The polarization in today’s Congress has roots that go back decades - "The analysis of members’ ideological scores finds that the current standoff between Democrats and Republicans is the result of several overlapping trends that have been playing themselves out – and sometimes reinforcing each other – for decades.
Both parties have grown more ideologically cohesive. There are now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-72.
Both parties have moved further away from the ideological center since the early 1970s. Democrats on average have become somewhat more liberal, while Republicans on average have become much more conservative.
The geographic and demographic makeup of both congressional parties has changed dramatically. Nearly half of House Republicans now come from Southern states, while nearly half of House Democrats are Black, Hispanic or Asian/Pacific Islander...
Five decades ago, 144 House Republicans were less conservative than the most conservative Democrat, and 52 House Democrats were less liberal than the most liberal Republican, according to the analysis. But that zone of ideological overlap began to shrink, as conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans – increasingly out of step with their caucuses and their constituents – either retired, lost reelection bids or, in a few cases, switched parties. Since 2002, when Republican Rep. Constance Morella of Maryland was defeated for reelection and GOP Rep. Benjamin Gilman of New York retired, there’s been no overlap at all between the least liberal Democrats and the least conservative Republicans in the House. In the Senate, the end of overlap came in 2004, when Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia retired. Ever since, the gaps between the least conservative Republicans and least liberal Democrats in both the House and Senate have widened – making it ever less likely that there’s any common ground to find. The ideological shifts in the congressional parties have occurred alongside – and, perhaps to some extent, because of – geographic and demographic shifts in their composition."
Lies and Violence - "Hannah Arendt wrote extensively on the psychology of totalitarian regimes. One of her foundational ideas was, of course, the banality of evil. Nazi leaders like Adolf Eichmann, in Arendt’s view, were not obvious monsters but bureaucrats—bland, eager to support the cause, and ready to look away when instructed to do so. Many take this observation as a warning that we should be vigilant in pointing out injustices and rooting them out. We should, but that’s only half the answer. Too often, while we use morality as a bludgeon to chastise our enemies, we fail to hold our own tribe to the same standard. If we have reached the point of mob violence in American streets, it is because we have turned our heads for too long in our eagerness to support a cause. My concern is that we do this because we have previously ignored unjust, audacious descriptions of people with whom we disagree as fascists, Hitlers, and people who “don’t deserve empathy.” Another anti-totalitarian philosopher, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, wrote that violence “demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” It would be fruitful for all of us to recognize that a lie of omission is a lie nonetheless."
We're not all going to get along - by Lakshya Jain - "Nobody in America takes politics more personally than young liberals. In our inaugural survey for The Argument, we sought to measure just how integral politics were to people’s lives and identities. When we asked participants whether it was ever acceptable to cut off a family member over their political views, 75% said no. When it came to the same question, but for friends, 70% also said no. But beneath the surface-level consensus that close relationships should transcend politics lurk deep divides by both ideology and age. Young people, and especially young people who lean left, were much more likely to say it was acceptable to freeze out friends or family members. Ideological segregation is a real problem for liberalism, and every indication is that it’s getting worse...
Liberals are more likely to cut people off over politics. Percentage of respondents, by ideology and vote choice, who think it is ever acceptable to cut off family or friends over opposing political views
The patterns were even starker when we broke results down by age. Among liberals under 45, 74% thought it was OK to end a friendship over politics. When it came to all other ideological groups we looked at, fewer than half agreed. But notably, young moderates and conservatives were still much more likely than older ones to say they’d end relationships over politics."
At this stage, we have so much evidence that left wingers are more intolerant that it's like the Law of Gravity. Of course, left wingers cope was copious
How Democracy Faces a Rising Threat Splitting Republicans and Democrats - The New York Times - "This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is onbrica... the two parties have not only become more ideologically polarized — they have simultaneously sorted along racial, religious, educational, generational and geographic lines. Partisanship has become a “mega-identity,” in the words of the political scientist Lilliana Mason, representing both a division over policy and a broader clash between white, Christian conservatives and a liberal, multiracial, secular elite."
Naturally, they don't talk about the contempt that liberals have for conservatives, and what role that might play in polarisation, and the article was mostly about bashing Republicans
J.D. Tuccille: Politicians must shoulder much of the blame for America's political violence - "Reporting on the assassinations in Minnesota, the BBC turned for comment to Jenna Stocker, editor of Thinking Minnesota, a political publication in a state that’s known for its niceness . According to Stocker, “Some people even here in Minnesota have really let politics guide their thinking and how they feel about their neighbours, their friends and their relatives,” and this has fractured society and driven people into hostile camps... Stocker is right that political partisanship is dominating people’s identities and poisoning relationships. A study published in February in the journal Political Psychology reported that, in America, “Political identity outweighs all other social identities in informing citizens’ attitudes and projected behaviours towards others.” That is, being a Republican or a Democrat is more important to Americans than shared racial, religious or class identities. Interestingly, the researchers also found that hostility towards political opponents motivates people more strongly than loyalty to their own side. Anger drives political polarization, and Americans can see the results in the arson attacks, bombings, shootings and riots throughout the country... After the Minnesota killings, NPR reported that threats against federal lawmakers have soared in recent years. “Members from both parties have repeatedly called for Congress to allow lawmakers to spend more money on personal security,” noted NPR. Frankly, though, while no one should be targeted by violence, it’s difficult to care much about the security of government officials who have played a key role in spurring it on. Democrats unleashed the power of the state on political enemies with politicized prosecutions of then-candidate Donald Trump and pressured the banking industry to deny financial services to their opponents. As the American Civil Liberties Union warned in defence of the National Rifle Association, “The NRA has a right, like all other advocacy organizations, to pursue their mission free from reprisals by government officials who disagree with its political viewpoint.” Returned to office, Trump’s Republicans followed suit by targeting the opposition press and suspending the security clearances of law firms associated with the Democratic party. “Punishing firms for their choice of clients or the nature of their legal work cannot help but intimidate the legal community, discouraging attorneys from taking on cases that may be politically unpopular or present a challenge to those in power,” cautioned the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Meanwhile, American government has become so large, intrusive and punitive that many Americans believe they can’t afford to lose elections. We now must ask permission of officialdom to start businesses, take certain jobs and renovate our homes. Politicians raise the political stakes and abuse their authority to punish critics. They tell their followers that opponents are “ deplorables ” or “ enemies of the people ,” “ fascists ” or “ communists ,” and far too many take them seriously. The results, in a growing number of cases, have been violent , bloody and tragic... Turning down the political heat would be a welcome change. The best way to start would be to make the government less important and easier to ignore"
Kevin Bass PhD MS on X - "I was a lifelong Democrat. I thought most conservatives were ignorant or evil or lying. I believed almost everything written in the New York Times, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. I was horrified when conservatives criticized the authorities. Every criticism I saw: I thought all of it was motivated by animus, resentment, self-interest, or ignorance. Whatever truth there might have been in the criticism, I saw as a mere "half-truth": an exploitation of this or that cherrypicked fact being weaponized. Why did I see it in terms of weaponization? Because I was biased: I saw liberal establishment institutions and figures as fundamentally good, so all criticism of them was automatically interpreted as being in bad faith. Didn't the critics know that these institutions or figures were fundamentally good? If they didn't, they were ignorant. If they did, they were evil. It was that simple. This meant that any legitimate criticisms would just be dismissed, as if bouncing off of an impenetrable bulletproof shield. This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn't understood what I had been judging. I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn't human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent "unprofessional behavior", which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school's own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment. But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, "Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood." I wasn't. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn't imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind. When I was dismissed, I was broken. But I had help from friends who helped me understand what happened. And I came to realize that a hysteria had overtaken the left. I spent a lot of time reading about show trials, about witch trials, and so on. I also connected with people who had experienced similar things and came to realize that something similar had happened to hundreds of physicians around the country. My story wasn't unique. It was all the same story over and over again. I cannot believe the person I once was. I cannot believe that I could exist like that. I still don't understand how I could be like that, or how millions of people in this country could continue being like that. It disturbs me greatly. One thing I know is that whatever this thing is that is driving people crazy needs to be destroyed. It is hostile to civilization and to our humanity. It causes us to dehumanize each other and try to destroy each other. It is the very same monstrous thing that I once attributed to conservatives. But it had been inside me, and I could now see it inside others. This is something I still grapple with."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Why are politics and political discourse so heated and dysfunctional in the US? Partly because it's the true believers and hyperpartisan who are the most engaged online and in the voting booth."
Young Democrats more likely to despise the other party - "Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn't be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans... 5% of Republicans said they wouldn't be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats... Women are more likely than men to take a strong partisan stance in their personal choices."
So much for "empathy", as well as women being more "empathetic"
Almost half of Americans have stopped talking politics with someone - "Six-in-ten liberal Democrats (60%) say they have stopped talking politics with someone because of something they said. That number is substantially larger than the segment next likeliest to drop the subject with someone – conservative Republicans, at 45%. In another area of difference, half of white Americans have stopped talking politics with someone, compared with roughly one-third of black and Hispanic adults. And those who say they rely most on local TV for their political and election news are far less likely to have stopped talking with someone about politics than any other group, such as those who mostly get this news through news websites or cable TV... Examined by party, Democrats and independents who lean Democratic are more likely to have stopped conversing with someone about politics because of something they said than Republicans and independents who lean Republican: 50% vs. 41%, respectively. But an even more striking contrast emerges from ideological groups within each party. A high-water mark of 60% of liberal Democrats say they have stopped talking politics with someone, compared with 41% of Democrats who are moderate or conservative... These findings are in line with earlier research the Center conducted in 2014. That report found that those identified as “consistent liberals” were more likely than “consistent conservatives” to see political opinions on Facebook that were not in line with their own views. But they were also more likely than consistent conservatives, by a margin of 44% to 31%, to block or defriend someone because they disagreed with something that person posted about politics... The closer people follow political and election news, the more likely they are to say they have stopped talking to someone about it"
Related: Who Doesn’t Want to Hear the Other Side’s View? | by Noah Carl | Medium
America's polarization problem - "Only 29 per cent of Americans would be willing to help someone who “strongly disagreed with me or my point of view,” according to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer. Even fewer — 23 per cent — would be willing to live in the same neighbourhood with those who disagree and just 20 per cent would be willing to have them as co-workers. “Ideology becomes identity” is how Edelman summarizes the findings. That aversion to cross-partisan connections has real-world consequences. During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to Pew Research, roughly four-in-10 registered voters who supported either Democrat Joe Biden or Republican Donald Trump said “they do not have a single close friend who supports the other major party candidate.” Two years later, one-in-five Americans polled by the New York Times and Siena College said that political disagreements had a negative impact on their friendships and family relationships. This makes it even harder to bridge political divides that are already deepening because of the odd correlation between partisan affiliation and lifestyle preferences. Pew Research finds that liberal Democrats tend to like urban, walkable communities, while conservative Republicans prefer larger homes in exurban and rural settings. Given the opportunities provided by a prosperous country and the growing acceptance of remote work, many people can move to places where they can live the way they want, inadvertently reinforcing political divisions in the process. “America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer,” notes a 2022 National Public Radio story. “People appear to be sorting.”... “Americans have a deeply distorted understanding of each other. We call this America’s ‘perception gap,’ ” observes More in Common, which has conducted studies about political polarization in the U.S. “Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents as reality hold views they consider ‘extreme.’ ” So, people are ill-informed, right? They need to follow the news more and open their minds to how the real world functions. Except that More in Common “found that the more news people consumed, the larger their perception gap.” Likewise, “the more educated a person is, the worse their perception gap” — though this only holds true for Democrats. More in Common speculates this is because educational credentialing contributes to the echo chamber effect for those on the left: “Highly educated Democrats are the most likely to say that ‘most of my friends’ share their political beliefs. The same is not true of Republicans.”... While family bonds tend to weather political disagreements pretty well, “a whopping 45 per cent of extreme liberal identifiers have ended a friendship over politics — twice the figure of their conservative counterparts,” wrote Samuel J. Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). And while all Americans are likely to prefer socializing with like-minded people than with political opponents, the right tends to cross lines more often than the left. Fifty-three per cent of Republicans report having Democrat friends, compared to 32 per cent of Democrats claiming Republican friends, according to AEI’s Survey Center on American Life... As people move to be among those who share their lifestyle preferences, their cultural values and their political affiliations, they create an opportunity to reduce friction with Americans they view as enemies. If governance and policy are made more local, decided and implemented by those who overwhelmingly share similar preferences, they’re less likely to contribute to disputes with people who live elsewhere and govern themselves by different rules. Of course, that would require Americans to look for solutions rather than seek access to the government power to torment their opponents. That may be too big an ask for the U.S. in 2024."
This adds to the tons of evidence that liberals are more intolerant than conservatives
Sean Speer: The more radical the progressive left becomes, the more the right reacts - "too few commentators and columnists are prepared to recognize how much left-wing politics has been radicalized in the past decade or so. Understanding these recent ideological and political developments on the left strike me as a key part of making sense of what’s currently happening on the right. Most online critics seemed unwilling to consider the basic idea. Their argument seemed to be that the Republicans in the United States and conservatives elsewhere in the Anglosphere have merely gone bonkers in isolation. Any effort to try to understand these trends as part of a dialogue between the left and the right amounted to excusing conservative excesses. Yet the idea that left-wing politics haven’t become more radical in recent years just belies the facts. Compare Justin Trudeau’s progressivism to Jean Chrétien’s relative centrism. Or compare the Biden administration to the Obama administration in which the current president served as the vice-president. Their differences are notable across a range of issues from to public spending and the role of government to deeper cultural questions about race, gender and sexuality. We’ve witnessed a marked ideological transformation on the left in a short period of time. There’s plenty of polling that points in this direction, but one doesn’t require data to observe these trends. You can see it in the political trajectory of individuals and even the use of language. That these seemingly radical ideas tend to concentrate in elite institutions — including corporations, news media and universities — only reinforces their pace, intensity and reach across the broader society. Take Barack Obama for example. Then-candidate Obama ran against Hillary Clinton’s broadly-centrist politics in the 2007-08 Democratic primary race as a left-wing insurgent. He distinguished himself on a number of progressive issues — most specifically, of course, the war in Iraq. But barely a decade later former president Obama has gone from being a figure on the left edge of Democratic politics to now being an increasing outlier on the other side of his own party. His 2007-08 positions on immigration, gay marriage and the importance of family stability and personal responsibility would now be viewed as microaggressions by those who occupy the new centre of gravity of left-wing politics. These trends are also evident in shifting language. As examples, Merriam Webster added the singular “they” to its online dictionary in September 2020 and the Biden administration recently replaced “mothers” with “birthing people” in various public health guidelines. These linguistic developments started on the fringe of academic and activist rhetoric and have since come to be represented in mainstream institutions including the National Institutes of Health and the New York State Department of Health in the United States and in high-profile research at Montreal’s McGill University or news reporting at the CBC. We have almost imperceptibly experienced a marked shift in the centre of political debate in Canada and the United States on a number of key cultural and social questions. It’s almost as if the right had been mistakenly fighting rearguard intellectual battles about taxes and government spending while the left was advancing without much resistance to redefine a broad set of cultural norms and practices. The key point here is that the most underscrutinized political story of the past decade or so is the extraordinary shift in left-wing politics. These ideological trends — particularly with respect to race, gender and sexuality — have essentially crowded out the old, moderate voices in progressive politics and in so doing reshaped the overall political and cultural climate. Depending on one’s perspective, these developments may or may not represent progress. But it seems odd to think that they would have no effect on conservative politics."
Why Societies Need Dissent - "In his latest work, Why Societies Need Dissent, Professor Sunstein casts new light on the fundamental importance of freedom of speech and shows us that nations are far more likely to prosper if they allow their citizens the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and dare to challenge the unchallengeable... when like-minded people are sitting with one another, they end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk...
There seem to be three things occurring: 1) The argument pool. If you have a group who believes that corporate misconduct is pretty bad, in a case in which, say, babies’ pajamas caught on fire, there will be a large number of arguments to that effect and not many arguments the other way...
2) The link among confidence and extremism... Any law professor knows that if you’re dealing with first-year students and want a certain answer, you frame the preferred answer as the middle of two poles...
3) Reputation and people’s self-conception. It turns out that people don’t want to be different from everybody else or the same as everybody else. They want to have a relationship to others which goes in the right direction and to the right degree...
The recent report about the Challenger disaster is about just this. The report says that NASA didn’t have any system of checks and balances, that there was a march toward consensus that was part of the culture, that safety issues were consistently downplayed, and that dissenters were effectively silenced, not through the law but through social norms, which made people feel embarrassed if they raised their doubts. There are two things that can make group polarization worse, in the sense that people move more. One is if people have a high degree of solidarity with one another and identify themselves in group terms... The other thing that helps aggravate the effect is if people are antecedently extreme... In a study done of investors and investment clubs—informal associations of people—the worst-performing investment clubs are clubs in which people like each other, know each other, meet at restaurants, socialize, maybe spend a holiday or two together. They lose a lot of money and they have no dissent. The best-performing investment clubs in the U.S., in the huge study done at Brown University, involved people who don’t know each other socially, don’t get together except for this purpose, meet in an office rather than at home, appear not to like each other terribly much, and exhibit interactions highly charged with dissent. Studies of disability movements in the U.S. show that the most mobilized, effective and separatist of the many disability movements, is the hearing-impaired. They are the ones who have the strongest sense of a shared identity, who have the most political clout. The author’s speculation is that deaf people have geographical unity, they have spaces of their own, they often go to school together, so they interact. Like-minded people interact, they polarize, they end up being a unified force, which doesn’t happen for the visually-impaired or depressed people or those in wheelchairs, at least not nearly as much... The public forum doctrine ensures that each of us, if the streets and parks are places we go, will have unchosen, unanticipated encounters with people who are not like us both in their lives and in their points of view. Even though this is sometimes irritating, or worse, it does something that is not dispensable in a democracy, which is to make it impossible for people to live in gated communities of their own design, something which may be a risk for contemporary Americans, just because of what technology and resources are making possible...
During World War II, Luther Gulick, a no-longer-famous advisor to Roosevelt, wrote a boring book, called Administrative Governance in the United States. He wrote an short concluding chapters in 1948, a conclusion about the war: “Our adversaries thought democracies couldn’t fight, but they had it wrong. Democracies fight better, and the reason they fight better is that they have not just law that tolerates dissent and disagreement but a culture that insists on it.” He attributes the success of the Allies to the fact that if we made any mistakes they could get corrected, whereas for Hitler and Mussolini it just didn’t happen. So for the blunders there were no mid-course corrections, and that was, he says, a great help to us. I don’t worry in the United States about legal regulation, but in Canada even to some extent, and certainly here, there are norms of political correctness that are a problem."
From 2003. The Science is Settled! Deniers need to be exiled from polite society
