Trust and Polarization

[subplotkudzu]

Yes, I’m still nattering on this.

 

Another aspect of this problem, specifically in politics (and, to a certain extent religion – especially religion that has become politicized), is the increasing polarization of American society. We don’t have to learn to trust people from other religions and the other party because we, in general, don’t spend any time with them.

There’s been a fascinating series in Slate lately called “The Big Sort”  which discusses how the last 30 years of socioeconomic trends have split us into like-minded groups. Worse, it goes into the research that the more we’re around people we agree with the more strongly we reinforce those beliefs: the way to stand out is to be even more Liberal/Conservative/Religious/Atheist/Gamer Geek than your colleagues. This raises the bar for anyone else to stand out, so they have to be even more extreme than you.

Eventually anyone who displays signs of what was once average behavior is no longer trusted, as they lack the ideological purity that the rest of the group has herded themselves into. This might be why Christopher Buckley was just cut loose from the magazine his father founded, and David Frum at National Review Online is being hammered by his erstwhile allies at The Corner: both pointed out that McCain hasn’t run a stellar campaign, and Buckley made the sin of announcing he would endorse Obama. Another National Review writer, Kathleen Parker, opined that Sarah Palin wasn’t the ideal VP candidate, and for that she has been getting hate mail from readers. One correspondent suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. Any Democrats who want to feel any sense of moral superiority over this must be reminded that their party is the long standing holder of the Circular Firing Squad award.  

As we moved next to everyone who agreed with us we all became more like…us. (“Etrigan and I made a deal that we would become more like each other. So I became more like Etrigan and he too became more like Etrigan. Don’t make deals with demons, Miss Cable.”) The middle disappeared. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has an interesting chart [scroll down a bit] that illustrates this, with the states broken up into quadrants, with conservative to moderate Bush voting measured on the x axis and moderate to liberal Kerry voting on the Y axis. The lower right quadrant, which should hold all the states where the people who voted for Bush were moderates and the people who voted for Kerry were moderates is… empty. There’s no one there. The battleground states are the ones where highly liberal and highly conservative voters share the same state. But they live in different parts of it, because the states are pretty big.

Sean Quinn, also over at fivethirtyeight.com, has been on the road visiting political offices in the swing states and learning that the goal is never to win the areas where the other party is strong – it’s to reduce your losses in the areas you’re not going to win and maximize the gains in the ones where you are. There are two ways to do this. The first is to suppress the turnout of your opposition in the other. Negative advertising often works because it convinces the moderates of the other side not to vote for you but to just stay home, in which case they didn’t vote for your opponent and you probably energized your base. This does nothing to solve my trust problem. The second, and more time consuming, is to hunt down your supporters in the areas you would otherwise abandon and get them engaged.

For all that we have sorted ourselves, very few places are 100% of one party or the other. And that gives me hope. If we can get everyone in the pre-sorted enclaves engaged maybe we can stop pushing ourselves to the outskirts and start talking to the other side. That might lead to moderation and maybe eve, dare I hope, Trust?

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I can see the kind of social process you describe. A few years ago, a group of us were having dinner after a session of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign, and we started talking about same-sex marriage, which at the time was not yet legal in California, but which nearly all of us actively supported (I think we may have had one person at the table who was neutral). And after a few minutes the one gay man present glanced around at the other tables and suggested that we change the subject. Because, you see, we were in Santee, which if not rural is an East Californian town with rural attitudes, and he had seen other people in the restaurant looking at us in an unfriendly way. And that was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the San Diego neighborhood where I live, where No on 8 signs are commonplace now.