Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree? The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs. If we see others as decent human beings, then we have to consider how they arrived at a point of view that differs from our own, and even consider the possibility that they could be at least partly correct. But instead, if we regard them as driven by evil motives, then we feel no need to give their actual arguments any sort of fair hearing. Demonizing them saves us the hard work of listening and the emotional challenge of self-doubt.
It’s a short essay offering some of the psychological insights included in The Three Languages of Politics.
One aspect of polarization is the most political positions are close or at the median voter with the assumption the median voter inherently has some contradictions to it. But polarization is strong because we have minor changes in government policy sound bigger than they are. Increased immigration doesn’t possibly lower working class wages $.25/hour (my guess here) but Immigrants are The Great Replacement!
1) Look at many of battles such Immigration with about 1M new immigrants, increased border control, and DACA protections. Mileage may vary but I bet this is fairly close to median voter. (In terms of contradiction, voters want better illegal immigration but don’t want prosecute employers of illegal immigrants which is much better method.)
a) So Immigrant restricts don’t claim possibly lower working class wages $.25/hour (my guess here) but Immigrants are The Great Replacement!
b) My open borders don’t claim some positive benefits of Immigration (labor supply in certain areas, etc.) but Trump is Rascist separating children!
2) The other reason why polarization is cultural issues free! So Trump asks Israel to restrict Omar and Tlaib which long term means and costs nothing, but the claims are huge.
Demonizing opponents also serves group binding — it’s a way of signaling to others in the tribe that you’re a loyal member. Living in Ann Arbor, I see this among lefty neighbors all the time. I also see it among some conservative, rural relatives of mine, though it seems a little gentler there (the progressive neighbors think conservatives are evil, the conservative relatives think progressives are fools). In neither case do I join in and I know I’m regarded with some suspicion in both groups.
That lines up with my experiences, though less symmetrical ( I live in one of the ‘bluest’ places in the country) and I avoid discussing politics like the plague, and its so ubiquitous a topic it’s hard to avoid without arousing suspicion.
I’ve actually had friends on the left who know my libertarian leanings express dismay at my refusal to join in and play along. They seem to think it’s actually a constructive form of social bonding, which I find rather amazing given their opposition to nationalism. What exactly makes binding over mutual hatred any more constructive or less dangerous in the context of domestic politics than in the context of nationalist out-group antipathy? If common hatred of some broadly defined out group is necessary for a sense of community, then Carl Schmitt was right about human nature, and the progressive project is doomed in any case, as I suppose is any project that doesn’t involve perpetual internecine warfare.
But, why does it matter so much if we’re wrong, especially in politics?
If we’re talking about plumbing, we are pretty good at considering we might be wrong and trying to figure out the right way to fix something.
Is it a matter of having skin in the game? If you get plumbing wrong, you flood your house. If you get politics wrong, you don’t have to clean up the mess.
Also that the mess largely affects OTHER people’s lives.
A lot of people are passionate about politics because there’s one single issue that everyone gets to vote on that has a major impact on their life (or had a major impact in the past), so they’re at the mercy of 99% of other voters who are voting without regard for the way that one issue impacts that small minority’s life. That lack of control makes people more anxious about how other people are going to vote.
I don’t know, I suspect that how anyone one meets drives (e.g. even slightly too slow), talks (e.g. long winded or unclear), blows their nose, washes their hands, etc. has a greater expected impact on one’s life than how they vote. I think it’s either an innumeracy problem (people can’t really intuitively grasp how small the impact of a person’s vote is), or it’s seen to indicate their moral character, regardless of its effect, which I don’t think is remotely warranted either. Take a bunch of ordinary, morally decent people, put them through different life experiences as variant as the broad array that exist in reality (people’s views are for better worse largely colored by personal experiences), then throw a bunch of complex puzzles at them with countless trade offs faced at each step, and they will probably favor a wide variety of different strategies, each of which may strike a great many other participants as thoroughly counterintuitive.
Demonizing is a short cut.
Take for example fraud in economics, economists knowing their assumptions do not apply, but they produce the fraudulent result anyway. At some point, their theory becomes religion and they get demonized. It is simply a short cut since the debate with religious folks goes no where, and some of these economists are simply religious.
There is another possibility to explain increased political acrimony, which is that many contemporary controversies are more personally salient with direct, concrete and unavoidable impacts, and less diffused, abstract, and indirect than in the past. Additionally, objection to proposals is now more often met with dismissive accusations of bigotry than with counterargument, which makes engagement hopeless. That’s the most important ‘demonization’ breakdown in norms of political interaction.
Let’s consider two political subjects: welfare and public education.
Let’s say two affluent college graduates (i.e., members of the politics chattering class) are arguing about how generous welfare benefits should be, whether they should be in the form of checks or in-kind merit goods and services, or even part of a UBI program. However implemented in policy, those “differences of opinion” will probably not be perceived as being likely to have much direct impact on either of their personal lives except for some obscure impact on tax rates (similar to the vague impact on increasing prices of environmental, safety, labor, and other regulations).
These two won’t collect welfare, few if any people they care about will ever collect anything except unemployment, and they will live their lives mostly segregated from welfare recipients. Yes, there will be some accusations of greed, heartlessness, or naivete, but it’s easier to remain civil and even amicable about what feels to be merely different opinions or preferences when it doesn’t “hit home”.
But then think about something like AFFH and other efforts to place low income people in higher income neighborhoods. All of a sudden the prospect of direct harm to legitimate and substantial personal interests comes into play. The debate is no longer just about third parties, but about what the other side will do to one’s own life if they obtain power.
Likewise with public schooling. The debates about, say, funding levels can be more polite and don’t generate much passion. But contrast that with three recent stories out of New York City, with the redrawing of the catchment area for certain desirable public schools to include a lot of underperforming low-income students, which filled the public meeting halls with angry parents. Or with schools chancellor Carranza’s official policy of anti-white hostility (cf. California’s thankfully tabled obscene proposal for a mandatory “ethnic studies curriculum”), or dumbing down the SHSAT / imposing race-quotas on the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. In the Obama administration, there were the initiatives to force transgender policies down the throats of local schools, as well as subjecting school discipline to disparate impact analysis. Finally consider the uproar (and indeed, mild panic) over the school busing subject which was brought up in the recent Democrat nomination debates.
All of these “hit home”. Hard. If you are against any or all of that, and someone is absolutely determined to impose them upon you and your kids, and who will write you off as a bigot if you object (and escalate with reputation ruination if you continue to do so), then you are absolutely going to treat that person as a threat and enemy and not just as some friendly neighbor with a different opinion on speed bumps.
Strategy for unpolarizing yourself:
Try going against your tribe, vocally, on one or two major issues where you think the doctinaire position is a bit off.
Another possible strategy, which I think has the added benefit of ‘depolarizing’ one’s interlocutors (if perhaps only slightly): avoid polemics, and stick to argumentation. E.g. ‘I think x is the right policy because…’ as opposed to ‘I think people oppose/support x because …’ (usually some variation of ‘they’re stupid and/or immoral’).
This is difficult because arguments can sometimes be thinly veiled polemic, (e.g., I support the minimum wage increase because I don’t want pot people to starve/oppose abortion because I oppose killing babies’). But I think most intelligent people can – if they really want to – follow this rule and not bake assumptions they know they’re opponents don’t share into their arguments, rendering them, essentially, polemical.
And avoid discussing the topic with people who are persistently unwilling or unable to do this, since a debate between two people who cannot (or refuse to) agree on which premise(s) they diverge is probably bound to be fruitless.
I think one of the major differences is that people are more educated than they used to be. My political beliefs have been shaped by thousands of hours of reading and reflection. The same could be said for most people reading this, except we’ve all read different things and come to different conclusions. When we see a new book or essay about politics, our ability to learn from it is limited by the extent that we understand the reference frame of its author. Similarly, my openness to the ideas will be limited if the author’s perspective does not seem compatible with relevant facts that I know.
For example, suppose I wrote a comment about socialized medicine. There are many libertarians on this blog who have highly-developed opinions about socialism; it’s not likely that a few sentences of mine would change their opinion. Someone who has lived in Europe would likely have direct experience of socialized medicine, and that may well cause them to disagree with both what I say and with the libertarians. A nurse would have a great deal of specific health care experience that might cause him to write me off.
Short version: It is very hard to change minds because other minds are roughly as complicated as your own.
Look at you wielding pronouns like a master. Gender bias be gone! Well done 🙂
I don’t like to offend people over trivial things like pronouns. I prefer to offend them with serious disagreements, backed by evidence when possible. 🙂
Was Christ “civil” with the money changers in his temple?
Civility is good, in the right context. It’s a strategy, like any other. Some people are better at civility than others, and some are more temperamentally disposed towards it. They make good ambassadors. But not every situation calls for an ambassador. Did Lincoln call up 75,000 ambassadors in response to Fort Sumter?
What are you supposed to do when you really do think you’ve grasped the whole of another’s argument, found it severely wanting, find that person intransigent, and the issue is too important for you to ignore?
Civility can be a way to resolve situations in the best way possible. It can also be an excuse for passivity or cowardice. It all depends on the context.
Assuming we’re still talking about verbal exchanges, the case you describe is not one in which incivility is a better strategy; it’s one where all strategies fail; it’s thus hardly an argument that incivility is ever a better strategy.
The civil response would be for Jesus to have a discussion with the money changers and try to persuade them to change. Certainly, there are many instances of him doing this with sinners. I suppose a more borderline instance of civility would be one of those times Jesus screamed at someone.
Yet he does not choose these courses of action. Is it because he knew that the money changers would be unmoved by both gentle or powerful words? Is it because the sin, desecrating his temple with exploitative commerce, is particularly bad?
I guess we can’t know. Only that he found civil discourse the incorrect response to the state of affairs he found.
Similarly, the civil response Lincoln could have come up with is to just let the south go. Certainly, that would avoid all the bloodshed.
Even on the issue of Fort Sumter, it’s unlikely the federal government could hold a fort in the middle of a new south. Lincoln himself considered evacuating the fort as part of the negotiations with Virginia. Until the attack on the fort and the calling up of the 75,000 volunteers, the Upper South had not yet seceded and there was some hope that they would not secede (votes for secession had failed up to that point). One could even say that the attack was meant to provoke the very response Lincoln gave, as this would force the Upper South to get off the fence. Maybe a different way of handling it results in a Civil War against only the lower south that lasts less than a year.
Or you could just figure that this war was coming anyway, and that push comes to shove the slave states would stick together no matter how it was handled. And that the seceding states, if allowed to go free, would have been a thorn in the side of the Union forever, so you might as well deal with the problem once and for all.
He had his reasons, but civil disagreement wasn’t the be all end all of his tools of response. You could say that entire period leading up to the war was a constant example of slave power insisting on greater and greater ultimatums against those who constantly backed down:
1) Pushing a bogus war against Mexico to expand into potential new slave states
2) Constantly trying to re-write the various “compromises” as to where slavery was allowed
3) Forcing the fugitive slave act on free citizens of the north
4) Dredd Scott
5) Bleeding Kansas and the blacklisting of Northern Democrats
The planters had been playing a game of chicken over secession for decades, demanding ever more ridiculous concessions. Each time free peoples responded “civilly”. Once the game was understood, what limit to depravity of planter arrogance was there?
Civil disagreement is something that works with a good faith party. If employed against a party willing to play a game of chicken in which they consistently increase the stakes it fails.
I’m in the middle of reading “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke. She was “ABD” in psychology at Yale and became a highly successful professional poker player. “Thinking in Bets” addresses the issues raised here. In sum, she writes, human psychology is a powerful driver that purportedly leads most of us to bias our perceptions of new information to protect our own egos – attaching positive assessments to information that confirms our opinions and negative assessments to opposing information. If the theory is correct, this bias is a human trait that is very difficult to overcome except through conscious and concerted effort.