Political Polarization: Part Two

Politics is Easy, Governing is Hard

This is the second installment of my series on political polarization. You can read the first here.

I’ve worked out a plan for the next couple of weeks. The dates might shift slightly depending on life circumstances, but here is the structure of the series.

1. Politics is Easy, Governing is Hard (performative politics, moral distancing, no compromise) (7/8)

2. Looking Out for Me and Mine (tribalism and “amoral familism”) 7/11

3. Don’t Believe What They Tell You (media and social media) 7/13

4. The End of the World as We Know It (losing cultural dominance and catastrophism) 7/15

5. Real America vs. the Woke Mob (rural culture and coastal elites) 7/18

6. Polarization is the Business Model (they get rich while we lose democracy) 7/20

7. Searching for Solutions (putting it all together) 7/22

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Colorado had their 2022 primary last week. There wasn’t much happening on the Democratic ticket as few of the races had competition. While this was my first Colorado election, I had some interesting insights because the previous owners of our house had very different political views from me. So I had several weeks of campaign mailers addressed to them (or current resident).

Some of those campaign pieces were touting the Trump-alignment and election denying of the very conservative option, which were quite likely sent my progressives trying to support the candidate easiest to defeat in November. But many were from the actual preferred party candidate. One in particular stated that their commitments were to lower inflation, cut taxes, stop wasteful spending, and increase support for law enforcement.

I’m undoubtedly too much of a numbers guy to simply take that as campaign slogans. I kept asking: 1) how does a state level candidate lower inflation? 2) how do you cut taxes and increase funding at the same time? 3) what programs or services do you consider wasteful spending?

I’m currently reading Tim Miller’s Why We Did It (#2 on NYT best seller list). The first half of the book explores how Miller thinks about campaign strategy and his role in political communications. The second half explores where things went wrong in Trump’s Republican party.

Early in the book, Miller explains what he calls The Game. It’s what separates the political operatives from the “wonks” concerned about policy.

We specialize in strategy, tactics, messaging, advertising, opposition research. Slaying the enemy. Winning the race. They undertake the mundane business of governing (21).

Miller makes no bones about the amorality of his early career. He would do what was necessary for his candidate to prevail. It’s remarkable how many similar operatives have done extensive mea culpas over the last few years. Time will tell if they’d do it again in future elections.

The description of The Game speaks to one source of our polarization. Winning becomes an end in itself regardless of how that might result in good or bad governance.¹

Voters buy into the Game imagery. Just like rooting for the home sports team (Yay Avs!), they become invested in the idea of their team winning. It’s not just to do better than the other team — one has to soundly beat them.

In his Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein builds on this sports analogy. It has a distinct impact on us psychologically.

Again, this is for all contests in which the stakes are purely psychological and emotional, and yet the ecstasy of victory, and sometimes the pain of loss, so overwhelms our faculties that we destroy the very towns the form the basis of our affection for the teams we’re supporting. This is how powerfully we attach to groups. This is how little it take for group identity to take over all our other faculties, for identitarian passions to push aside the tinny voice of our reasoning mind (56-57).

The tribal sentiments of The Game were very evident after the 2020 election during events at The Village, the Florida retirement community that is the largest such community in the country. There had been several instances of “golf cart parades” in support of then-president Trump before the election. After the election was called, another parade was met with people along the street with Biden-Harris flags, taunting the Trump folks (there had also been Biden parades at The Villages).

The very idea of elderly² senior citizens shouting at each other, making rude hand gestures, and celebrating their team while denouncing the other can seem humorous, at the very least bizarre.

But campaign operatives, talk radio, Facebook, YouTube, and mass mailing campaigns have created expectations that we need to stick it to the other team. We can win as long as they lose. And when our side wins, it’s like we won the Stanley Cup. When we lose, however, we don’t say “better luck next year after the draft”. We say, “Everything is falling apart and we’re losing our country.”

Political analysts Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason empirically explored The Game in their recent Radical American Partisanship. In one of their surveys, they find that over 60% of both Republican and Democrats see the other party as “a serious threat to the United States.” The most radical of the respondents combine their support for The Team with preexisting feelings of trait aggression.³

This focus on The Game instead of governing has an impact on the confidence of the voting public. Pollsters have long used the “right track/wrong track” question to gauge voter’s concerns. The most recent RealClearPolitics average has the right track at 18% and the wrong track at 75%. While the figures are somewhat higher recently due to inflation, gas prices, congressional inaction, and Supreme Court decisions, they have been bad for a long time.

This is because we have largely failed to consider how governing would work if Our Team won. The “horse-race” coverage of the media is in part a reflection of how voters have come to see elections.

If Their Team wins, it’s a disaster. And so every election becomes a “Flight 93” election. The natural ecosystem of our political world at the moment is set up to feed polarization because it works.

1. The current angst among Democrats around what they see as inaction from the Biden administration is in part a reflection of expectations created from the election game. “We won,” they say, “why can’t we get these policies passed?” This ignores the reality of a 50-50 Senate (which was a miracle in itself) and the biases of fiscal conservatives in that caucus. How did they think governing worked?

2. Yes, I know I’m old enough to live there — but you can’t make me.

3. Watch five minutes of any of the January 6th videos and you can see that aggression (verbal and physical) at play.