Those who like their own party least, often loath the opposition most. I will refer to this as the defensiveness hypothesis.
Tyler Cowen’s post put me on the trail that ended with this paper.
Suppose you identify with one party, but you find that increasingly you do not like what the party is doing. You might think that your response would be to tone down your partisanship. But instead, you dial up your opposition to the other party. This approach avoids the cognitive dissonance that otherwise would result from supporting a party that is not doing what you like.
that’s a way too phsycological an explanation
political parties (especially in a two parties system) are moderate in rhetoric AND practice because they represent the weighted sum of all party members opinion + voter opinion + public opinion + reality
the people within the party most unhappy with this moderate position are the extremists of the party
by a strange coincidence those people also hold the worst opinion about the policies of other parties
There’s also an obvious selection effect here.
Call opinion of Party X “x”, and opinion of Party Y “y”, giving them numbers from 0 to 1. Imagine that (x,y) is uniformly distributed on the unit square – in other words, opinions of the population as a whole are completely uncorrelated, i.e. no “defensiveness” is occurring.
Suppose that someone will belong to X if x is greater than y, or to Y if y is greater than x, and look at the opinions *within* a single party, say X. For those party members with x=z, the average value of y is z/2! So if you love your party then your opinion of the opposition reflects the moderate opinion of the population as a whole, but if you dislike your party then you are relatively likely to *hate* the opposition. This, despite the fact that x and y were still generated completely independently, because people with higher opinions of Y are more likely to simply *become* members of Y.
Let’s say there are three countries, a giant A, and big B, and a small C. A is preparing to attack B, which it dislikes, and C, which it loathes with the heat of a thousand suns. A could trounce C, but also easily defeat B, if it fought either one at a time. It may be able to beat them even allied together, but it’s not certain. So, B and C become shaky allies by necessity in a marriage of convenience.
However, B and C also don’t like each other very much. Even if the alliance prevails, C knows B will dominate the post-war order, and will do many things that C hates, to include throwing some of C’s priorities under the bus in any attempt to make peace with A. But C is stuck either way: it has no good options, and must choose the lesser of two evils: Civil Domination by B or Sadistic Eradication by A.
In such circumstances, what it the optimal emotional disposition for C if not to suppress the animus towards B for the sake of comity and alliance, and allocate all motivating-antipathy towards A?
All of this is something distinct from ordinary “cognitive dissonance”. It is the instinctive mental and emotional process by which any loose and imperfectly-aligned federation comes together for the sake of cooperation and mutual interest, especially defense from a common enemy.
It seems that our society’s situation and the techniques of political coordination have evolved to the point where many people on various sides can be convinced to imagine they are in C’s situation, even though it would be impossible for everyone to be underdogs in that way. It’s like overbooking an aircraft and everyone thinking they are going to be on the flight.
But there is no symmetry to this particular political delusion. Groups on the left are hypersensitive and hallucinating, and groups on the right are, if anything, ennervated and insufficiently alarmed at the real precariousness of their situation.
“In such circumstances, what it the optimal emotional disposition for C if not to suppress the animus towards B for the sake of comity and alliance, and allocate all motivating-antipathy towards A?”
If B is the Republican Establishment and C is Trump’s “Populist” constituency, superficially, this model does not seem to be holding – C has as much animus as ever toward to the leaders of the Republican Establishment (McConnell, Ryan, Romney, etc.).
But, as is often pointed out, the Trump administration, notwithstanding the noises made by Trump himself, has governed mostly in accord with the GOP Establishment’s donor-driven agenda. Not much has come of the “populism” and “nationalism” Trump ran on (to the limited extent he was running on any substantive platform). Trump has pretty much given up not just on the Wall but on increasing border enforcement, and he recently touted increasing H-2B visas in the omnibus at a rally. There is no talk of legislation to reduce the level of legal immigration. US military involvement in the Middle East, including the by-now utterly pointless intervention in Afghanistan, goes on. Meanwhile, Trump’s “achievements,” such as they are, are what one would have expected from a Jeb! administration – tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments of Federalist Society types.
In spite of the foregoing, Trump’s base shows no signs of turning against him, and is apparently not interested in hearing him criticized for failing to deliver on what were supposed to be their priorities (or for anything else). On the contrary, the base is most incensed against Trump’s one cabinet-level appointment who is actually committed to the “populist” agenda – Jeff Sessions – for failing to save Trump from the “Russian” mess he brought on himself.
This leads me to conclude that Trump’s significance is to provide a new public face to the unchanged GOP Establishment agenda, in an era where the old Reaganite rhetoric has lost its power to move the GOP’s electoral base of middle class, non-metropolitan white voters. An entertaining distraction to reconcile GOP voters to a GOP Establishment that is, as ever, uninterested in addressing their problems. In other words, a new front for the same old racket.
But, of course, the B/C coalition of the GOP Establishment and its voting base is still losing to A (the Progressive Establishment and its various constituencies) and seems headed to permanent defeat. Which the McConnells, Ryans and Koches seem uninterested in averting.
Meh. Elections are like economies. Just as we would rather economists disaggregate rather than aggregate, so too should we have a preference for disaggregating politics.
Why ‘t not just buy the whole macro-polarization theory? Because it doesn’t take into account micro-election decisions. As Alabama demonstrated, polarization doesn’t control everything.
And, despite rumors to the contrary, split-ticket voting is still common. There were more ticket splitters in 2016 than in 2012, with Republicans more likely to split tickets than Democrats. A Mac Tan piece on split-ticket voting over at Quora states “18% of voters voted for a different party for the House than they did for the presidency, and a whopping 36% voted differently for the Senate than they did for the presidency (and this is excluding California, where the two choices for Senate were both Democrats).”
Who splits tickets? The Mac Tan Quora piece states”One characteristic that is associated consistently with split-ticket voting? Interest in the news. Those who express “hardly any” interest in political news are less likely to split-ticket vote in both Senate and House elections than those who express more interest in the news. This may or may not be consistent with political science literature connecting engagement with politics and strength of partisan belief, depending on your perspective. On the one hand, those who pay less attention to the news might be less likely to pick up on partisan cues and might therefore be less likely to vote straight-ticket, in which case this finding is pretty surprising. On the other hand, those who pay less attention to the news might rely more on the the little letter next to the candidate’s name to decide on their vote due to their lower knowledge about issues, policy, and/or candidate characteristics, in which case this finding is totally consistent.”
Anarchists the most hostile, they never agree on anything. Libertarians the kindest, they all agree on nothing.
Six ideas to de-politicize the American campus