Tribal Partisanship, Authoritarianism, And Violent Rhetoric.
Tribe Trumps All. At Slate.com on Monday Shankar Vedantam’s interesting article, Partisanship Is the New Racism, revealed how recent psycho-sociological scholarship is changing the way partisanship is understood. Primarily, he explains, academics have begun to believe that partisanship is not the result of matching our thinking about the issues of the day to the party that supports them.
It’s quite the opposite, Vedantam writes. Evidence is emerging that “our party loyalties drive our views about issues, not the other way around.” And this effect is the result of social identity: “I’m a Democrat because people like me are Democrats, or I’m a Republican because people like me are Republicans.”
of a tribe is the trump card,
not the issues of the day . . .
This helps explain why partisanship as a corollary of a group’s slow-to-change social identity remains intact “even though each group’s rational interests might be better served by the other party.”
Social identity as a member of a tribe is the trump card, not the issues of the day: “race, gender, religious affiliation, geographical location—play an outsize (and largely hidden) role in determining our partisan affiliations.” And like racism, partisanship implies discrimination against “those who do not belong to our group.” Moreover, given the moral taint that accompanies open bipartisanship, like racism, we try to appear non-partisan as much as we possibly can; Vedantam calls it that old familiar plausible deniability.
He concludes:
If partisanship and racism are both tied to social identity, then a post-partisan America is about as likely as a post-racial America. Our views on issues may change, but our identities remain stable over Decades.Democrats and Republicans sitting together in Congress will no sooner put an end to partisanship than gay men, black women, and Alabama hunters will give up their tribes.
The Emboldening Effect Of Violent Rhetoric. One commenter on Vedantam’s article, Martin Kobren, offered a different analysis, one we’ve heard over the years, the authoritarian personality. And, if the academic research is accurate, the highly ingrained partisanship through social identity will get worse, not better, despite the recent cooling off period in response to the Tucson
“The thing is that authoritarians who feel that group integrity is being threatened tend to react most strongly against outgroups . . . If you crank the threat up enough, the literature shows that people with lower authoritarian tendencies begin to behave like people with higher authoritarian predispositions.
You can see immediately why our politics is as nasty as it is. Politicians who stoke up fear and loathing of the other party are actually preparing their parties for battle. It mobilizes the hard core and gets the lower authoritarians in the party to begin thinking like their higher authoritarian comrades. [All emphasis added]
Quo Vadis? And if, as Vedantam writes in Partisanship, The New Racism, social identity trumps national issues on a person’s route to partisanship, one can imagine that the violent GOP rhetoric will grow (and especially among the Tea Party). This follows from the commenter’s observation that with more “cranking up” of the threat by “alpha” authoritarians, the more emboldened the lesser authoritarians become. To be sure, there are authoritarians in all political movements, but if, for example, the Tea Party’s success in the midterm elections emboldens those more timid TPs, their rhetoric of violence and destruction is likely to reassert itself after the Tucson effect wears off.
The commenter closes with an excellent diagnosis:
Poor Barack Obama. From the standpoint of authoritarianism, he’s doing everything wrong! He keeps talking about there not being a red American or a blue America, but only a United States of America. It’s unilateral disarmament.
On the other hand, the Republicans keep doing everything right. Authoritarians respond when they think that existing leadership is weak, ineffective or illegitimate (that’s where the birthers and all the people who insist that Obama is a socialist or a muslim come in). They mobilize when they see that there is an “us” (the real Americans) who need to protect themselves against “them” (everyone else).
If the Democrats – and President Obama, in particular – decide to ramp up their anemic political rhetoric, and finally stand up as a group to fight the good fight for more progressive policies, then the emboldening effect among Democrats will energize the party, and provide some push back against the GOP and the TP. Democratic rhetoric – despite what FOX News reports – is far less a product of a culture of violence than Tea Party rhetoric, and I’m not suggesting they adopt the destructive language and metaphors of the Tea Party. Yet, Democratic leaders and back benchers, one and all, must engage the GOP and their redhaired stepchild, the TP. Engage them with tough speech, not hate speech. But engage them!
So, despite the recent increase in violent imagery in political “discourse,” it appears that the pot of violent and destructive oratory is nowhere near the boiling point. Many timid Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers still remain sidelined waiting to be “emboldened.”
And what is the next step when all the timid are alpha dogs?
