Thread by @glukianoff

THREAD: To update the trends covered in @JonHaidt & my book Coddling of the American Mind, we take a look at political polarization.

Fortunately, that problem was solved in the years since COTAM released!

Just kidding, things are much worse. 1/26
thefire.org/catching-up-wi…

In Alan Moore's masterpiece @watchmen, 1980s US is on the brink of nuclear annihilation, until Ozymandias (spoilers, but srsly read it!) fakes an alien attack on NYC, killing millions in the hope that an external threat will bring humanity together. 2/26

amzn.to/325DvQk

The assumption that people pull together when faced with an outside threat is almost taken for granted. In Watchmen, the ploy probably saves the world.

Yet here we are with COVID-19, over 170,000 Americans dead, over 5 million infected, seemingly more divided than ever. 3/26

In COTAM, we tried to get to the bottom of what changed in 2013-14. Why was there a return to demands for speech restrictions? Why was medicalized language used to justify censorship? And why were rates of anxiety and depression skyrocketing? 4/26

amzn.to/2FIrw3I

In COTAM, one of the causal threads we identified was political polarization.

Even though the country seemed extremely polarized to us way back in 2015 (when we did the article), that time now seems downright idyllic compared to the present. 5/26

It surely feels as though cross-partisan nastiness has gotten worse, but what do the numbers say? Are we really more polarized than we used to be? 6/26

In COTAM, we reviewed data from @pewresearch & @electionstudies showing that over the past 25 years Americans have become increasingly polarized on various issues. 7/26

Pew found that the average party gap on ten policy questions grew from 15% in 1994 to 36% in 2017. 8/26

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017…

Affective polarization — or, as one paper describes it, “the tendency of Democrats and Republicans to dislike and distrust one another” — has also steadily increased since 1980.

Importantly, this trend accelerated over the past decade. 9/26

pcl.stanford.edu/research/2018/…

In the two years since COTAM, issue polarization has only gotten worse. This growth is evident across a number of different methods of measuring polarization. 10/26

Pew data show that between May & Sept. of 2019, the percentage of Democrats who rated their feelings towards Republicans as “very cold” increased from 45% to 57%.

The percentage of Republicans who reciprocated increased from 48% to 60%. 11/26

pewresearch.org/politics/2019/…

In the same survey, notable percentages of Democrats and Republicans consider each other closed-minded (75% and 64%, respectively), immoral (47% and 55%), and unintelligent (38% and 36%). Each of those percentages increased from 2016. 12/26

One disturbing expression of this trend is revealed in partisan feelings toward violence against political opponents. 13/26

A Dec. 2019 survey by @DemocracyFund found 1/5 partisans felt violence against the opposing party would be at least “a little” justified if their party lost the election; about 1/10 felt there would be “a lot” or “a great deal” of justification. 14/26

voterstudygroup.org/publication/de…

Comparing @electionstudies survey data from 2016 and 2018, the number of Americans who said violence was “not at all” a justifiable means of pursuing political goals declined 10% in two years, from roughly 82% to 72%. 15/26

electionstudies.org/data-center/20…
electionstudies.org/data-center/20…

(Stay Tuned! Next month, @TheFIREorg will have more specific data about student attitudes toward partisan violence from a survey we recently conducted, which reveals distressingly broad acceptance of violence among some partisans.) 16/26

We think these trends are likely to hold. In 2018 Pew found 65% of Americans think the US will grow more politically divided over the next 30 years; 64% think their trust in each other has been shrinking; 70% think this low level of trust makes it harder to solve problems. 17/26

As covered in @ezraklein's book Why We’re Polarized, one factor not getting enough attention is that the political divide increasingly coincides with population density. Higher-density areas vote largely D and lower-density areas vote largely R. 18/26

amzn.to/3kMOQgN

Differences in partisanship by population density may be complicating coronavirus responses. Given how COVID spreads, densely populated areas like NYC are especially vulnerable, while lower density areas are less vulnerable (though rural areas are seeing infections spike). 19/26

A major factor in keeping down the population of cities in part of the 20th century was the persistent problem of epidemics. Even in the Middle Ages, the best practice to avoid an epidemic was to relocate to the countryside (see: The Decameron). 20/26

college.columbia.edu/core/node/1761

Differences in density alone do not fully explain different partisan reactions to COVID-19. Pew found in July that Ds in less-impacted areas were 14% more likely to say the virus was a major threat than Rs in highly impacted areas (46% to 32%). 21/26

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020…

We should not be totally surprised that rural, generally Republican voters are less worried about the virus than urban, generally Democrat voters are. 22/26

But we should be concerned that different experiences, combined with the pre-existing partisanship, may be frustrating our efforts to act collectively to stop the virus and help its victims. 23/26

In previous disasters, like Pearl Harbor or Hurricane Katrina, Americans came together to oppose a common enemy. That was true even if we were nowhere near Hawaii or New Orleans, and even if our politics kept us at odds on every other issue of the day. 24/26

Slow and frustrating as the government reaction to Katrina was, the overwhelming public reaction was empathy for its victims & a desire to help. If we can rise above partisanship and achieve similar consensus during this pandemic, we may heal more than COVID in the process. 25/26

Thank you to my co-authors @AdGo and Sean Stevens and thank you to @RynoWeiss for helping with the twitter thread!

Join us next time for an update on paranoid parenting! 26/26

thefire.org/catching-up-wi…