The Bedrock Decency of the Average American

November 20, 2024 8:16 PM

Two Americas: Why is American political discourse so radically different than the daily life of Americans? "...that ordinary Republicans and Democrats both think ordinary people in the other camp are more extreme than they actually are. That delusion is depressing but unsurprising. It gets stranger, however, when you break the numbers down to distinguish between degrees of partisan affiliation and involvement. When the NGO “More In Common” did that, it discovered that partisanship and delusion were highly correlated: The greater the political commitment, the greater the delusion. And then there’s this astonishing fact: There was one group whose perceptions were hardly skewed at all, meaning they had a pretty good grasp of the real views of Democrats and Republicans. That group? The “politically disengaged.” "
posted by storybored (5 comments total)

The point at which I knew this was going to be some very motivated rationalization to avoid looking reality straight in the face was this:

One possible explanation for this disjuncture is fear. Maybe people don’t put up lawn signs to avoid alienating neighbours or inviting retaliation. Maybe they aren’t showing their colours in public because they don’t want strangers haranguing them, or worse.

I don’t find that explanation compelling, however, because that just doesn’t sound like Americans.

As someone who is careful what positions I state because you don't know how someone will react (and this is said as a cishetero white man), this comes across very bluntly as "I don't want to accept reality, because accepting reality means having to put aside comfortable lies I believe," with a touch of being in a privileged position where the author has never been the target of abusive invective (or worse.)

He follows this up with talking about responses to the "beliefs" of both sides to a poll, in which he uses incredibly amorphous statements ("properly controlled immigration can be good for America", "most police officers are bad people") while ignoring how amorphous those statements are (and thus how worthless they are as barometers of actual viewpoints.) All this culminates in trying to turn to an infamous conservative argument - "the silent majority" - to argue that most Americans have common beliefs while ignoring that this is the whole point of the "silent majority" argument, to make a claim that most people quietly agree with the speaker while not really defending it. The author also leans heavily on the infamous "Hidden Tribes" report, which became popular with centrists looking to argue away polarization while avoiding the limitations of such studies, as well as what they cover up.

(I'd argue that if you ever find yourself agreeing with David Brooks, that's a sign that you need to start checking your priors, but that's me.)

Overall, this is yet another "we're just being divided by extremists" piece that we've been getting as of late - a genre that I, at the very least, find driven by a desire to believe that there is a centrist "common ground" we can all go back to, while ignoring the reality of political positioning and polarization today.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:18 PM on November 20 [15 favorites]

Better question: why keep doing this disingenuous both-sides bullshit?
posted by AlSweigart at 9:24 PM on November 20 [12 favorites]

There was one group whose perceptions were hardly skewed at all, meaning they had a pretty good grasp of the real views of Democrats and Republicans.

Uh, the graph in the linked report shows that the politically disengaged had roughly a 10 point "perception gap" whereas the extremes were around 30. I'm not sure if that qualifies as "hardly skewed" because there's no control group of green men from Mars who were polled without any frame of reference for what the parties even are.

But the statements that they're being asked to identify what %age of Rs or Ds agree with them are worded in a conspicuous way. Take "Racism still exists in America," a phrase which conveniently doesn't specify which racism, and "still exists" is the kind of phrasing you can technically agree with in all sorts of scenarios. Ditto "Sexism still exists in America", "Many Muslims are good Americans," "Properly controlled immigration can be good for America," "People are right to be concerned about how climate change might affect us" and the laughably mild "Donald Trump is a flawed person."

I suspect the politically engaged poll respondents are going to read into each of the statements a lot more than the disengaged ones. So when you ask a progressive whether they think that Republicans agree with "Racism still exists in America" I suspect what they read into that is something more like "Racism is a problem we need to solve" and that they're (probably correctly) going to think is something Republicans don't agree with. Because they talk about it all the damn time.

I'm reminded also of Feynman's observation about back-of-the-envelope calculations tending to have errors that cancel out (somewhat). A pile of politically disengaged folks might have more cancellation of error than engaged folks, whose errors will tend to lean in the same direction, compounding their skew more.
posted by axiom at 9:36 PM on November 20 [2 favorites]

I would to love in the imaginary America that the author lives in, where people never talk about politics and are all nice to each other.

This is some horrendous both-sides-ism. People who have a slightly skewed opinion about how Republicans think are not the same as people who believe that immigrants eat cats and the Democrats secretly control hurricanes.

Maybe people don’t put up lawn signs to avoid alienating neighbours or inviting retaliation.

That's crazy talk. It's not like there were actual acts of violence or sheriffs threatening to keep lists of people with Harris signs or anything.

Well, I'm off to write an insightful article about Canadian politics that focuses on how much the people there eat at Tim Hortons and call each other "hoser".
posted by mmoncur at 10:11 PM on November 20 [3 favorites]

I no longer have delusions about the (in)decency of my fellow Americans. New York Times journalists can go fuck themselves, as far as I care.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:15 PM on November 20 [3 favorites]