Some months ago I blogged an interesting bit of research showing that partisanship is wired into a part of the brain where logic doesn’t reach. Via Aravosis, Dick Meyer at CBS News muses about that study as well as another bit of recent work showing that not only are many of us nuts, but the nuts are taking over:
According to Arthur Brooks, a professor at the business school at Syracuse University, the number of partisan brains is increasing. And they may be becoming more partisan; more precisely, they seem to hate their opponents more.
Specifically, Brooks studied polling collected by the one of the biggest and most important ongoing demographic surveys, the General Social Survey.
…In 1972, even though the country was heated up over Nixon and Vietnam, only 4.9 percent described themselves as either extremely liberal or extremely conservative. That rose to 6.6 percent in 2004, an increase of about one-third. Though the baseline percentage is small, a 30 percent increase still potentially effects a couple of million votes.
…Brooks also found a disturbing level of what he calls “personal demonization” in 2004 Another prestigious, long-running survey, the American National Election Survey, collects public opinion data using what it calls “feeling thermometers” — for example, on a scale of zero to 100, zero being the sub-human low, how do you feel about members of Congress? Or conservatives? Or liberals?
Scores below 20 are very rare. Brooks says, “No one gets zeroes, not even Hitler.”
But in 2004, lots of people gave out zeroes. They were — surprise, surprise — self-described liberals and conservatives, and they gave zeroes out to their ideological enemies
Twenty percent of self-described extreme liberals gave “conservatives” (the word used in the question) zeroes, while 23 percent of extreme conservatives gave “liberals” zeroes. So about one-fifth of the people at both ends of ideological spectrum consider those they disagree with “dead to me,” to use Tony Soprano’s words.
Surveys describe things rather than explain them so I can’t say that this explains anything in particular, but it does give some weight to what we all more or less knew already. The number of people who view their political opposition as intractable, evil and wrong definitely seems to be on the rise. On the upside, going by the article’s numbers the Randroids only amount to one to two percent of the population. On the downside, those are often the people who care enough about politics to log on and argue about it.
Postscript…If you arrived late to the whole demonization thing and want to catch up, you can start with a handy 1996 memo by Newt Gingrich. Uber-pollster Frank Luntz has also proven invaluable, enriching our discourse with gems such as the use of ‘Democrat’ as an adjective.
BumperStickerist
Your point being that Democrats can’t recognize, let alone follow, a simple, effective strategy memo for political communications when it’s handed to them?
Yeeaaaaaaaargggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Tim F.
If you want to know my point, try here. I couldn’t have written it better myself (I didn’t, honest).
Pooh
Tim, Tim, Tim. Let’s stop living in the past, and come together as a people to get Mr. Whittington a mask.
(And if you don’t get the reference, you missed the best 10 minutes of tv evah.)
ppGaz
So, one side in a two-party country sets out to declare war on the other side — literally — and make half of America out to be the enemy …. and it works, and we’re shocked — Shocked! — that “crazies” are more numerous?
What the FUCK did we expect to happen?
I’ve said it before, here, and say it again: I have no intention of surrendering America to the crazy assholes on the right. If they want a war, they will get their war.
Sometimes, people should be careful what they wish for.
The mouth breathers and the phony “christians” wanted a war. Well good for them. They got it.
Twenty six (!) percent of Americans today feel that the country is on the right track. How’s that war going so far?
Al Maviva
Yeah, ppGaz. I made you hate me. You didn’t have a choice.
So you’d better stop letting people in on my fiendish plans, or I’ll make you talk like Topo Gigio, and then force you to give me the pink slip to your car.
[Editor: Better do what he says. I think he means it…]
***Does anybody think that the rise of political hatred in the U.S. had anything to do with Joe McCarthy, and the new left’s adoption of Marcuse and Gramsci as political tacticians in the 1960’s? Nahhh. Guess not.
ppGaz
Of course I have a choice, you horse’s ass, and I choose not to be governed by you and those idiots.
Having that choice is what being an American is all about, asshole, and you aren’t anywhere near { your adjective here } enough to take that away from me.
Ancient Purple
I certainly didn’t have a choice in being called a traitor or having my patriotism questioned at every turn because I refuse to acknowledge Bush as King.
VidaLoca
I don’t: Gramsci was way to subtle, and Marcuse too opaque, to get much more than a marginal audience. I do think that in the wake of the Goldwater debacle, some extremely smart and patient people started building their careers in the ruins of Republican party. Now going on forty years later, we know some of them as Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff: all veterans of the College Republicans. Their counterparts on the left faced a debacle in McGovern’s run for the presidency in 1972 but instead of building careers in the party, they walked away from electoral politics.
That’s looking, with the benefit of hindsight, like a stupid tactical error. But I don’t see it as a cause for the rise in political hatred.
Al Maviva
Vida Loca, It’s easy to say that Marcuse and Gramsci only had fringe influences; maybe so, but the fringe that adheres to them, or seems to have adopted their methods, are opinion leaders. This includes student radicals, college professors, and the more politically active among lawyers and journalists. It appeard first on the left in the student movement, and more recently on the post-Reagan right. Ideas have consequences. On the left, I think what we are seeing is a trickle down of the proposition that civility is a tool that the capitalist oppressors use to keep everybody else down. On the right, it’s a conscious adoption of radical tactics by some activists who have seen the left’s success. I know a few fairly rabid activists here in D.C. who can cite you chapter and verse of the Frankfurt school; they actually study Gramsci and have discussed using his resistance tactics in fighting public policy battles. The effect exists, even if the books aren’t center stage in anybody’s movement any more. McCarthyism, I believe, was a tactic of a different type more grounded in old school xenophobia, capitalizing on legitimate fears combined with illegitimate prejudices to whip up the country into Five Minutes Hate. See, e.g. Dubai ports deal.
VidaLoca
Al,
My sense of the new left in the 1960’s and early 1970’s was that people looked as tacticians to Marx and Lenin, and from there on in varying degrees to Mao or Trotsky or Che Guevara. It was all heavily weighted toward ego and posturing, the signal-to-noise ratio was very low, the time spend on group infighting was high: about what you’d expect from a population composed mostly of upper-middle-class people in their late 20’s. I’d have to be persuaded that there’s a historically significant link between the political activism of that period and that of the present.
I think that the ideology did lead to the decision that electoral politics is not a worthwhile field of endeavor (because “there’s no difference between the bourgeois political parties”, yadda yadda) — which insured political impotence fourty years down the road — which is why I’m arguing that there’s mostly a disconnect between then and now.
Or maybe I was just misreading the intent of your comment that I blocked above. If you were saying that political anger among people who are more or less on the left is ideologically driven, I don’t see it. People are passionate, they look around for models to make their influence more effective, they look around for frameworks to help them understand reality (this is not a phenomenon limited to the left).
Which is why I’m curious about this:
Am I to understand that the right-wing activists are studying Gramsci? My head may explode.
Al Maviva
You are correct to understand that. A number of people in those circles see Gramsci as offering a good guide for capturing or social institutions, and for grass roots political battle. Marcuse isn’t as popular; his prose is much more turgid, although he does telegraph the intellectual left’s legal and political strategy on many culture war issues.
VidaLoca
Al,
Can you provide any links to anything these right-wing neo-Gramscians(?) have written, or any other source materials? Not that I’m questioning your veracity, I’m just really interested. And I need something to read while I go looking for the pieces of my head.
Matthew J. Stinson
Uber-pollster Frank Luntz has also proven invaluable, enriching our discourse with gems such as the use of ‘Democrat’ as an adjective.
Nah. That was pre-Luntz. Try Bob Dole, circa 1976, with “Democrat Wars.” Luntz just refined the meme.
Regardless of “who started it,” if we acknowledge that it’s fucked up our politics, a more important question is who or what will bring an end to hate-based politicking?