Why We’re Polarized, Part 1

Not quite buying the personality psychology stuff. Too many places for those measurements to go wrong, even with the caveats. Also seen far too many different descriptions of what those perseonality traits actually mean for my taste, as if everybody just makes them mean whatever he wants to proof when personality models are applied to sociology. Guess according to the messy table, new food and travel definition i´m sufficiently in line with predictions. Not stoping me from beaing fearfull or very conscientiousness according to somewhat different definitions from the one here for that mattter.

My own favorite part of recent US political geography is the two huge partisan swings that have happened over the last 30 years: the blue-to-red swing in much of the Midwest, and the red-to-blue swing in much of the West.

***the word “fearful” comes up a lot to describe the conservative worldview

‘contempt’ hits closer to home; rural americans were squishy apoliticals until fox transformed white contempt into a virtue (and profits for murdoch)

I’ve been somewhat skeptical about this psychology research. I think that’s partly because it just seems so very flattering to the self-concept of many liberals I know…

Not to mention how psychology research is overwhelmingly focused on WEIRD kids as subjects, and the implications of that for trying to apply the results to people who are not WEIRD kids.

I reread the Wikipedia page about the Big Five model, and in fact some psychologists claim that there is a biological component, however not that it is the only component. Anyway when you look at such traits in the aggregate it is likely that the social components dominate the biological ones: if for example you take physical strenght, it depends clearly on DNA but also on how much you exercise, your diet etc., that are social components

Now if it turns out that Reps are on average stronger than Dems it is more likely that it depends on, for example, white collars being more Dem and blue collars being more Reps than on the DNA component of strenght, that reasonsbly on big numbers of people tend to average out.

Now if you consider that, per the book cited in the OP, the urban/rural divide is more and more determinant for politics, either one assumes that the DNA part of the traits is distributed in very weird ways in n the USA or one has to conclude that it is the social determinant of the traits that drive the process, e.g. because rural lifestyle leads to lower opennes to novelty than urban lifestyle.

„conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism. …Conservatives are resistant to change, whereas liberals welcome it.“

This is a standard definition of conservatism and it may be a useful concept for categorizing the politics of Angela Merkel and her political allies (although the term conservative has mostly gone out of fashion in Germany). But it does not remotely apply to the present day GOP. Trump and his minions, paragons of „conscientiousness“ (let’s leave aside „traditional family values“ shall we)? A violent coup attempt, „preference for order“? Overturning generations of legal precedent, enacting total abortion bans after 50 years of abortion being legal, how is that „resistant to change?“ Ditto rolling back the New Deal and dismantling the regulatory state. This is a movement pursuing radical transformation of the political system, not its preservation.

Words matter, analytical categories matter. Why do US media but also political scientists still systematically mischaracterize a right wing extremist movement as „conservative“ instead of reactionary or fascist? Is it because of unwritten rules that you can’t say anything negative about the GOP because that would be „liberal bias“ or is there a deeper reason? Is it that they are so invested in the old exceptionalism that denies the possibility of authoritarianism in the US? It baffles me every time when I come across this. You will never be able to understand the transformation of the US political landscape (which after all is the topic of the OP) if you imagine the Republican base as conscientious conservatives wishing to preserve tradition.

(Please don’t respond by pointing out that racism and misogyny are old traditions. That is true in a sense but it’s not what the term conservative is intended to convey, otherwise you could just say so.)

Klein writes that “different studies categorize people in different ways, but the common thread is that … conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism.”

This sort of “science” has a lot in common with astrology and tarot card reading. Any data can be interpreted in whatever manner you’d like. So in the US, we had a president who — on national television — refused to promise an orderly transition of power. Our Capitol was subjected to invasion by criminals who, among other things, smeared feces on the walls.

Why aren’t conservatives outraged? Because conservatives value conscientiousness; they are skeptical of disruptive change; and they prefer order and tradition.

You want a reductive explanation of the difference between conservatives and liberals? The difference is epistemic. Bigots, oligarchs and conservative evangelicals are overwhelmingly supportive of Trump because Trump gives them permission to believe whatever they want to believe without judgment or shame. The core conservative value is a disregard of factuality. Contempt for universities, loathing of journalists — these are the hallmarks of conservatism, as conservatives themselves will tell you.

I’ve been somewhat skeptical about this psychology research. I think that’s partly because it just seems so very flattering to the self-concept of many liberals I know, who style themselves as open to experience and courageous in virtue of that openness.

This only captures part of the story. Yes, this sort of research allows liberals to condescend to their political opponents. But it also allows liberals to humanize their opponents, as liberals are wont to do. And especially, it allows liberals to mitigate the fear and loathing that arises from a more honest appraisal of conservatism.

Are modern conservatives to be thought of as authoritarians, bigots, rubes and sexists just because they adore a pussy-grabbing, scam-promoting racist who is seeking to overturn democracy? No, no. Conservatives are merely motivated by an alternative set of entirely honorable motives, such as a desire for order. Heck, liberals could no doubt learn something from them!

Come on, Luis. Altemeyer says in the introduction to his book that the authoritarian personality is right-wing because his work has been done in a society where conservative behavior is associated with the right wing, and in another society such as the PRC things might look totally different.

Early in TFG’s reign, I remember people writing about “the authoritarian personality” and how certain kinds of upbringing would foster it. Stuff like harsh disciplinarian parents, ditto schools. And gosh wouldn’t you know, it seems like that’s more common out in the sticks, than in cities. For a cherry on top, parents with authoritarian personalities tend to reproduce it in their children, b/c of the environment they provide.

And of course, such personalities seem to be ripe for joining Fascist movements.

I always found the psychology research questionable –especially if linked to anything genetic–because if it sorts geographically, why would that sort geographically? (I do not see how it could be genetic.)

But of course there are many ways that sorting occurs voluntarily 1) regional culture (which anecdotally most people could attest to) may affect childrearing practices and social expectations…Class definitely affects childrearing and social expectations.

2) Life experience–especially early life. I would not call East Coast Liberals particularly open, especially if they are upper middle class. They are not necessarily more open to people radically different from themselves. However, they are perhaps less distressed by the existence of such people. Perhaps it comes from things like– they travel more, may have somewhat less experience growing up in racial or ethnic segregation if they are from cities, may be more ‘widely educated in the sense that they are accepting of certain ideas even if their life experience also tends to be narrow in certain respects, etc.

Liberalism and conservatism come with a value system one’s parents may hold that probably affects one’s upbringing substantially.

You can see some latent theories about childrearing and political (and religious) orientation in the Focus on the Family type of literature where they are concerned that a failure to instill a certain kind of fear and discipline (often by corporal punishment) will cause children to develop rebellious and disobedient personalities. Liberals also fear their children will be racist or intolerant and raise their children accordingly.

It is fascinating to think about all the ways we teach our children to pay attention to and interpret certain kinds of social facts as well as various moral values relevant to those facts.

I don’t know how this would run up against the idea that personalities are innate. Some theorists claim this but even assuming some voluntariness in geographical location it’s probably not enough to explain the striking fact that people in urban areas are so much more likely to vote Democrat.

I am very suspicious of all of these ideas of inborn or fixed traits determining political orientation,, having grown up in a very mixed political environment environment. People in my environment tried to pull me towards their political orientation. As a fairly young child I would want to please conservatives by sharing their values much more than I wanted to please liberals for some reason. But I didn’t succeed because the beliefs they had did not seem true. For example, the idea that people were wholly personally responsible for their economic status seemed wildly false. It seems like a simpler explanation that I’d already been taught to interpret social facts in another way than that I had fixed personality traits.

Another reasons for skepticism is that something new is happening that these personality traits aren’t tracking. For example, a not insubstantial number of people attending 1/6, refusing vaccines and supporting The Big Lie are (for lack of a better term) New Agers. It’s hard to think about a group of people more ‘open’ than people attracted to New Age doctrines.

Moreover, Trump has substantial support from bikers. They are not the staid churchgoing conscientious sort that theorists imagined as your standard Republican conservative.

Qanon people also cannot be categorized in this way. And they are probably more like millenarist religious groups of the past–who certainly were not afraid of novelty.

Perhaps there are too many confounding factors in this period of instability to easily track the factors from which right wing affinity arises.

Your idea that ‘fear of change’ is not very useful seems spot on–but there is one constant element that everyone amenable to the right seems to have an antipathy to and that is a change toward a flatter hierarchy where they are expected to see people around them who have traditionally been marked as inferior as truly completely fully socially equal. To the extent liberals or leftists dislike change it is change back to a stark hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. The change the right wants is to change things back (or to move toward their idea of a utopia that existed in the past that had this hierarchy).

Until recently, the US was far less polarized than most other places, in a number of ways. Most obviously, the Democratic party was a coalition which included racist Southern whites, as well as centrists and centre-leftists

But also, and relevantly here, rural voters weren’t as conservative, relative to city dwellers as in most other places. France is the model here – the conservatism of the peasantry as opposed to the radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries. The emergence of a uniformly rightwing rural vote is a relatively new phenomenon in the US.

As a “finicky eater” since childhood, I rarely try new foods because I probably won’t enjoy them. (According to the Internet, science has since designated this as a mutation which produces twice as many papillae, so that bitter things taste twice as bitter. Inability to drink coffee is a reliable test for it.)

I have a nephew who has the same condition. When he first came to a Thanksgiving dinner at my parent’s house, he looked at the table, laden with turkey, stuffing, casserole, three-bean salad, squash, mashed potatoes, and cranberry salad, and whispered sorrowfully to his mother, “I don’t think there is anything here I can eat.” (She made him a peanut-butter-and-fluff sandwich.)

Despite that condition, I liked Adlai Stevenson better than Eisenhower as a young child, and have yet see a conservative political candidate worth voting for. According to what intelligence I have and the facts I have learned, they are wrong about too many important things. (I often have doubts about Democrat candidates also. I couldn’t vote for Bill Clinton the second time, and wasted a vote on Ross Perot.)

I grew up in a rural town of 144 people, mostly dairy farmers. Three of us from our senior high school class of 19 went on to college, all of them liberals. However, my older sister, who averaged 99 in high school to my 97, is a rabid conservative, intolerant of facts such as whether or not illegal immigrants are filling emergency rooms. (A Kaiser study says no as I pointed out to her with a link. She responded with an ad hominem.) She never liked math though.

Which is to say, I too consider the psychological-traits modeling to result from torturing the data until it confesses. I think general intelligence and education are the keys, and would torture the data for them. With the caveat that smart people are also able to think up creative ways to believe wrong things. That same nephew got The Encyclopedia of Basketball for a birthday present, and on our next phone conversation I had him looking up old-time players I saw play, such as Nate-the-Great Thurmond, who was always introduced as “at six feet, eleven-and-a-half inches”. He responded, no, the EoB says he was 6′ 1-1/2″. I said, that must be a typo, isn’t he also listed as a center? How could a six-foot, 1-and-a-half inch person play center in the NBA? He replied, “Maybe he was a great leaper.”

@
‘The book makes the case that the U.S. political system is now characterized by a vicious feedback loop between polarizing political identities and polarizing political institutions.

Why?
As doesn’t every American know – that in ‘the homeland’ it’s
THE CULTURE WAR
as actually –
AND
in reality:
The U.S. political system is now characterized by a vicious feedback loop between polarizing cultural identities confused with polarizing political institutions?

And traveling through America – there still is this ‘cultural’ rejection or actually
HATE
of everything ‘political’ –
on all sides…
on all sides…

A lot of thought provoking ideas here.
Trumpists are not Conservatives, they are reactionary counter-revolutionaries.
Trump drive some number of Conservatives away from the Republican Party. Some took on Trumpist protective covering. Some bought in to Yrumpism. I am using Trumpism as a euphemism for our particularly American brand of Fascism.
(ethnocentric reactionary authoritarianism).
Trad-Caths and conservative Evangelicals are very comfortable with that and each other.
The last being strange to me because I can remember when Evangelicals went out of their way to differentiate themselves from Catholics.
As far as regional sorting, people who only feel u comfortable with change are more likely to stay in the exurbs or more there from urban areas. They also tend to social mix with people they work with and more importantly people they go to church with. For many rural people, their primary social network is their church.

JQ@24: “the conservatism of the peasantry as opposed to the radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries”.

Looking from the opposite point of view: “the murderous and destructive radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, as opposed to the sober conservatism of the rural provinces, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries”.

I think that makes at least as much sense.

In a more parochial sense: looking at Sinn Fein in Ireland, would you classify them as liberal or authoritarian?

Here’s a good example of how Moral Foundations Theory and the “big five” are used by the media establishment (and folks like Ezra Klein) to shirk professional responsibility.

The linked study discusses five “core professional values” — such as “factualism” — and asserts that news consumers often don’t share those values. In the case of factualism, the study finds that only two-thirds of respondents agree that “more facts get us closer to the truth.”

And factualism is the most popular of the core journalistic principles. Allegedly, only 29% of Americans believe that “a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems;” 44% of Americans support the journalistic value of transparency ; and 50% support the journalistic value of giving voice to the less powerful.

The study offers recommendations for how journalists can accommodate people who don’t share journalistic values, specifically recommending that journalists de-emphasize their role as watchdogs and “broaden” their coverage to oblige people with other values.

But as is so often the case with Moral Foundations Theory research, it’s all bullshit.

Niemanlab demolishes the study here and here.

The first link shows how the fraud was conducted; the second link shows how widely journalistic values are shared in the real world.

I believe the people at the American Press Institute — and people like Ezra Klein — are smart and have a good-faith interest in arriving at sound conclusions. But they will buy into obvious frauds like this for two very human reasons: They have an aversion to criticism and (more important, I think) they desperately want to believe that their critics are operating from good-faith motives and can therefore be reasoned with.

It’s hard for me to think of the API study as anything other than a hoax, but this sort of thing will continue to get a respectful hearing because the actual problem is so intractable, and the technique for denying the problem is so easy. I say that Trumpism is characterized by a desire to assert dominance over factuality. You say that Trumpists are trying hard to conform their views to reality, and just have a different moral perspective.

And you have proof! Just ask a Trumpist if I’m right! Nobody howls louder than a Trumpist about “fake news.” Trump named his social media outlet “Truth Social.” How can I suggest that these people are not interested in the truth when that’s the underlying issue regarding pretty much everything they talk about?

@JimVRE: Nate-the-Great-Thurmond… Wikipedia (mostly) agrees with you (and no, I did not change the entry just now to show him as 6’11, from either 6’1.5″ or 6’11.5″.) You might want to show this to your nephew (if he is still insisting that you are wrong). Teh Google agrees with Wikipedia. Nobody, it seems, agrees with the announcer at the games which you remember.

@William— you know the way it works. That is, I didn’t know about Mackey. I probably occasionally buy products from a company owned by the Koch brother by accident as well. Oh well, maybe someday I’ll have the time to do all the research it would take to live my life perfectly.

I can see that I’m not going to read Klein’s book, but its shortcomings are interesting enough to me that I bet I’ll read a lot about it. I found the New Yorker review useful, and I was particularly interested in the discussion of Klein’s Darwinism.

Darwin can be used to explain anything; in the psycho-evolutionary rummage bin, you can dig up totalitarian tendencies just as easily as you can unearth an inherent love of liberty. Along the way, the difference is lost between Explaining and Explaining Away.

As I mentioned @14, this is how Klein and others employ Moral Foundations Theory, too.

Klein provides a Darwinist explanation of how polarization has increased (itself a dubious proposition, given that US history has included polarization so extreme that it led to war), but he needs to explain how the Darwinist imperative was so ineffectual that the country arrived at its previous non-polarized state. I’d be interested to know whether Klein even recognizes the need to address that.

(The reviewer, Stephen Metcalf, veers off in directions that I don’t endorse: He seems to question the value of Klein-style explanatory journalism in general, rather than in particular instances, and he goes from critiquing Klein’s Darwinism to an inapt discussion of actual Darwinism. But it’s still a good piece.)

appalachian diaspora @33: I was writing about the difference between Parisian and rural French attitudes, in response to an earlier post on the same subject.

You believe that the death in the US of Mathew Shepard is somehow relevant to that.

Either you have difficulty in understanding what you read, or you do not know that France is not the same as the US.

Wonderful thing, the American educational system.

I always have trouble understanding these discussions, because it seems to be taken for granted that “polarisation” is bad in some way. I want to brush right past any vague suggestions that it’s OK to be polarised or doesn’t really matter, and land firmly in the opposite camp: polarisation is a good.
(I think of myself as a progressive, so this argument will be from that position.) One way of understanding progress is the gradual grinding away of unfairness and discrimination imposed on people for irrelevant factors. Like being male doesn’t really have anything to do with land ownership, so women should be allowed to own land; being gay doesn’t have much to do with your ability to commit to a partner, so gay people should be allowed to marry; being upper class doesn’t have much to do with your ability to make wise decisions, so leadership positions should not be closed off to working class people. But getting rid of irrelevant discrimination doesn’t mean ending diversity. People are still massively diverse, and they will inevitably sort themselves. If they’re not sorted by external oppressive forces, then they will sort themselves voluntarily. So the theory is that polarisation is what it looks like when people are sorting themselves based on their beliefs, rather than being sorted by their birth or their skin colour or their accent.
If polarisation sometimes makes Twitter interactions a little fractious, that’s barely a cost in the grand scheme of things. Compared with the massive systems of inequity that we are (I optimistically believe) eroding, a bit of fruity political language among family members seems like a small price to pay.
Perhaps this is a very Panglossian view, I dunno. But “polarisation is bad” seems to me like a deeply weird place to be beginning a conversation.

I did not find Klein’s book helpful. Like politicalfootball, I thought the New Yorker review raised interesting questions about Klein’s POV.
America Against America, Wang Huming, more insightful.

I really liked Klein’s book and think it’s more careful than than many of the criticisms would suggest. It isn’t perfect, but broadly speaking I thought he was conscious of the limitations of much of the work he was using and trying to be responsible in his summaries.

If you’re interested in the interplay of politics, urbanization, and psychological openness to experience I would also recommend Will Wilkinsen’s paper on the subject: https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/

It is explicitly trying to think about the possibility that, “Urbanization sorts populations on attributes—ethnicity, personality, and education—
that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives to move toward cities.”

Even if you are skeptical of the Big-5 traits, it is worth thinking about the ways in which the large political and economic gaps between urban and rural areas is going to look different to people with different personalities.

Finally, recommended with many, many grains of salt, I’ve been intrigued by some of Richard Florida’s recent comments about cities as, “engines of inequality” for example this is an interesting conversation: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/20170418_urban_florida_transcript.pdf

Starting from first principles, or somewhere near them, it seems obvious that people vary in personality and so it makes sense for variation in personality to be an area of psychological research. One possibility is that it will turn out that variation in personality, or a large part of it, can be explained by variation in a small number of underlying factors. To explain a multifarious phenomenon by a model with a small number of dimensions would be a good thing if the model were accurate. Just from reading a little on Wikipedia, though, what seems to emerge from the current state of knowledge is that although the Big Five model, or something like it, might be accurate, and certainly further investigation might be fruitful, there’s more than one model of the same time as plausible candidates, even without the possibility that no such model is accurate. Given that, I can’t figure it as anything but premature to rely on any such model for interpreting political developments in more than the most tentative and speculative way.

JQ@24: “the conservatism of the peasantry as opposed to the radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries”.

Looking from the opposite point of view: “the murderous and destructive radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, as opposed to the sober conservatism of the rural provinces, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries”.

The use of the introductory expression ‘Looking from the opposite point of view’ creates the misleading impression that all that is being done is a reversal of the original statement. John Quiggin’s statement integrates no evaluation either of conservatism or of radicalism, except to the extent that it suggests that it is conservatism and not radicalism which is a puzzle and a problem; therefore, a simple reversal would look like this ‘the radicalism of the cities, and particularly of Paris, as opposed to the conservatism of the peasantry has been a puzzle and a problem for centuries’. Stephen’s statement is not a simple reversal of this kind; it introduces an element previously absent by attaching evaluative descriptions to both radicalism (‘murderous and destructive’) and conservatism (‘sober’). What isn’t clear is whether these evaluations should be taken as being applied only to French (urban) radicalism and French (rural) conservatism, or to radicalism and conservatism more generally.

***sober conservatism of the rural provinces

so matthew shepard died of exposure to sober conservatism as opposed to murderous and destructive radicalism

This response obviously takes the above-mentioned evaluations to have the wider applications.

I was writing about the difference between Parisian and rural French attitudes, in response to an earlier post on the same subject.

You believe that the death in the US of Mathew Shepard is somehow relevant to that.

Either you have difficulty in understanding what you read …

As explained above, the difficulty for the reader arises from limits to the clarity of what was written. It’s not clear that the evaluation of (rural) conservatism as ‘sober’ and (urban) radicalism as ‘murderous and destructive’ is limited to the context of France; if it isn’t, then reference to the death of Mathew Shepard is relevant.

-I enjoy owning guns.
-I am regularly worried about being the victim of violent crime.
-I purposefully chose to live away from the urban center, and I actively avoid much of the city.
-I purposefully chose to live in a place with few restrictions on gun ownership and carrying.
-I purposeful chose to live in a place with good schools that feel safe for my kids.
-I have some fantasies about using a gun to save someone.
-I am not racist, but I believe some racial groups are more likely to be violent (it’s for societal reasons: bad schools, poverty, bad parenting, misguided progressive social programs).
-I believe that people should help themselves and that it harms people, long term, to be helped by the government.
-I am a good citizen who always follows the law.
-I will accept government help if that is what the law says, but I don’t want or depend on those laws.
-I live in a place with very few people of color, but that is not why I moved there.
-Sometimes I carry a loaded gun into the city (for my safety), even though it is against the law.

Here is a set of affirmative statements that I encounter, bundled together, in conversation with folks who commute into Chicago. Does one of these come first and lead to the rest? For my money, I think it is about race. Safety, fear, guns, and opposition to social services, all stem from antipathy to people of other races, who are perceived to be dangerous and dependent on costly social programs. These commuters are deeply defining themselves as different* from "those people" (*better than).

But, whatever the causal element, the list travels as a group and drives sorting.


A lot of American polarization emerges from our two-party system. Our old system was a kind of a two-and-a-half party system: Republicans, Southern Democrats, and other Democrats. The three-body problem is interestingly dynamic, but the two-body problem pretty much consists of a stable orbit. Things would look very different–with the same voters in the same location–if we had proportional representation.

Stephen @32 “Looking from the opposite point of view: “the murderous and destructive radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, as opposed to the sober conservatism of the rural provinces, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries”.”

As others have noted, I didn’t put forward a POV, or add adjectives to the fairly standard terms, “radicalism”, and “conservatism”. But now that you have done so, should I put you down as a fan of the “sober conservatism” that saw rural areas give overwhelming support to Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, as well as (less poisonous, but still nasty) autocrats like Napoleon III?

The premise that rural areas politics are determined by the mass of the population needs support. If the conservative politics of rural areas is largely determined by the greater relative power of the rich, rather than the psyche of the masses, then all this personality speculation is irrelevant.

On the other hand maybe, in urban areas, the relative numbers of the lower classes gives them more power to express their real attitudes. Yet the greater numbers of rivals among the rich reduces their effectiveness in creating a political monolith that displaces any dissent?

The test of this proposition lies I suppose in the suburbs. But then, suburbs are very much about geographical separation of different groups, starting with who can afford the property and commute.

Historically, in other countries the ability of local political chiefs, whether called gentry or caciques or whatever, local landowners has served to dominate the rural areas. I see no reason why people should assume US democracy makes rural politics an emanation of the rural people’s vileness or nobility.

Nor does it seem obvious that political groups would collect the same personality types any more than “religions” do. But it does seem obvious why some vested interests would be interested in promoting the idea it’s all about the moral failings of the bad people versus the moral superiority of the good people.

JQ@48: you are partly right, and I owe you a partial apology. You said @24: “the conservatism of the peasantry as opposed to the radicalism of the cities, and particularly Paris, has been a puzzle and problem for centuries.” I had supposed, perhaps wrongly, that you regarded the radicalism of the French cities, and particularly Paris, as admirable, and the conservatism of the peasantry (”a uniformly right-wing vote”} as deplorable. I do not dispute that such was sometimes the case; but sometimes the urban radicals were less admirable than the rural conservatives.

Restricting ourselves to France, as you originally did, I would mention the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in Paris and subsequently in other provincial cities; various murderous events in the French Revolution (but I might be too heavily influenced hereby Richard Cobb); the Paris commune with its belief that if Paris voted one way, so ought the rest of France. As for Napoleon III, I would ask you to note that in the 1848 Presidential election, the only departments voting against him were very rural, very conservative places in Brittany and the south of France.

Outside France, I would mention the Gordon Riots in London in 1780; inspired by popular hostility to Catholic emancipation and not suppressed till, after three days of arson and looting, the militia arrived from southern rural counties to shoot the urban mob. Or the New York City draft riots of 1863, suppressed by local militias (but I don’t know how far these were from rural upstate) and the Michigan and Indiana Volunteers, who I’m fairly sure were deeply rural. Or Ernst Toller’s very urban Bavarian Socialist Republic in Munich, 1919, which had some members who were deranged even by Trumpian standards – the Foreign Affairs Minister declared war on Switzerland for refusing a demand to provide railway locomotives – and which was succeeded by a Communist government who declared of the children of the bourgeoisie “We are not interested in keeping them alive. No harm if they die – they’d only grow into enemies of the proletariat.”

It is entirely unworthy of you to suppose that if I disagree with you on some points, I may be a supporter of Hitler, Franco or Mussolini. None of whom, of course, were French, and we were discussing France. And I do not admire any of them.

Need I add that I regard President Trump as having been unworthy of a great country?

So much discussion of American exceptionalism without a mention of slavery!

It’s been noted that a map of the prevalence of diabetes nearly matches that of Baptists. Maternal and infant mortality rates track opposition to abortion. A wide assortment of measures of misery have been such a familiar fixture in the same states for so many generations that it’s a wonder anyone remains.

Let me state it plainly: the former slave states have been the poorest in the nation since the abolition of slavery. Why? Perhaps because their operating principle seems to be that some white misery is an acceptable price for even more black misery. I can conceive of no other reason for some states’ refusal of Medicaid expansion, free medical care for millions in desperate need.

MisterMr@23:

Rather than “innate vs. stable”, the distinction I’ve found most illuminating in this sort of conversation is “innate vs. inherent”. Both indicate functionally immutable characteristics, both generally refer to characteristics that were not derived based on any choices made by the individual (or even consciousness that the traits were being developed) and inherent remains a subset of innate. However, inherent allows for acquired traits whereas innate only allows inborn ones. An illustrative example would be skin color vs. native language proficiency. Both are stable and unchanging characteristics derived w/o any choice by the individual, but one was inevitable and genetic while the other was up to a certain moment undecided but ultimately is a result of the formative environment. There is a troublesome liberal tendency towards essentializing all significant identity traits, and aside from religion that essentializing is almost invariably framed as innate rather than inherent. It’s not new – it springs from the same place that progressive eugenicists arose last century – and it appears to a significant degree to be a way to rationalize intergenerational wealth transfer (and similar class-derived inequality) with the meritocracy myths that are so fundamental to the hierarchical social order they embrace and defend.

I’d add that this latter impulse is how nominal leftist authoritarianism is expressed as a meaningful movement – the velvet gloved over an iron fist. It’s soft authoritarianism; there’s police on every corner, but they’re protecting persons and property rather than imposing strict rules. There’s a social hierarchy with limited social mobility, and only certain parts of it get to make decisions, but it’s based on a fair meritocracy that merely coincides with your parents’ street address and jobs. Everyone gets to have a say before the wise technocrats decide what’s best for us. Hard authoritarianism is indeed sparse on the left in the West (though the tankies are certainly making a comeback), but soft? It’s there. It’s less present at the family level, yes, but in larger groups there’s definitely disdain for democratic rule when the outcome can’t be assured in advance – and a tendency to try to make the outcome assured in advance, even if not by uncouth means like those uncivilized brutes on the right. This is visible in domestic politics, but it’s glaringly obvious when examining ostensibly-liberal foreign policy.

Question for Gina or anybody who has read the book:
Does Klein define the term polarization? And does he attempt to explain why this phenomenon is supposedly observed at certain times and places in contrast to others? Iow does he offer a halfway convincing comparative analysis?

Cranky @51: we shouldn’t forget that the US Census definition of urban areas is rather loose. It is true that > 80% of the population are now classified as urban but urban areas as defined by Census often include large areas of low population density.

„For the 2010 Census, an urban area will comprised a densely settled core of census tracts and/or census blocks that meet minimum population density requirements, along with adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses as well as territory with low population density included to link outlying densely settled territory with the densely settled core. To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters“

Your point is still correct of course that rural interests are way overrepresented in US political discourse (as well as in other countries). But we shouldn’t forget that US urbanization patterns are fundamentally different from most developed countries. People living in real core cities are a minority and those in the suburbs often don’t identify with the cities.

https://www.census.gov/history/www/programs/geography/urban_and_rural_areas.html
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2010-urban-rural.html

Stephen @62. We seem to be in furious agreement new. There are plenty of examples of murderous behavior both by urban radicals and by rural conservatives, and not much point in trying to keep score.

To restate my original point about “a puzzle and a problem”:
It’s a puzzle that relatively poor rural people support parties whose policies benefit the rich and powerful at their expense; and
It’s a problem for the left – is it better to attempt to win rural support, for example with elements of social conservatism combine with egalitarian economic policies, or to give up on rural areas and try to build a majority coalition centred on cities and attracting support from towns, peri-urban areas and so on.
Every case is different, but the US is mostly notable for the late arrival of this kind of polarization

and in order to come back to the topic of this thread:
‘Why We’re Polarized, Part 1’ –

We are polarised BE-cause we can’t FOCUS anymore and most of US don’t even know anymore who or what WE are –
(especially ‘politically’)

J-D: insert “the majority of” at appropriate places, and your question should be resolved.

The voting pattern discussed is evident among small proprietors as you suggest, but also among wage workers in rural areas (with some historical exceptions like unionised shearers). Arguably, it’s farmers who lead opinion and others who follow

@Orange Watch 66

“Rather than “innate vs. stable”, the distinction I’ve found most illuminating in this sort of conversation is “innate vs. inherent”. Both indicate functionally immutable characteristics,”

I get your point about “inherent” characteristics, but seriously there is nothing that proves that these “traits” are functionally immutable; Altemeyer for example says that RWA changes during life depending on where one lives.
There are some people who think that “traits” are (or should be) immutable, but there is really no reason they should be, and even the studies that suggest high level of biological dependence IMHO are quite dubious.
It’s just that a lot of people by default tend to think that “traits” exist and are either biological or functionally immutable, and so accept studies that show high correlations with less skepticism they accept the ones that show changes (or inherent VS innate).

Speaking of “traits” and politics, first of all it’s likely that such “traits” depend on sociological (class) variables, and second it is possible that political parties end up “targeting” one trait or another because it becomes a good strategy for them. Atlemeyer for example says (since like 20 years ago) that Reps are actively pushing on high RWA buttons.

Part of the problem, IMHO, is that during the late 80s and the 90s parties of the left shifted their economic policies towards the right, and this was very popular at the beginning (e.g. Clinton The Husband and Blair). Thus the right had to shift its priorities towards the right and had to work on identity issues, that favour RWA attitudes.

For the record I think that the left also might end up going in that direction, with opposite identitarian identifications, although it is not yet at the extreme level of the right (this is the reason I made my anti-anti-racist comments on another thread some times ago, I’ll avoid to reharse the same arguments if possible).

There are also other social/cultural shifts: the left is more and more the party of the highly educated, who however are not anymore necessariously the rich, whereas the right is still the party of the wealthy, who however are not necessariously not educated, so this creates a polarization between two groups that do not really define one as the opposite of the other; people who aren’t very educated but are also wealthy are up for grabs and so are people who are both wealthy and educated; the Reps are using this high RWA tactic because it helps them get some poor and uneducated voters via identity politics basically.

BUT!
on the other side –

PARIS is still ‘FRANCE’ –
even if ‘trump’ -(or any Tweeter on CT) says THE opposite!
https://youtu.be/BnzXMRkBjMY

MisterMr@76:

I feel comfortable in saying I agree with essentially everything you said here. In examining my own preference for inherent over stable, I find myself wanting to avoid saying that traits and identities viewed as fundamental can be changed, and I think a lot of that is derived from the conservative culture-war contention that what people are is a result of their choices, and the common liberal counter that identities are inborn or systemic and thus outside the control of individuals. It feels like there’s a certain tendency – not universal, certainly (as liberal embrace of meritocracy demonstrates), but not also insignificant – towards ascribing immutability, both to disarm moral judgements against the speaker but also to disavow any responsibility to seek to change their opponents’ minds or even understand their POV. It’s certainly easier to speak in fixed/unfixed rather than adding unfixed-but-stable between the two, as considering why something is stable-but-mutable when other things are not is a question that can be both difficult and uncomfortable (as with the aforementioned discomfort I’m currently experiencing reviewing my own priors).

It does feel like retreating to “I’m like this and can’t change, so your condemnation is irrelevant” cedes moral high ground to the right. It doesn’t challenge the legitimacy of imposing one’s values on others, and in doing so can appear to validate it. It’s easy to hear that as “well, if I’d chosen to be like this, you’d have a point, but since I didn’t…”, which becomes important if the accuser (or more importantly, uncommitted audience) doesn’t fully accept the contention that there WAS no choice involved in making the person what they are, or that the criticism is strictly aimed at immutable traits rather than ostensibly-unrelated decisions.

Any fury on my part comes from the insinuations that if we differ on some matters I may, or must be a supporter, or crypto-supporter, of fascism. I think that you and J-D may now be regretting such words.

Since ‘words I used to insinuate that Stephen may or must be a supporter or crypto-supporter of fascism’ is a description of something which does not exist, it’s not something which I can regret.

Whether Stephen will regret insinuating that I used such words when I never did, I do not know. It may be that Stephen will have regrets; it may not be so.

But for a complicating factor, some time back in the 70s I came across a French rural election poster: “Vote Communist! The party of the small independent landowner!” Make of that what you will.

What I make of that is along the same lines as what I make of all elections posters: that (some) Communists thought it would help them gain votes. Whether they were right, I can’t say. It would not surprise me to learn that there are or have been some small independent landowners who have voted Communist, but as a group I’m confident they aren’t and never have been a significant source of Communist support.

I think the rural-urban divide is influenced in the US, in a way it isn’t in the UK, by the fact that retired factory workers and their descendants, after the factories closed, were often left in still-rural areas, because the factories were spread out and built in then-small cities or in farming areas (and only a few of those newer cities, like Los Angeles, grew large enough to support lots of other employers). In the UK they would presumably now be living in London and Manchester. In the US they’re in the heart of Trump country.

@J, not that one – A small correction – I think most factories were built in smaller cities that only depended on their largest employer and never diversified economically. I wouldn’t call Akron, Ohio or Kenosha, Wisconsin rural. I’ve seen larger cities classified using the terms, “money center” or “headquarters cities”, meaning that they command some sort of economic power. Akron and Kenosha, to use two examples, are not that.

I can’t think of an equivalent British city. Maybe Leeds?

DavidtheK

I had in mind something like this https://www.kcci.com/article/700-iowans-to-lose-jobs-friday-as-tpi-composites-ends-manufacturing/38640116#. The article references an earlier, larger plant closing in the same town. MaybeNewton, Iowa, is itself a town and thus not strictly “rural”, I don’t know.