Political "Polarization" Was Never the Problem

Do we really need more "centrists" in a genocidal empire?

The November issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science just landed in my inbox, and with it, a piece of political psychology research that’s so out-of-touch with our current political reality that it feels like it’s from a completely different era:

In a series of three studies, psychologists Lukas Wolf & Paul Hanel surveyed over 2,000 American Republicans & Democrats about their ‘fundamental values,’ and concluded that adherents to each party actually have a lot more in common with one another than they do sources of disagreement.

This lack of a meaningful difference between the two parties is, somehow, taken by the authors to be a positive and “hopeful” finding. Bizarrely, within a political paradigm in which over five million immigrants have been deported in the past four years, trans healthcare and abortion access are increasingly restricted, and $17.9 billion has been dispatched to Israel in the past year to support bombings in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, what many liberal political analysts consider to be most important is that members of the two parties don’t disagree with one another too much.

It seems to completely elude the authors’ grasp that it’s not necessarily a positive sign for a nation’s only major parties to be in lock step with one another on virtually all substantive issues. To really determine whether “polarization” is a threat to progress or a sign of necessary rebellion, you must consider what that polarized disagreement is even about.

This is a fact that liberal commentators always ignore when they fret about the distance between conservative and liberal voters, which has supposedly been widening for the last several decades. They presume that when two groups stake out strongly opposing positions, it must inherently be a negative thing. Disagreement, after all, leads to conflict, and conflict slows down production, and so it must be bad. But if one of the leading political factions in a country is arguing for the complete eradication of transgender people from public life, for example, it is a good thing for there to be intense polarization against it.

In the present studies, Wolf & Hanel presented survey respondents with a list of potential values (such as “security,” “tradition,” and “benevolence,”) originally created by researcher Shalom Schwartz, and asked them to rate how important each value was to them on a numbered scale. Previous studies using Schwartz’ values measure found that Republicans and Democrats actually hold many of the same values in high esteem. Take this set of results for example, published by Vladimir Ponizovskiy in 2001:

For reference, the M’s in this table stand for mean, in other words the average ratings of each value among Republicans and Democrats. We can see that both Republicans and Democrats rated “security” as highly important to them, for example — the average rating for Republicans was 5.02 (out of six potential points), and for Democrats, it was 4.60. Members of both parties also rated “benevolence” quite highly, as well as “self-direction,” “universalism,” and “hedonism.”

The parties did diverge in some values — Republicans rated “tradition” far more highly than Democrats did, for example — but on the whole, Ponizovskiy found that members of both parties were pretty aligned.

In their data, Wolf & Hanel found much the same thing:

Wolf & Hanel used a rating scale with more options (ranging from -1, “Opposed to my values”, to +7, “Of supreme importance”), so their means are a bit different. But their results suggest even more similarity between Republicans and Democrats. Members of both parties rated “security” as one of the most highly important values (getting 7.71 points on average for Republicans, 6.96 for Democrats). Both parties similarly considered “benevolence,” “self-direction,” and “conservation” to be highly important. Interestingly, both Democrats and Republicans also agreed in finding “conformity” to be a highly important value — and they didn’t diverge quite so much on “tradition” as they did in Ponizovskiy’s study.

What strikes me in reading this table is how highly the respondents ranked almost every single value on offer — when asked about what matters to them in an abstract, vague way, and when not forced to choose between competing values by some practical problem, both groups endorse a great number of the same things.

After surveying Republican and Democratic participants on their personal values, Wolf & Hanel showed some of them the data from the 2021 Ponizovskiy study. The goal here was to make one subset of the study sample aware of the fact that both parties have a lot in common with one another. (Members of the control group were not shown this data). After this, all respondents were asked a series of questions about how easily they believed both parties could compromise with one another, how motivated they were to have a discussion with a political opponent, and how hopeful they were about the future, among related questions.

In their analyses, Wolf & Hanel generally found that participants who had learned that Democrats & Republicans share many values viewed their political opposition in a more favorable light. They saw more potential for compromise between the two parties, felt more motivated to engage in conversation with members of the other party, and on some measures, expressed greater hope for the future of the country and world.

“[Our] findings show why correcting misperceptions is important,” the study authors write. “…people appear to feel a sense of hopelessness because they see the country as deeply divided, and reducing the perceived division can help inspire new hope.”

Wolf & Hanel go on to write that if scientists and journalists would simply work to make the American public more aware of how much common ground they share with those across the aisle, they could limit unnecessary political conflict and reduce violent extremism. It’s a lovely idea, and a comforting one, because it supposes that the primary problem in American politics is the intensity of the disagreement between the right and the left, rather than the specific, oppressive governmental policies over which they disagree.

Under this point of view, members of the right and the left are both equally to blame for social injustice, because both sides are so “polarized” against one another they refuse to sit down for a civil discussion about potential solutions. This is quite a common viewpoint among members of the political commentating class, particularly centrist liberals, who often claim that the ‘extreme’ stances held by both the right and the left are the root of inequality and violence.

But this understanding of the world ignores that it’s impossible to have a productive or remotely “civil” conversation with someone who wants to throw you in prison for using the correct gendered bathroom, or who views the life of your cousin as completely disposable because she lived in Turkey for a while and opposes the Israeli regime. A shared appreciation for the idea of “benevolence” means nothing when your opponent sees dropping expired food rations on Palestinian heads as a benevolent act. And when the majority of both liberals and conservatives in a highly militarized police state say they hold “security” in the highest possible esteem, it’s worth questioning what their notion of security really is.

Image by Rock Starr on Unsplash.

I’m a political psychologist by training — most of the published, peer-reviewed research from earlier in my career is about the problem of political intolerance and close-mindedness. In the 2010’s when I was doing this research, I was a liberal, and like most liberals I considered the American public’s intolerance of competing perspectives to be one of the most important issues of the age. I thought that if people would only stop fighting with one another and trying to score short-sighted political points, they’d finally be able to build real solutions to problems like global poverty, climate change, and income inequality.

Later on, I came to understand just how little influence the average voter actually has in our political system, and just how narrow the range of options that politicians provide to us really are. I learned that it was in fact U.S. policy that often robbed the rest of the world of wealth, polluted the planet, and left a majority of us struggling to survive. It was then I started becoming quite polarized against the entire American regime.

I come from a family of die-hard Republicans. My mom, my grandparents, and all of my aunts and uncles are Trump supporters, and they’ve voted for conservative politicians all my life. Growing up as a queer kid in a family that elected homophobic & transphobic politicians had a strong and negative effect on me. I blamed my family members for Ohio’s gay marriage ban in my teens, for Trump’s removal of legal protections for trans youth in the 2010’s, and for the culture of cissexism and heteronormativity that had suffocated me and made it so difficult to accept myself.

But as I wrote about in my book Unlearning Shame, I eventually concluded that my family wasn’t the source of my misfortune. My mother is a feminist who has always confronted racism wherever she saw it, and she has supported me and my queer sister without hesitation. She raised me to get vaccinated regularly and to recycle for the sake of the public good. In fact, most of my relatives hold values shockingly similar to my own. But where we differ is in our understanding of political possibility — and in how we make sense of the avenues for influence that this country’s political parties present to us.

My family didn’t put a gay marriage ban on the ballot in Ohio when I was a fragile, closeted teen. Conservative strategists did that. They didn’t put J.D. Vance’s inaccurate, bigoted view of rural white poverty on the map. Liberal book reviewers and journalists did. They didn’t decide that the only way to find security and economic prosperity was through the commitment of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq — both parties had advocated for that.

Opposing queer rights, blaming poverty on drug use and “low” morals, invading other countries to plunder their resources — these were the normative political positions of their time. It was not political “polarization” that created these problems at all. Looking at how the United States’ government actually behaves, I see that the parties are overwhelmingly aligned — they move together to procure oil, money, and land, while the majority of everyday people stand on the sidelines, unable to weigh in on anything except the color of the banners that get flown. If most Americans do hold lofty values like “benevolence” and “conservation,” then those values are incapable of being expressed within our political system.

There is no sensible, moderate position on matters like genocide. There’s no middle ground between destroying the Appalachian mountains for fossil fuel (as both Harris & Trump wish to do) and seeing those 480-million-year-old lands preserved. Either you believe the present state of affairs is irredeemable and wish to see it ended, or you take steps to silence the people who do fight for such a change, deeming them “extremists” who refuse to “compromise.”

A Nation of Settler Militias

If a fracture ever were to form within America between those who support the nation’s xenophobic & genocidal policies and those who do not, the very foundation of the country would fall apart. The United States was formed by violent settler militias who drove indigenous people from their lands and slaughtered them remorselessly, in hopes of securing economic prosperity and free territory for themselves — much as Israeli settlers in the West Bank do today.

In the centuries since it first colonized Turtle Island, the American empire has turned its weapons on the peoples of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, the Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, Panama, the Philippines, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, treating indigenous inhabitants as “unlawful combatants” and “terrorists” while imposing external rule and robbing them of land and life. Questioning the righteousness of these invasions makes a person an anti-state actor and a radical, particularly if they try to put a stop to colonization before it is too late.

To even participate in the American political project, certain common beliefs must be assumed. Like the belief that security can only be promised at the barrel of a gun. Or that overthrowing another country’s elected socialist leadership is an act of benevolence. Or the belief that the economy’s growth must be endless and unchecked, environmental conservation be damned. To have a voice in American politics, you must start from these conclusions. And it’s not even really seen as violence for the state to censor, brutalize, arrest, or unperson anyone that disagrees. They were, after all, a threat to our democratic state.

Wolf & Hanel and their ilk seem to believe that greater agreement between political parties is a sign of peace and unity. But in reality, it’s a signal that our democracy is not one at all.