Eyes that see the good in things: August 27, 2018

It was an eye-opening few days, that’s for sure. One day I listened to someone with “liberal” views share that, for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like he could honestly share his political views because of the business ramifications that came with being honest. Two days later, I listened to the same type of complaint, except this time it came from a political “conservative,” who shared that she could no longer even share her views with her family.

Personally, I wouldn’t have entered into a political discussion with either of them because as they lamented the fact that they no longer felt safe to share their opinion, they also insulted the people who represented the other party.

Many years ago, I became friends with a co-worker. We totally enjoyed each other’s company. We both loved animals and enjoyed music. We discussed classical literature and pushed each other to read different authors. Our families were extremely important to us. We shared a rather dry sense of humor. Yet, politically, we agreed on nothing.

In the home I grew up in, political discussions happened often and were encouraged. This is also true about my workplace. You can’t really escape politics when you work in a newspaper office. Opinion pieces written by columnists come in ready to set for the next issue, letters to the editor are prepared for print. Even choosing a weekly cartoon means entering into the world of political polarization. In this office, political conversations happen daily, so I know that people can talk about issues, disagree, and still be respectful of each other’s differences.

Political polarization is no new thing. In 2004, then-Senator Barack Obama’s address at the Democratic National Convention was designed to unite the country and tear down partisan divides.

"Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he said. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” It was a great speech and a great thought, but as a country we seem to have become even further apart now than we were then.

After listening to the two polar opposites speak the same message about feeling muzzled, I decided to research political polarization. I found an article in The Intercept to be of interest. It was called “A new study shows how American polarization is driven by a team sport mentality, not by disagreement on issues.”

The article discussed how far apart the labels “liberal” or “conservative” put us and even cited a Gallup poll that asked adults about the prospect of their son or daughter marrying someone of a different political background and found that support to have gone down dramatically. Surprising? It was to me.

Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland, recently wrote a paper called “Ideologues Without Issues: the Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” which was published in late March of 2018 by Public Opinion Quarterly. It uses 2016 data from Survey Sampling International and American National Election Studies to study how and why Americans are so politically polarized.

Mason used measures that identify where people stand on issues and how they identify their “political clan.” She studied six major issues from the survey: “immigration, the Affordable Care Act, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and the relative importance of reducing the deficit or unemployment.”

Mason looked for a correlation between those answers with questions where respondents answered whether they would prefer to live next door to, marry, be friends with, or spend social time with someone who differs from them politically. She found that the political identity people adopt was far more predictive of their preferences for social interaction. In other words, if you are a committed liberal, you’re much more likely to want to live next to other committed liberals. But if you just disagree strongly with them about a specific issue like abortion, not so much. 

“The effect of issue-based ideology is less than half the size of identity-based ideology in each element of social distance,” she wrote. “These are sizable and significant effects, robust to controls for issue-based ideology, and they demonstrate that Americans are dividing themselves socially on the basis of whether they call themselves liberal or conservative, independent of their actual policy differences.”

Mason gave the example of how President Trump “managed to flip a party from support of free trade to opposition to it by merely taking the opposite side of the issue.” On the flip side, Democrats, ridiculed Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia the United States’ greatest adversary, but now they are making the same argument.  

Mason believes the implications of such shallow divisions between people makes the work of democracy harder. If your goal in politics is not based around policy but just defeating your perceived enemies, what exactly are you working toward?

Mason said. “We just care about who’s winning in a given day. And that’s a really dangerous thing for trying to run a democratic government.”

She suggested a solution: Spend some time talking to your neighbors, friends, and loved ones about things besides politics.

“The problem is not a policy-based problem, because on average we’re relatively moderate in these policy attitudes. Talking to each other about political stuff is sort of the worst solution ever, because all that’s going to do is activate our political identities, which cause us to dislike each other. The better thing to do is if your next-door neighbor is of a different political orientation than you, to talk about their dog, or what’s going on in their family,” Mason said. “In general, the best way to get through this polarization is to start thinking of each other as human beings.”

I sure do like her thought process.

We would love to share local stories about the good things your eyes are seeing.

Stop in to share your stories with us, give us a call at 947-2417 or e-mail us at [email protected]. Or send a letter to Eyes That See the Good in Things, c/o Allison Lindgren, The Transcript, 6 8th St N., New Rockford, ND 58356.