wagers on the results. They have no love for people making the same bets, and no hate for people betting the other way. They have skin in the game, and some incentive to ignore these kinds of social influences and considerations which manipulate them on some psychological level into deviating from the optimal bet.

   So, the more that is actually at stake, the less the ‘affective’ whatever-it-is.

   Indeed, it’s not even clear which is truly cause and effect. Consider: what if there is a “social glue” equivalent of risk-homeostatis. That is, when members of a social group detect that there is insufficient solidarity, cohesion, comeraderie, esprit de corps, etc. then that tends to indicate too much variance of personal interests, which requires everyone getting enthusiastic about the next-best commonality. Organic homogeneity of interests produces automatic, spontaneous, and passive cohesion without the need for much emotion or maintenance.

   The less of that you have, you more you have to substitute with “tribal” enthusiasms and rivalries against an outside other, in inverse proportion to the objective and pragmatic analysis of the “stake”.

5. There is a common question asked of religious believers – how could you support Trump? A guy so often, and so obviously, immoral?

   Those (few?) reading Rod Dreher (The Benedict Option ) or other believers get the easy answer. Hillary was worse.
   The other side is worse.

   “the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines, or even to partner with opponents in a variety of other activities”

   This especially comes from the secret (not!) discrimination of colleges against hiring Rep / Christian professors. The polarization will continue getting worse until there is more balance in college professors.

   • I don’t read many religious conservative writers, but I think they should frame their position differently from ‘the other guy/gal was worse.’ Rather they should emphasize the relative unimportance of personal morality in politics. Even if the democratic nominee had been an unambiguously good person, a sincere Christian who never lied or cheated, was kind and generous, and held all the standard left wing positions, should a conservative Christian support them over Trump? Given conservative Christian values, probably not. The harm they see as following from the policies the moral Democrat would enact – the deaths of many unborn children, erosion of religious freedom, etc. – isn’t mitigated by the sincere personal morality of the person enacting then. In other words, you’re not voting for the person most likely to go to heaven, but the person who will do the least net harm.

     This may be seem hard to square with religious aversion to utilitarianism, but I don’t think it actually is. You want the most morally correct decisions to be made, regardless of the virtue or motivation of the one making them. I think that’s probably consistent with Christian moral absolutism. Interestingly, people on the left often seem to share this aversion to openly admitting to being utilitarian. They rationalize what seem like cynical, utilitarian decisions more by challenging the notion of discontinuity between politics and personal morality. E.g. a pro life politician is, by that fact, extremely sexist, even compared to a pro-choice politician who mistreats women in his personal life. Inasmuch as one’s politics necessarily reflect one’s character, the person with the right politics is almost by definition the more moral person. Conservatives implicitly argue this way too sometimes, but in a more roundabout way.

     • What’s moral at the individual level and what’s moral at the “running society level” are different things. Christians have been trying to work out this difference since Constantine. In times where church and state are more aligned, such as the Old Testament, its even more front and center (some of God’s favorite Old Testament kings are a bunch of assholes).

       It would be ideal if individuals did the “Christian thing” within the context/rules of the game set by a pragmatic utilitarian LKY type. So on say immigration Christians should follow the Good Samaritan when they encounter a refugee, but refugee policy (whether that refugee is there in the first place to be encountered) should be determined by a hard headed pragmatist.

       That’s pretty hard to set up though. Both because the Christians will see the platonic philosopher king as a hypocrite to be unseated, and unconstrained by Christian morality its pretty easy for the philosopher king to become a tyrant. There is plenty of truth to the idea that a person who conducts themselves in a moral manner as an individual is more likely to be a moral leader, but that’s insufficient by itself to be a good leader.

     • In terms of religious voters, they did in 1980 against Jimmy Carter who was the most religious President last century and that is one reason the Moral Majority using their Religion to influence identity politics.

       The biggest potential fallout of heavy Christian support for Trump is it is built in excuse for young people avoiding church. And some churches are complaining about this reality. (This really could be exaggerated hearsay but it is worth watching.) Trump is a terrible person with few morals and conservative Christian don’t care.

       (Honestly, if you polled the top 500 CEOS in 2015 of which CEO should want as President, I bet Trump would in the bottom 10%.)

       • I know a lot of very religious people who voted for Trump. And they are definitely “The Real Deal” when it comes to living a moral and upstanding Christian Life.

         There are three things that worry them.

         1) The corrupt priests in their own midst.

         https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-wva-bishop-spent-millions-on-himself-and-sent-cash-gifts-to-cardinals-and-to-young-priests-he-was-accused-of-mistreating-confidential-vatican-report-says/2019/06/05/98af7ae6-7686-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html

         To be blunt, there is a lavender mafia in their church that has turned it into a gay whorehouse. When the pro-gay side starts telling them about the damage Trump will do to religion, they look at the damage the gay/leftist wing of their church has done.

         2) They are extremely worried about religious persecution.

         This has been discussed at length and I think the case has been adequately made. I can only say that my friends have encountered real world persecution for their beliefs and it’s not just theoretical.

         3) They are very worried about raising their children to have proper sexual norms in modern society.

         Whatever you think of Trump’s sexual escapades, he doesn’t go into your elementary school and start teaching kids to be non-binary or have Drag Queen Story Hour at your library. He’s not evangelizing his personal habits.

         Even his personal habits have a certain “here’s what I’m about” honesty. As far as I can tell he’s given children and financial support to each of his bimbo wives, and been pretty up front with them what the deal was when they signed on.

         As to young people leaving the church, my experience before and after Trump is that people make up their mind to leave the church and THEN they latch onto whatever acceptable excuse is available in the broader society. “I wanted to bang my boyfriend/sleep in Sunday morning/whatever, but I can’t say that’s why I’m leaving the church so it’s because of Trump.”

6. One of the more interesting notes from the survey was that the recent reports (and new “conventional wisdom”) about political animus being so high that people hoped against inter-party marriage for their children are likely wrong. And in a way that turns out to have big implications for all this animus research.

   It turns out that most people dislike politics, and when you talk to those people about “Republicans” and “Democrats” in survey questions, they don’t think about the average person who happens to vote for those candidates or have conservative or liberal opinions in general. They are thinking of those disagreeable ideologues and the loudmouth blowhards in their lives whose self-identification centers around their political beliefs and affiliations and who are obsessed with politics and indefatigably relentless in talking about it, like those Facebook folks you complain about making constant political posts. My emphasis in the following:

   However, Klar, Krupnikov, and Ryan (Forthcoming) show that social distance measures conflate partisan animus and a dislike of politics: when people are asked about their child marrying someone from the opposing party, they assume that partisanship is a salient part of that person’s identity. When respondents were told prior to the question that the potential spouse in question is largely apolitical, their opposition falls sharply. Similarly, their opposition rises to same-party marriage when they are told the person frequently discusses politics. This suggests that part of the opposition to inter-party marriage (and other types of social distance) may be that people assume “Republicans” and “Democrats” are the extremists portrayed in the media (Levendusky and Malhotra, 2016a), rather than their more typical apolitical brethren. Alternatively, the finding may reflect the well-known association between politics and disagreement; most people prefer to be in agreeable relationships. Understanding the
   precise limitations of social distance measures is an important topic for future research.

   “An important topic for future research” translated into English means, “Uh oh, whoops, that’s a huge mistake, and all that stuff probably isn’t actually true and won’t replicate under more careful study.”

   It’s a problem with all these surveys, because the mind tends to run not to averages by to extreme, archetypal caricatures when you ask one to visualize some conceptual category. So, when you think of, say, “Packers Fans”, you don’t think of the average mild spectator, but the annoying guys screaming with the wigs and bodypaint going absolutely nuts about their fandom and who just won’t shut up about the Packers or stop posting and retweeting about them. If you are a normal fan, then even if you like the Packers, you don’t want your daughter marrying a real “Packers Fan!” because it’s going to be annoying as hell for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you like the Vikings, you don’t mind her marrying someone who merely liked the Packers an ordinary amount.

   So, most people prefer to get along and not be constantly annoyed by obsessed extremists , that’s in general, including with regard to politics.

   So, this turns out to be good news. People don’t like politics and politically-obsessed people, and they don’t really hate members of the other political team nearly as much as recent reports claimed they did.

   • +1

     Even amongst people on my side, I would vastly prefer the apolitical to the hyper political.

7. A thought experiment and a question:

   Imagine that a subset of citizens self-sort to form a voluntary UBI association. Call them Group A. Imagine also that, some adverse selection notwithstanding, there are enough high-income people in Group A to fund its UBI well. Or substitute the voluntary UBI example with voluntary single-payer health care, or any other voluntary major risk-sharing or redistributive initiative. In other words, imagine that a subset of citizens accomplish such initiatives by voluntary cooperation, instead of insisting that these ideals (1) can be accomplished only by government, and (2) can have ethical value only through what Dan Klein calls ‘the political romance of the State.’

   Would affective polarization between Group A and the rest of citizens (Group B) increase, decrease, or remain the same?

   Here is a link to Dan Klein’s article:

   https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_10_1_1_klein.pdf

8. It seems to me there is a big problem in potential bias in chosing the right framework of interpretation and in distinguishing between whether people who believe certain things and/or are angry at their political opponents are doing so for ‘good’ reasons or ‘bad’ reasons.

   The ‘bad’ reasons are perhaps those based in what people are calling ‘tribalism’ and mostly matters of favoritism, fashion, and social psychology.

   The ‘good’ reasons are maybe those based in threats of real harm to personal interests, frustration of preferences, or violation of ideological commitments.

   The danger of a social-psychology approach is that one can self-justify failing the ideological Turing Test by always dismissing any claims or behaviors are ‘merely’ those of sheep going along with their herds and respcetive sheepdogs, and not being based in fundamental differences in beliefs and matters of legitimate interests, and furthermore, if the sheep try to offer any explanation, that’s just a parroting of a popular rationalization or cover story for the true underlying ‘bad’ motive.

   Consider Obama’s infamous ‘bitter clingers’ remark, explaining away the real origins of non-progressive sentiments by reference to material and economic decline. The reaction was “He just doesn’t get it,” but a response in the vein of the “political social psychology” school would be, “No, you just don’t get yourselves.”

   How is one to tell the difference, or to know whether or not on is stacking the deck with a motivated and predetermined conclusion?

   As an example using Rauch’s “Rethinking Polarization” NA article in which he talks about affective polalization and negative partisanship. He says Americans reject compromise, and thus in effect reject governance under our system.

   Until recently, nominees for Supreme Court Justices often received near-unanimous confirmation by Senators (Ginsburg, among the most liberal Justices, 96-3. Scalia, among the most conservative, unanimous!) Today, with the nuclear option, it’s winner-take-all near-party-line votes. (Kavanaugh 50-48, Gorsuch 54-45).

   Now, is this negatively partisan, affectively political, or a perfectly rational strategy that naturally exihibits coalitional behavior given that the Supreme Court acts like a super-government and control over composition is the key to the power to completely dominate the opposition for a generation or more? Of course, so long as you have any say in the matter, you can’t compromise on whether or not you get to dominate or be dominated unless you are seriously considering political suicide.

   To take a dismissive (or condescending) attitude that these are merely phenomena of social-psychology is also necessartily to adopt a position on the lack of seriousness and validity of the underlying disputes, interests, and concerns. But on what basis?

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