How Divided Are We?

In an earlier essay, we talked about the problem of whether we can trust our senses. In many ways this is not a new problem: readers may recall Plato’s famous analogy that the images we see on the walls around us are mere shadows that we mistake for the real thing. What we think we are seeing is not what is actually there. Philosophers have further reflected on the ways in which our prejudices, biases, preconceptions, and other commitments go a long ways in determining what we see (think about how football fans view officiating), and that problem is further complicated by the fact that those prejudices and biases can’t be easily bracketed. Our prejudices keep us from being able to separate our prejudices out from the equations of knowing. In other words, we are stuck in a world of compromised perception with no easy way out.

Our own preferred approach to this problem is the combination of dialogue (thoughtful interaction with others so that we might clarify our opaque vision) and dialectic (the back-and-forth movement between ourselves and the external world). Both of these approaches revolve around our involvement in communities.

One of the standard “biases” that can affect our perception of the world is our tendency to think in binaries. Precisely because there are binaries, and in many ways, the most important things in the world occur in pairs (God/man, I/thou, man/woman, human/non-human, etc.), we tend to apply a binary way of thinking to phenomena that don’t admit as easily to binary thinking. This becomes a problem especially when our binary categories reinforce divisions that would otherwise allow for greater distinctions.

For this reason, political scientists have long sought ways to categorize people’s political approaches that avoid the Republican/Democrat or Liberal/Conservative binaries. Since the views of most individuals demonstrate sufficient nuance that simple labels can’t capture, scholars have likewise sought to capture the differences in the electorate in more nuanced ways. Many examples exist in the political science literature, and one hopes that the nuance may indicate less division among us than we suspect, and thus also a greater ability to overcome our divisions.

This report from More in Common* is a more popular effort to bring greater clarity and nuance to our political divisions. To approach the problem:

We used an advanced statistical process called hierarchical clustering to identify groups of people with similar core beliefs. This revealed seven groups of Americans―what we call Hidden Tribes―with distinctive views and values. Our breakdown of Americans into groups is tied to how they express their core beliefs, which isn’t necessarily aligned with conventional demographic measures like age, gender, level of education, or ethnic background. The result is a unique portrait of the American public that we believe is both more revealing and more actionable than typical surveys.

They break down the electorate this way:

The identification of an “Exhausted Majority” is the second most important revelation in their taxonomy, only behind the fact they use the word “tribes” as their descriptor. Their reasoning is that “tribal membership predicts differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan grouping.”

The size of the “exhausted majority” may indicate the desire for many Americans for something like a “normal” politics, more modest in scope and more cooperative in spirit. I find it odd that the authors place “traditional conservatives” on a wing along with “devoted conservatives,” while not connecting “traditional liberals” to their left wing but instead as part of the “exhausted majority,” and this probably reveals some of the prejudices of the surveys designers, prejudices further revealed if one takes a close look at the underlying assumptions of many of the questions they ask. (For the record, I took the quiz and found more than half the questions to be either impossible to answer or badly constructed, in part because they created false binaries.)

Still, I find their typology more interesting and useful than our typical “left/right” ones. One of my pet peeves is when reporters indiscriminately toss around the phrase “far-right,” as if that term has any scientific value. Herewith their typology:

– Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
– Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
– Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
– Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial.
– Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
– Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
– Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic.

Then, too, the report does a fairly decent job identifying the underlying factors leading to “polarization”:

Polarization in the United States is being driven by a mix of economic, social, demographic and technological factors that are common to mature democracies around the world. These include:
– rapid demographic changes
– increased economic inequality, stagnation in median wages and job insecurity
– the persistent threat of terrorism
– the ‘echo chamber’ effect of social media
– the partisanship of cable television and other media
– the US-specific trend of the erosion of confidence in the ‘American dream’

Readers are invited to fill-in-blanks concerning possible causes the authors don’t mention, but I can come up with four or five off the top of my head that are arguably more consequential than the ones the authors identify. I think they get closer to the truth in a later chapter when they examine “psychological forces” such as “Fear and perception of threat; Parenting style and authoritarianism; Moral foundations; Personal agency and responsibility.”

Along those lines, one of the things I like about the report is the use of the word “hidden,” by which the authors mean that people are more likely to be driven and united by shared beliefs, ideologies, and worldviews than they are by external factors such as race and sex.

Like most efforts to categorize the complexity of political views as well as the vast differences in the American public, the report contains no small amount of question-begging. But that too is an invitation to further study and clarification. In the meantime, the reader is invited to peruse the report as a way of bringing greater nuance, and thus hopefully greater understanding, to the political problems of our day, most notably concern about “polarization.”

Discussion Questions:

1. Where would you locate yourself in their typology?

2. What do you think are the most significant issues that divide Americans?

3. On what sorts of matters can one reach compromises, and on which ones not?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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