The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 6. The Polarization Cycle
Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2019-8-20 Review Date: Status:💥
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if we step back and look at American universities as complex institutions nested within a larger society that has been growing steadily more divided, angry, and polarized, we begin to see the left and the right locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage that is an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve in this book.
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Figure 6.1 comes from the Pew Research Center, which in 1994 began asking a nationally representative sample of Americans about their level of agreement with a set of ten policy statements, and repeated the survey every few years. The policy statements include “Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and healthcare,” and “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength.”4 Pew computes how far apart members of different groups are on each issue, then takes the average of the absolute values of those differences across all ten statements. As you can see in the line near the bottom marked “Gender,” men and women are just about the same distance apart in 2017 (7 points) as they were in 1994 (9 points). Only two of the lines show a clear increase. People who attend religious services regularly are now 11 points away from those who never attend, compared to just 5 points apart in 1994. But that 6-point increase is dwarfed by the 21-point increase in the distance between Republicans and Democrats over the same time period, nearly all of it occurring since 2004.
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FIGURE 6.1. The distance between Republicans and Democrats, on a set of 10 policy questions, has grown very large since 2004. Differences by race, gender, education, and age have not changed much since 1994. (Source: Pew Research Center.)
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If the people on the “other side” are moving farther and farther away from you on a broad set of moral and political issues, it stands to reason that you would feel more and more negatively toward them. Figure 6.2 shows that this has been happening. Every two years, the American National Election Study measures Americans’ attitudes on a variety of topics. In part of the survey, the researchers use a “feeling thermometer,” which is a set of questions asking respondents to rate a variety of groups and institutions on a scale where 0 is defined as “very cold or unfavorable” and 100 is defined as “very warm or favorable.” The top two lines in the graph show that when Republicans and Democrats are asked to rate their own party, the lines are in positive territory and haven’t moved much since the 1970s.5 The bottom two lines show what they think about the other party. These lines have always been in negative territory, but many will be surprised to see that the cross-party ratings weren’t all that negative from the 1970s until 1990—they hovered in the 40s. It’s only in the 1990s that the lines begin to drop, with a plunge between 2008 and 2012 (the years of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street).
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Stanger, A. (2017, March 13). Understanding the angry mob at Middlebury that gave me a concussion. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opinion/understanding-the-angry-mob-that-gave-me-a-concussion.html
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Pew Research Center. (2017, October 5). The partisan divide on political values grows even wider. Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/1-partisan-divides-over-political-values-widen
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With the exception that Republicans’ ratings of their own party dipped in 2016.
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You can download the data yourself at http://www.electionstudies.org.
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FIGURE 6.2. Affective partisan polarization. Americans’ feelings toward their own party have barely changed since the 1970s, but Americans have become increasingly “cold” or hostile toward the other party since the 1990s. (Source: American National Election Study,6 plotted by Iyengar and Krupenkin, 2018.)
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Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but in order to make sense of America’s current predicament, you have to start by recognizing that the mid-twentieth century was a historical anomaly—a period of unusually low political polarization and cross-party animosity7 combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government.8 From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War. Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
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A second major reason is that, since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities, as Bill Bishop showed in his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Subsequent research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block.9 The two major political parties have sorted themselves along similar lines: as the Republican Party becomes disproportionately older, white, rural, male, and Christian, the Democratic Party is increasingly young, nonwhite, urban, female, and nonreligious.10 As political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin put it, “The result is that today, differences in party affiliation go hand in glove with differences in world view and individuals’ sense of social and cultural identity.”11
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There were plenty of cultural conflicts, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, but measures of political polarization in Congress were low; cross-partisan cooperation was high. Hare & Poole (2014).
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See Putnam (2000) on social capital.
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Greenblatt, A. (2016, November 18). Political segregation is growing and “We’re living with the consequences.” Governing. Retrieved from http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-bill-bishop-interview.html
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For example, in a September 2017 survey of adults aged eighteen to thirty-four, only 11% of African Americans, 18% of Asian Americans, and 20% of Latino Americans had very or somewhat favorable views of the Republican Party. By contrast, those groups had a favorable view of the Democratic Party: 61%, 68%, and 52%, respectively. See: NBC News & GenForward Survey: September 2017 Toplines, p.4. Retrieved from http://genforwardsurvey.com/assets/uploads/2017/09/NBC-GenForward-Toplines-September-2017-Final.pdf
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Iyengar & Krupenkin (2018).
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A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s, there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. And then there’s the “filter bubble,” in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds.12 Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
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- Pariser (2011). A “filter bubble” is what happens when the algorithms that websites use to predict your interests based on your reading/viewing habits work to avoid showing you alternative viewpoints. See: El-Bermawy, M. (2016, November 18). Your filter bubble is destroying democracy. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2016/11/filter-bubble-destroying-democracy
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A fourth reason is the increasingly bitter hostility in Congress. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for about sixty years, with only brief interruptions in the mid- to late twentieth century, but their dominance ended in 1994, when the Republicans swept to victory under Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House. Gingrich then imposed a set of reforms intended to discourage his many new members from forging the sort of personal relationships across party lines that had been normal in previous decades.13 For example, Gingrich changed the work schedule to ensure that all business was done midweek, and then he encouraged his members not to move their families from their home districts, and instead fly to Washington for a few days each week. Gingrich wanted a more cohesive and combative Republican team, and he got it. The more combative norms then filtered up to the Senate as well (though in weaker form). With control shifting back and forth several times since 1995, and with so much at stake with each shift, norms of civility and possibilities for bipartisanship have nearly disappeared. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”14
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Mann & Ornstein (2012).
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Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018, January 27). How wobbly is our democracy? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/democracy-polarization.html
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These four trends, plus many more,15 have combined to produce a very unfortunate change in the dynamics of American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. In a recent review of data on “affective polarization” (the degree to which members of each party feel negatively toward the other party), Iyengar and Krupenkin summarize the change like this:
Prior to the era of polarization, ingroup favoritism, that is, partisans’ enthusiasm for their party or candidate, was the driving force behind political participation. More recently, however, it is hostility toward the out-party that makes people more inclined to participate.16
In other words, Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. “They” must be stopped, at all costs.
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Others include increasing education (educated people are more partisan), increasing immigration and diversity, and the increasing importance of money in campaigns. See a list at Haidt, J., & Abrams, S. (2015, January 7). The top 10 reasons American politics are so broken. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/07/the-top-10-reasons-american-politics-are-worse-than-ever
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Iyengar & Krupenkin (2018), p. 202.
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This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.
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The vulnerability comes with an unfortunate asymmetry: the faculty and students at universities have shifted to the left since the 1990s, as we showed in the last chapter, while the “outrage industry” of talk radio, cable news networks, and conspiracy websites is more developed and effective on the right.17 (The mainstream media overall leans left,18 but the left simply never found a format or formula that could match the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.) Right-wing media has long loved to make fun of professors and stir up anger over “politically correct” practices spotted on university campuses. But as campus activism increased in 2015 and offered up an unending stream of dramatic cell phone videos (including students cursing at professors and shouting down speakers), right-wing media outlets began to devote far more attention to campus events, which they portrayed gleefully, usually stripped of any explanatory context. The rising expressions of anger from the left on campus, sometimes directed against conservative speakers, led to rising expressions of anger from the right, off campus, sometimes directed in threatening ways at left-leaning professors and students, which in turn triggered more anger from the left on campus … and the cycle repeats.
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Berry & Sobieraj (2014).
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Cillizza, C. (2014, May 14). Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/just-7-percent-of-journalists-are-republicans-thats-far-less-than-even-a-decade-ago
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Littleton, J. (2017, May 29). The truth about the Evergreen protests. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@princessofthefaeries666/the-truth-about-the-evergreen-protests-444c86ee6307
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In the last two chapters, we examined protests, shout-downs, open letters, and witch hunts originating from the left, because the left is the dominant force on most college campuses (leaving aside religious and military academies). But if we step back from campus, we see that some people and groups on the right engage in moralistic, aggressive, and intimidating actions aimed at campus, too.
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In physics, as Newton’s law tells us, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction. Many critics of campus protesters in 2015 accused them of overreacting to small things (such as Dean Spellman’s email at Claremont McKenna). But beginning in late 2016, we began to see more examples of off-campus overreaction from the right in response to speech by professors on the left.
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The polarization cycle influencing university life since 2017 typically proceeds in this sequence:42
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- See Haidt. J. (2017, June 28). Professors must now fear intimidation from both sides. Heterodox Academy. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/professors-must-now-fear-intimidation-from-both-sides
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A left-wing professor says or writes something provocative or inflammatory on social media, in mainstream media, in a lecture, or (less often) in an academic publication. The statement is often a reaction to perceived injustices committed by right-wing groups or politicians off campus. A video clip or screen shot is then shared on social media.
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Right-wing media outlets pick up the story and then retell it in ways that amplify the outrage, often taking it out of context and sometimes distorting the facts.43
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- Schmidt, P. (2017, June 22). Professors’ growing risk: Harassment for things they never really said. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Professors-Growing-Risk-/240424?cid=rclink
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Dozens or even hundreds of people who hear about it write angry posts or comments on social media, or send emails to the professor, often including racist or sexist slurs, sometimes including threats of rape or death. Some people publicly call for the university to fire the professor.
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Meanwhile, the college administration fails to defend the professor. Sometimes an investigation follows, and sometimes the professor is put on leave. Professors who are untenured are at high risk of being fired or of not having their contracts renewed.
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Most partisans who hear any part of the story find that it confirms their worst beliefs about the other side. The right focuses on what the professor said or wrote. The left focuses on the racist/sexist reaction to it. With their anger fortified, people on both sides are primed to repeat the cycle.
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This pattern is different from the pattern when professors arouse the ire of students on campus, and calling someone racist or demanding that they be disinvited is in no way equivalent to making rape threats or death threats. That distinction is recognized in law; the First Amendment does not protect credible rape or death threats. Those are criminal. But whether the reaction comes from the off-campus right or the on-campus left, the response from university leadership is usually weak and often doesn’t support the professor. Things spiral rapidly out of control, and observers on the left and the right draw the same conclusion: the other side is evil.
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Many professors say they now teach and speak more cautiously, because one slip or one simple misunderstanding could lead to vilification and even threats from any number of sources.44 Add to that an insidious new problem: professors are being closely watched because of their politics. The conservative campus group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) even created a “Professor Watchlist” in order to “expose and document” faculty members “who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”45 Many free-speech advocates watched the unveiling of TPUSA’s watchlist with concern—after all, the keeping of lists of disfavored ideas and the people who hold them has a distinct and ugly history in the United States.46 These lists are meant as a warning for those on them to watch what they say. Provoking uncomfortable thoughts is an essential part of a professor’s role, but professors now have reason to worry that provocative educational exercises and lines of questioning could spell the end of their reputations and even careers.
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Haidt, J. (2017, April 26). Intimidation is the new normal on campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Intimidation-Is-the-New-Normal/239890
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Flaherty, C. (2016, November 22). Being watched. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from highered.com/news/2016/11/22/new-website-seeks-register-professors-accused-liberal-bias-and-anti-american-values”>https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/22/new-website-seeks-register-professors-accused-liberal-bias-and-anti-american-values”>highered.com/news/2016/11/22/new-website-seeks-register-professors-accused-liberal-bias-and-anti-american-values
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Heterodox Academy condemned the Professor Watchlist. See: HxA Executive Team. (2016, November 24). Heterodox Academy condemns Professor Watchlist. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/heterodox-academy-condemns-professor-watchlist
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After declining for twenty-five years, reported incidents of hate crimes increased in 2015.47 In 2016, those numbers, tracked by the FBI, rose a further 5%.48 One study of major U.S. cities from January to August 2017 suggests a 20% rise in reported hate crimes compared to the first eight months of 2016.49 It is extremely difficult to obtain accurate statistics on hate crimes, and some widely publicized events have turned out to be hoaxes.50 Nonetheless, there is a widespread perception on campus that hate crimes are increasing in the Trump era, and as far as we can tell from our review of the available research, there is some truth to that perception.
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Middlebrook, H. (2017, November 14). The fascinating, if unreliable, history of hate crime tracking in the US. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/05/health/hate-crimes-tracking-history-fbi/index.html. Middlebrook correctly notes that hate crimes are historically underreported; still, years of decline, followed by a sudden surge in 2015, may not be strictly attributable to changes in accounting methods.
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FBI: US hate crimes rise for second straight year. (2017, November 13). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41975573
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Farivar, M. (2017, September 19). Hate crimes rise in major US cities in 2017. Voice of America. Retrieved from https://www.voanews.com/a/hate-crimes-rising-in-us/4034719.html
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Alfonseca, K. (2017, August 21). When hate meets hoax. ProPublica. Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/when-hate-meets-hoax. See also: Soave, R. (2018, January 19). Another hate crime at the University of Maryland turns out to be a hoax. Reason. Retrieved from http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/19/a-second-hate-crime-at-the-university-of. See also: Gose, B. (1999, January 8). Hate-crime hoaxes unsettle campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Hate-Crime-Hoaxes-Unsettle/2836 [inactive]
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On campus, threats take concrete and sometimes terrifying forms. In 2015, a white student at Missouri University of Science and Technology was arrested for posting on social media that he was going to the Mizzou campus (the main campus of the University of Missouri), where black students were protesting, and would “shoot every black person” he saw.51 This happened five months after Dylann Roof murdered nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In October 2017, a white University of Maryland student was charged with murder and a hate crime after stabbing to death Richard Collins III, a visiting Bowie State student, who was apparently targeted for being black.52
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Suspect in Mizzou threats identified as Lake St. Louis teen. (2015, November 11). NBC12. Retrieved from http://www.nbc12.com/story/30489913/um-police-arrest-suspect-who-made-racist-threats-on-social-media
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Bui, L. (2017, October 17). U-Md. student to face hate-crime charge in fatal stabbing on campus. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/u-md-student-to-face-hate-crime-charge-in-fatal-stabbing-on-campus/2017/10/17/a17bfa1c-b35c-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html
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In the aftermath of the murder of Heather Heyer and the violence at the white supremacists’ march through Charlottesville, the physical threat posed by the alt-right and neo-Nazis became far more real for many observers who might have previously thought the alt-right was limited to internet trolls. In October 2017, only two months after the Charlottesville march, avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke at the University of Florida. An hour and a half after Spencer’s speech ended, three men proclaiming to be white nationalists drove their car over to a group of protesters at a bus stop and began to yell neo-Nazi chants at them. After one of the protesters hit the rear window of the vehicle with a baton, the three men jumped out of the car, reportedly yelling, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and “Shoot them!” One of the white nationalists, Tyler Tenbrink, was carrying a gun. He fired one shot, missing the protesters, and then the men fled. All three were later caught and charged with attempted homicide.53 Months later, at Wayne State University in Michigan, a student pulled a knife during a dispute with a group that was handing out pamphlets in favor of immigrants’ rights. He said he wanted to “kill all illegals that don’t belong in our country.”54
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One charge was later reduced to accessory after the fact. See: Smithson, D. (2017, November 9). Cases continue in shooting after Spencer protest. Ocala Star-Banner. Retrieved from http://www.ocala.com/news/20171109/cases-continue-in-shooting-after-spencer-protest. See also: Rozsa, L., & Svrluga, S. (2017, October 20). 3 men charged in shooting after white nationalist Richard Spencer’s speech in Florida. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-shooting-richard-spencer-speech-20171020-story.html
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Student in Trump shirt detained after brandishing knife, saying “Kill all illegals.” (2018, February 16). The Daily Beast. Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/student-in-trump-shirt-who-brandished-knife-and-said-kill-all-illegals-detained
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Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress. In 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, many Americans had the sense that the country had turned a corner in its struggle with racism.55 In late 2016, college students in the United States had spent the previous eight years in a country with a black president, and most experts and pundits were telling them to expect a transition to the country’s first female president. The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.
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- McWhorter, J. (2008, December 30). Racism in America is over. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html
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We close this chapter by repeating Allison Stanger’s assessment: “Political life and discourse in the United States is at a boiling point, and nowhere is the reaction to that more heightened than on college campuses.” This is the context in which today’s college students are trying to make sense of major national events and are reacting to seemingly small local incidents. We have suggested throughout this book that some interpretations of events are more constructive than others, but our point in this chapter is that there are reasons why students are doing what they are doing. There is a backstory. There is a national context. The polarization spiral and the growth of negative partisanship are influencing political activity all across the country, driving many Americans to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them.