Polarization is Overrated
We have more in common than you might think, without our leaders repulsing us
Just watching this guy Smerconish on CNN this morning, struggling to explain Biden’s unpopularity. Noting Biden’s approval rating is at 40%, he observes Biden is the most unlikable president since Jimmy Carter.
Radio and Television Business Report
God I wonder why that is.
Between a clean withdrawal from Afghanistan, no less than a year of “transitory” inflation, his manifest cognitive decline, referring to the War in Ukraine as Iraq twice, and his outstanding progeny who “did nothing wrong”— I can’t imagine why Biden’s approval rating isn’t at least above 50%.
Mr Smerconish appears confounded as to why, according to a poll scoring a potential rematch between Biden and Trump, the electorate prefers Biden by a margin of roughly ten percentage points. He boils it down to partisan polarization increasingly siloing the country into mutually hostile factions, having the total lack of a sense of irony to take a swipe at “right wing media,” even while he airs his own unabashedly left-leaning opinions on CNN— a news source that spent two years amplifying the patent untruth that Trump was a Russian mole, who didn’t legitimately win the 2016 election, and more recently that the George Floyd protests were entirely peaceful…
Washington Speakers Bureau
However, the we’re so polarized argument overstates the polarization of society by way of overlooking the accelerating gratuitous divisiveness of our leaders. To be sure, rates of partisanship are grotesquely high. For example, after she took offense to my application of the term “leftist,” when I pressed an admittedly progressive relative of mine to describe what her political beliefs were fundamentally, she indignantly asserted, “I’m a Democrat…” Similarly the MAGA faction of the Republican party has taken to criticizing any conservatives who don’t share their blood-and-soil nationalism as RINO’s (Republican in Name Only), meaning unless you’re a “Republican,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene defines it, you don’t—indeed can’t— qualify as a conservative…
Indeed it’s shameful how brazen we’ve become at the height of our lust for the comfort to substitute the value of political ideology for partisan identity, the reward of which I think is to feel oneself merging like the unconscious membrane of a cell with a movement— for one lacking the wherewithal for any independence of viewpoint whatsoever. It’s as if people preferred the vertiginous thrill of being swept up in a riptide, at least compared to the calm isolation of standing on shore, let alone the strain and discipline it would exert to swim against the current. As a matter of fact, I remember reading some Trump voters identify simply as “movement conservatives.” To me to zealously identify your allegiance with a movement is tantamount to boasting that you’re a herd animal, and announcing what farm you live on. But the subtext of this disreputable eagerness to signal one’s membership on a team is no less droll than to submit you don’t have any of your own opinions, because you’re a party person (pun intended)!
Moreover I think the social media era places such a high premium on being social, extroverted, or a people person that our frantic desperation not to be a loner has contributed embarrassingly to calcify our willful tribal attachments. It is not to be underestimated the extent to which the cultural transformation of civil society distorts human behavior in the public sphere, as by shaping the dissemination of useful knowledge, information technology has profound ramifications for the dynamics of political engagement.
Nevertheless, I think the majority of society is actually less polarized than that our leaders are intensely divisive. If people are more extreme nowadays, the massive extent of that extremism is an illusion of digital media, amplifying the craziest voices and effectively screening and drowning out the moderate ones, making insanity appear strong and prevalent, and moderation weak and outnumbered by contrast. And it’s the rational response to the incentives of digital reality that our leaders become populist thespians. If social media gives the marginalized and the weird special interests outsize scope to shape public opinion, it’s only natural that anyone who wants political power seeks to appeal, not necessarily to the dispersed high passions of the rabble, but to play to the elite minority of gatekeepers of triggering content.
The State Journal Register
This is an oversimplification, but in this environment, if you want the Republican vote, all it takes practically, is to wax enraged over offshoring, fentanyl or border security. Any combination of those combustible elements will do. If you want the Democratic vote on the other hand, work yourself into paroxysms over RACISM!! of course, or LGBTQ+IAXYZ issues. If you’re on the right, pander in the crudest, lowest way possible to the base rancor of white uneducated working class men. If you’re on the left, stoke the fire and fury of self-loathing college-educated white progressive women. Whichever ticket Republican or Democrat you run on, you can be sure to get nowhere without taking a partisan’s cultural identity and his/her factional cosmetic vision for America into consideration. Once you get a good grip on the partisan conscience, and you’re fanatical enough in your rhetoric, this will at least get you past the primaries. Hell maybe you want to split the partisans right down the middle, and cast a net big enough to catch both left and right terrified fish, as RFK Jr is attempting. Pepper your rhetoric with images of rising things— Rising income inequality, rising teen suicide suicide, rising sea levels. Also conjure images of falling things. Falling middle class incomes, falling working class wages. Or how about collapsing infrastructure. Generally you want to lead with infrastructure right out of the gate, and perhaps you want to wrap up with things vanishing and disappearing. Church, jobs, family, marriage, coal mining, flip phones.
But there’s a catch. For the means to win a primary is antithetical to what it takes to secure the approval of the majority of the country. It’s unsurprising that Trump’s approval rating stabilized around as low as Biden’s throughout his tenure. He was no less unprincipled and extreme. And while one has to be extreme to win local elections, one is bound to run into the disapproval of most of the country, the bigger the elections, as Ron Desantis’s floundering campaign is just discovering. That is because despite the media environment, and despite the growth of partisanship, the average person is not extreme or partisan. The average American is actually more likely to resent hardliners in power.
So if Smerconish wonders why Biden’s approval rating is so low, that’s probably because none of us care about the millions of Jobs Jobs Jobs! that the overheated economy has been hemorrhaging over the last year, at least not while real wages under Biden declined by 3%. Most of the country probably doesn’t like being told what to think or what to do either. Take Diversity initiatives in the military and his token appointments of women of color, tenaciously to every office and department. Or what about the fact that his administration cajoled tech companies to filter out “misinformation” on social media? Or that he’s spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the domestic manufacture and consumption of electric vehicles. Does Mr Smerconish think that the average person cares about diversity in the armed forces, or hitting the arbitrary target of Net Zero emissions by 2050?
Main Line Reform Temple
Americans are highly sensitive to authorities who presume to tell them what and what not to do. For one, I do not have difficulty understanding why Biden’s approval rating is so low. The reason is the same as why Trump’s approval rating was also historically low. It should surprise no one that most Americans don’t approve of people who endorse grabbing women. And most Americans don’t believe illegal immigrants are rapists and murderers it’s worth the spectacle of a border wall.
It should be cause for optimism that the sort of thing that helps you campaign and primaries—polarization—reveals directly how unpopular you are later on.
Dare I say, it means we’re actually not that polarized.
— Jay