How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics
It’s been a nasty election year, full of ugly name-calling and loathing. But how did our politics get to be so hate-filled?
After all, the parties didn’t always hate each other so much. Forty years ago, when asked to rate how “favorable and warm” their opinion of each party was, the average Democrat and Republican said they felt OK-ish about the opposite party. But for four decades now, partisans have increasingly turned against each other in an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust, and views of the other party are currently at an all-time low.
Broadly speaking, there are three trends that we can point to. The first is the steady nationalization of American politics. The second is the sorting of Democrats and Republicans along urban/rural and culturally liberal/culturally conservative lines, and the third is the increasingly narrow margins in national elections.
Yet beneath the surface of hyper-partisan politics, the parties themselves actually have a lot of internal division, which means they share a version of the same dilemma. Republicans and Democrats can’t please all the different voters and groups who fall into their party and want their issue to be prioritized. But in a polarized two-party system, they can make it clear why -- whatever someone’s frustration is with their own party -- the other party is worse.
Coming into their convention, for instance, Democrats had to bridge policy disagreements between progressives and moderates that were visible during the presidential primary. But the convention focused less on policy and spent more time discussing the existential risk presented by a second Trump term. The party reminded its voters that, whatever concerns they have about Biden, a vote for Biden is also a vote against Trump.
Republicans similarly focused on messaging against the Democrats (even if one of the reasons Trump emerged victorious in the 2016 primary was because the party was so divided that it couldn’t decide). Trump has remade the party in his image, but even for the few remaining Trump-skeptic Republicans, nothing unites like a common enemy. And in a two-party system, being anti-anti-Trump counts the same as being pro-Trump.
If all of this seems unsustainable, it should. The current levels of hyper-partisanship are clearly dangerous. It’s bad news for a democracy when 60 to 70 percent of people view fellow citizens as a serious threat to the country because they belong to a different political party. And the more the parties continue to unify their supporters by casting the other party as the enemy, the higher this number will rise.