With the 2024 election just days away, it may seem that Americans are more divided than ever. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters Opponents attack with increasingly vile words. There have already been incidents of political violence — including multiple alleged arson attacks on ballot boxes and terrorist arrests in Arizona after repeatedly shooting out windows from Democratic Party offices — and polling suggests voters are worried about post-election violence.
Elections with democracy issues and abortion rights are at serious stake — but the intense, vitriolic polarization we’re experiencing now is largely based on us. understanding of each otherAccording to research by Johns Hopkins University professor Liliana Mason.
Mason, a professor of political science at the university’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Agora Institute, says this kind of division, which he calls emotional polarization, doesn’t require us to have different policy disagreements to hate each other. Instead, he told Vox, “it’s based on feelings,” as well as misunderstandings about which group and what kind of people are on the other side.
Through a series of surveys and experiments spanning four years, Mason and Nathan Kalmo, political communication professors at Louisiana State University, studied the origins of extreme partisanship among ordinary Americans for a 2022 book, Radical American Partisanship. Mason and Kalmo found that about 40 percent of Americans surveyed were willing to use dehumanizing language about the other party — a metric they say could be a precursor to more serious political violence.
Today, explained Host Noel King talks to Mason about how the American electorate got to this point and how we can get back to more civil politics..
Below is a portion of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Noel King
You’ve written two books that seem relevant here. Name your book.
Lillian Mason
The first book is CIVIL AGREEMENT How politics became our identity. And the second book is Radical American Partisanship.
Noel King
The two major parties in the United States, the Democrats and the Republicans; As a researcher, do you know what we think about other groups that is wrong?
Lillian Mason
Everything! We all overestimate how extreme the other party’s policies are. We also tend to overestimate the groups that form groups, like the stereotypical groups associated with parties. So, Republicans think that the Democratic Party is majority black. It doesn’t. Democrats think that the majority of the Republican Party is rich people who make $250,000 a year. It’s actually like 2 percent. And so we tend to assume that the stereotypical group that we think of when we think of that party, we tend to assume that that makes up the whole party, and we’re all wrong.
And in fact, political scientists and sociologists have done experiments where we correct people’s misconceptions and it actually makes them hate the other party less because they didn’t realize that the party wasn’t made up of people they didn’t like or weren’t. Not made up of those who are truly extreme in their policy choices. We overestimate the extent to which the other group is made up of people we assume we will really dislike.
Noel King
How do you define teamwork?
Lillian Mason
The classic understanding of partisanship is which party you vote for based on your evaluation of politics. But more recently, we’ve come to think of partisanship as a social identity, meaning it’s a psychological connection to other people in the party, and what happens to our party seems to affect our own self-esteem and self-esteem. The traditional view of value is thinking of choosing who to vote for like a banker chooses to invest. And really what we’re doing today is a lot like sports fans cheering on our team.
Noel King
It is factionalism. What is polarization?
Lillian Mason
So polarization can also be two things. It may actually be more than that. But the classic understanding of polarization is that we disagree on issues. So Democrats are really liberal and Republicans are really conservative on these various issues. But increasingly, what we’re finding now is that our polarization is partly about that, but it’s also about how we feel about each other. So Democrats and Republicans don’t really like each other and we call this emotional polarization. So it is based on feelings.
And the really important thing about understanding the effects of polarization is that we don’t need to disagree to hate each other. We use theories of social psychology to explain why Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other, and you know, they don’t need to agree on marginal tax rates.
Noel King
Does the data really say that people from different groups dislike or even hate each other?
Lillian Mason
yes In fact, in my first book, I asked people how they would feel if their child married someone from the other side or how they would feel if someone from the other side moved in with them. And those kinds of questions – people don’t really like the idea of their child marrying someone from the other side. They don’t really want to socialize with people from other groups. And such sentiments are not entirely rooted in disagreement. So people who really like moderate policies can still really dislike people on the other side.
In the second book, we begin to ask more extreme questions. So we asked, “Do you think people from the other party are not just wrong for politics, they’re downright evil?” Or even, “Do they deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals?” So a dehumanization question, which is kind of the most extreme question, and we see that about 50 percent of partisans are willing to say that their partisan opponents are evil, and between 20 and 40 percent are even willing to dehumanize people. the other side
We started asking this question in 2017. The reason we asked the question is because it’s something we measure in other countries, if there’s a mass violence incident. Such attitudes already exist. It doesn’t always lead to violence, but whenever there is massive violence, you have to pre-empt these dehumanizing and degrading attitudes, because otherwise it’s really hard to harm other people and still feel like a morally good person. And really, the only way to do that is to think they’re a threat to you, they’re evil and they’re inhuman. And so when we see genocide in other places, for example, this attitude exists before the violence takes place. And what we wanted to know is, did this attitude exist among American voters? And no one has really asked this question before.
Noel King
Tell me about the kind of polarization we are seeing these days.
Lillian Mason
So what we are seeing is mostly effective polarization. So it’s basically a form of polarization that means we don’t like each other. And if you think about human groups throughout human history, there are many reasons why two human groups don’t like each other. People hate each other for all kinds of reasons. And it’s the very kind of visceral dislike and distrust that any two social groups can have against each other that we’re observing right now in the Democratic and Republican parties.
Noel King
Disagreement on policy seems to me quite natural; It seems a little less natural to me to think that a person from the other party is bad. What is it rooted in, this emotional polarization? Where did this come from?
Lillian Mason
This antagonism between Democrats and Republicans comes out of a trend over the past few decades that not only is our party identity the thing we fight for during elections, but all these other identities as well. And since the 1960s, our ethnic identity, our religious identity, all other cultural, even geographic identities have gone into alignment with our party identity. So what happens is when we think about politics and who wins and who loses, we’re not just thinking about my team winning or my team losing. We think, “If my party wins, then my ethnic party wins and my religious party wins.” And all these other parts of my identity triumph and it feels really good and vice versa. “If my team loses, so do all these different parts of my identity,” and that feels really, really terrible. So the stakes become much higher when we think about our electoral choices and who is in control of our government as a reflection of who we are as a people.
Noel King
I don’t want to live in this version of America. There is a selection to cover. How do we, in all seriousness, fix this problem?
Lillian Mason
We’ve tried a number of interventions in our survey, so we’ll embed an experiment in the survey to see if we can make people less violent or less approving of violence. And one thing we’ve found that basically always works is to read a quote from one of their leaders. So in our tests, we use Biden or Trump, a quote that just says something like, “Violence is never acceptable. That’s not the way we do things here.” And those who read this quote were less likely to approve of political violence than those who read nothing in the control condition. So just reading a sentence from a leader can make people take some sort of action from this offensive position. We have to get something back.
I think the things that have been done in the last few years — and I think Trump in particular as a candidate — have really broken the rules of what is acceptable behavior in American politics and in American society. The idea that we can use racist and vulgar language against our fellow citizens, the idea that we can lie and not be punished for it; You know, our politics today are characterized by many things that would never have been allowed on the political stage 20 years ago. And there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans who just remember a different time. And what worries me is that young people don’t. So we’re increasingly moving into this world where young people don’t know that it was nicer, more diplomatic, and so I hope that we can pay attention to the rules that are broken because the only way to enforce a norm is for people around you, when you break the norm. does, asking you to turn it off. Law is enforced by law enforcement. Rules apply to us, to people.
And shame is a powerful emotion because it’s the way we enforce rules. To the extent that together as a community, if we see someone behaving in ways that we find unacceptable, as a community we can say to them, “That’s beyond the pale, you’ve just crossed the line. I don’t accept that kind of behavior.” And we haven’t done that with each other for years, I think. But to the extent that we can remember what it’s like to be normal people and treat each other like we’re part of a community together and we’re part of the same society, it’s like that. Something we can all make our own
