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Guest Essay
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Is partisan hostility so deeply enmeshed in American politics that it cannot be rooted out?
Will Donald Trump institutionalize democratic backsliding — the rejection of adverse election results, the demonization of minorities and the use of the federal government to punish opponents — as a fixture of American politics?
The literature of polarization suggests that partisan antipathy has become deeply entrenched and increasingly resistant to amelioration.
“Human brains are constantly scanning for threats to in-groups,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a September 2023 essay, “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says.”
“As people affectively polarize, they appear to blow out-group threats out of proportion, exaggerating the out-group’s dislike and disgust for their own group, and getting ready to defend their in-group, sometimes aggressively,” Kleinfeld argued.
Kleinfeld acknowledged that “a number of interventions have been shown in lab settings, games and short experiments to reduce affective intervention in the short term,” but, she was quick to caution, “reducing affective polarization through these lab experiments and games has not been shown to affect regular Americans’ support for antidemocratic candidates, support for antidemocratic behaviors, voting behavior or support for political violence.”
Taking her argument a step further, Kleinfeld wrote:
Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.
Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, succinctly described by email the hurdles facing proposed remedies for polarization and antidemocratic trends:
I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.
The reality, Lelkes continued, is that “a fish rots from the head, and political elites are driving any democratic backsliding that is occurring in America. Most Republican voters do not support the antidemocratic policies and practices of their elected officials.”
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