Reasons To Be Optimistic About Polarization — BCB #113

Things could be worse, they have been worse, and they will get better.

If you’re reading BCB, you are well aware that polarization is a serious and pervasive problem, one that many say threatens American democracy. But here’s a much-needed hit of optimism: there’s reason to believe that this situation will eventually start to get better—and might actually be improving already. In a recent newsletter, environmental economics professor Matt Burgess argues that polarization will destroy itself:

If we can maintain free and fair elections, freedom of speech, market competition, and the rule of law, the polarizing forces in our society will eventually undermine themselves, and the silent, exhausted majorities will eventually hold them accountable. Think of polarization as a very bad flu, and our democratic institutions as our immune system. We are pretty sick right now, but our immune system will eventually win as long as we don’t become immunocompromised.

Burgess cites evidence suggesting this is already starting to happen, that both extremes on the American political spectrum are beginning to weaken. The sides feed off each other, treating the other as a bogeyman and silencing moderates on their own side (in the usual way). But both the far left’s tactic of dividing people into ever smaller identity groups and the far right’s taste for brinksmanship and dysfunction run counter to achieving each side’s ultimate goals, something people seem to be picking up on. For example, Trump’s election supercharged a move towards cancel culture and identity politics on the left, but there’s evidence that this trend has reversed since Biden was elected.

Timing of Blue culture war trends, as measured by annual numbers of scholars under fire (i.e. targeted for discipline), tweets mentioning negative social justice words (e.g. transphobia, racism), and US-listed company earnings calls mentioning DEI, ESG, or related words (Source).

From here, Burgess predicts that America’s political extremes will ultimately be defeated by the market in business, culture, and education. Consumers want companies to make good products marketed to as many people as possible. Audiences want to consume media that’s entertaining. And students and parents want to learn the skills needed to excel, at the K-12 and university levels.

He further speculates that the far left will be the first extreme to go, both because of the de-escalation of social justice trends and because a majority of Democrats identify as “moderate” or “liberal,” while most Republicans describe themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.”

(Source)

Burgess predicts that more moderate Democrats will be more broadly appealing, compelling Republicans to deprioritize far right voices in order to remain competitive in elections. And, perhaps most importantly, this will all be possible because the institutions that make it possible for moderate majorities to prevail over time are already in place: free and fair elections, freedom of speech, market competition, and the rule of law. “It is impossible to overstate how much our democratic institutions prevent us from going off the rails,” he writes.

Still, just because the extremes promise to destroy themselves (in Burgess’s eyes at least), doesn’t mean we can’t speed things up a little. To do this, he argues, there are a few things to bear in mind:

First, attempts to address complex societal issues will not be successful unless they are serious. By serious, I mean rigorous and evidence-driven, thoughtful, and pragmatic. By pragmatic, I mean more focused on delivering results than on pieties, purity tests, or political posturing; and ambitious, but also aware of and concerned with practical limitations. Any approach that is not serious does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Second, slowing economic growth will make reducing polarization, and solving the underlying societal problems, harder… [It] has the potential to create zero-sum mindsets (which catalyze polarization), gaps between expectations and reality for young people (which catalyze social and political unrest), and a variety of other social, economic, and political problems. It is possible that artificial intelligence (AI) or some other technological breakthrough will reverse this trend of declining economic growth, but we should prepare for the possibility that it doesn’t, just in case.

Third, we need to build a strong, shared, multicultural identity… maintaining a strong shared, superordinate identity is key. History suggests that social and political movements, which balkanize us by sub-group and make sub-group identities supersede the shared identity, are likely to undermineour social fabric and our democracy.

Not only could it be worse, it really was worse

It’s become trendy to say that we’re living through unprecedented times, and sure, in many ways we are. But in a recent New York Times column sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gently reminds readers that America has withstood many moments of extreme division that we’ve smoothed the edges of over time.

The civil rights movement, for example, was unpopular and highly divisive in the 1960s—Martin Luther King Jr.’s unfavorable rating was 63 percent in a Gallup poll a few years before his assassination. Political violence spiked around the same time, thanks in large part to civil rights and antiwar protests. And things only got worse during Nixon’s presidency:

Bombs started going off seemingly everywhere — the Pentagon, corporate offices, the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, Wall Street, the California Attorney General’s Office. The retired F.B.I. agent Max Noel put the total at 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone — an average of five a day. In the book “Days of Rage,” by Bryan Burrough, Noel scoffs at how “one bombing now gets everyone excited. In 1972? It was every day.”

“One lesson from this history is that divisive, polarized issues of yesteryear can look very different in the light of history and progress,” Tufekci writes, “As I like to remind my friends, a true, harsh critic is actually an optimist—inspired by the hope that things can be made better.”

The Olympics stoke nationalism—and collaboration

Speaking of optimism, it’s Olympics season! On the one hand, the games are an opportunity for the entire world to tune into the same events and feel a sense of solidarity with each other. On the other, nationalism is baked into the entire ethos of the sporting ritual. In a recent newsletter, Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bevel parse this contradiction, asking the question, “How do the Olympics balance this tug-of-war between national pride and collective celebration?”

In a 2020 paper, two South Korean researchers referred to this as the “Olympic paradox,” finding that Koreans perceived out-groups, specifically Chinese people and Southeast Asians, more negatively during the 2016 and 2018 Olympics. In 2011 psychologists found that the same was true of Chinese people’s perceptions of the West during the 2008 Games in Beijing.

But this doesn’t mean the Olympics are bad for international relations. As Packer and Van Bevel point out, competition is actually fundamentally collaborative. After all,

The Olympics exemplify the principle that we can only compete peacefully if we agree at a deeper level to cooperate and play by the same sets of rules. The same is true for other forms of competition. There are also cooperative rules in politics, written in constitutions, embedded in institutions, and carved out by tradition. Shared rules allow social groups and political rivals to engage in fierce debate without resorting to force and bloodshed.

This is very much in the style of agonistic democracy—a political theory which says that different factions in society don’t have to agree, in fact they shouldn’t agree, but they do have to play by rules that constrain conflict.

Image of the Week

(Source)