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]

William F. Buckley's son Christopher, in a blog post explaining why he offered his resignation to National Review after a previous blog post in which he endorsed Barack Obama brought a storm of hostile correspondence to NR, commented So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me. That's rather the impression I had too.

A few years ago, I realized that without noticing it, I had decided that the Democrats were going to be the lesser evil virtually every time, and that an area that reliably voted Republican was not one I considered civilized. It was rather a shock. Then I discovered that the head of the Ayn Rand Institute had pronounced a few years ago that the only morally valid choice in the current American political culture was to vote the straight Democratic ticket. I know of a number of other libertarians who consider Obama the lesser evil, or consider the Republicans utterly hopeless.

On the other hand, the recent bailout vote revealed real fractures in the Republican Party, when a majority of Republicans in the House voting against their own president's economic plan.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

and that an area that reliably voted Republican was not one I considered civilized.

Just to be clear, are you speaking of a specific but unnamed Republican leaning area that you consider uncivilized? Or do you consider all Republican leaning areas to be uncivilized? Because one of those is a much broader statement.

And what do you use to as a benchmark for civilization? Are the Republicans not using salad forks, or are they violent anarchists?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Benchmark of civilization: Support for the Enlightenment values embedded in the United States Constititution, and in particular for keeping religion a private matter, so that no religious group can use the power of the state to impose religious or moral conformity to its faith on other religious groups, or on the nonreligious. The Enlightenment came about as a reaction to centuries of devout Christian governments making war on other governments that were not the same kind of devout Christians, and subjecting their own citizens to arrest on the bare accusation of religious dissent, to torture until they confessed, and then to punishments ranging from exile to painful death. I don't have any desire to go back, and the Republicans seem to be firmly in the grip of people who don't see anything wrong with state-imposed religion, as long as it's theirs—and when the state has the power to favor one religion over another, that's where it leads.

Touchstone issue: Abortion. Sarah Palin's stance on abortion nailed the coffin shut on any chance of my voting for McCain. I'm not quite a one-issue voter, but I consider that particular issue vitally important, and being on the wrong side pretty much rules a candidate out for me. So, in practice, I don't consider a community where the general consensus is anti-abortion to be civilized. If there are Republican-leaning areas that don't have such a consensus, I'll make an exception for them.

As I said, it startled me to realize that my views had shifted so far. But then, my actual views have not changed; I still hold the same beliefs and values I had when I thought the Republicans were the more civilized party. It's the Republicans who've changed.