George Washington’s Nightmare
How Binary Thinking Jeopardizes American Democracy
This is the second of two articles examining the role of binary thinking in polarizing American politics. Part one can be read here.
In 1796, George Washington penned a farewell letter to the public in which he feared that political parties might someday try to prevent branches of government from executing their constitutional powers. In a “spirit of revenge natural to party dissention,” he wrote, they would “incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
The first president further warned that such disunion “agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, [and] foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”
In 2022, America is living Washington’s nightmare.
Us vs. Them
Binary thinking has consistently governed one of the world’s oldest democracies. Now it threatens the future of same. Pitting two sides against each other may work fine in sports, but despite often being treated as such, politics isn’t a game. According to research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, the two-party system, with its clashing ideologies, triggers a good vs bad, us vs them mindset. So much so, a Stanford University investigation revealed that escalation of polarization in the United States has been more pronounced than in any other consolidated democracy in the world.
Indeed, nearly four-in-ten registered voters queried by the Pew Research Center admit they don’t have a single close friend who supports other party’s candidate. More seriously, a study conducted at the University of Chicago found that 73% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats think the other side are “bullies.” Most concerning, multiple surveys have shown that roughly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden was illicitly elected president; many of whom were willing to seriously harm federal officials to make their point.
So, what drives them to such distinctions?
Choosing to be Afraid
Providing citizens with limited and conflicting choices is known as a bifurcation fallacy, whereby they are given just two options, forcing them to consider issues strictly from an either/or perspective. This happens, for example, when pollsters ask only whether or not respondents support overturning Roe v. Wade, which a substantial majority does not. But it also presents a false dilemma because it is based on the premise there are no other alternatives. Dig deeper, however, and it turns out there are, and attitudes about abortion are much more nuanced. The same is true with respect to gun control, voting and LGBTQ+ rights. Sadly though, when faced with such disjunctive situations, people come to see the other side not merely as rivals but as enemies.
Yet even when circumstances are not controlled, disparities arise. Neuroscientists have determined that as the world has become more complex and uncertain, people increasingly believe they are seriously threatened. Such symbolic threats occur when their status and sense of identity are conceived to be under attack, to which they exaggerate the presence of racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities and retaliate against these presumed interlopers.
In a poll conducted at the University of Maryland nearly a third of White participants said they had witnessed “a lot more” discrimination against White people over the past five years. Forty percent of Republican men claimed they encountered much the same in a 2016 American National Election Pilot Study. Given the intensity of the perceived threat, some have embraced violence as a supposed act of defense. Before Payton Gendron gunned down ten Black people in a Buffalo, New York supermarket, he justified the murders in a manuscript largely based on the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that White populations are being demographically supplanted by people of color, orchestrated by elites including liberals and Jews.
Opportunism Knocks
Horrendous acts like this transcend partisanship, or even polarization, and are the upshot of unbending extremism. Still, for some politicos, extremism is an opportunity to advance a personal agenda regardless of the consequences. Donald Trump has spent a lifetime mastering the art of self-interest, recently goading true believers to storm the nation’s capital on his behalf, then browbeating many of those who had been imperiled to rationalize the assault. He has also spawned a brood of bootlickers, including Representatives Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and senatorial hopeful J.D. Vance. But look up “political opportunist” in the dictionary and what is likely to appear these days is a picture of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
A leading GOP contender for the oval office in 2024, DeSantis is the epitome of what is contemptuously labelled a “performative politician:” someone whose theatrics are meant to achieve nothing more worthwhile than to incite his base. As such, he has ostensibly positioned himself at the vanguard of efforts to annul voting, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights. He and his staff have also borrowed a page from the Newt Gingrich playbook to tag supporters of gay rights as “groomers” — a catchword to imply they endorse pedophilia.
DeSantis’ counterpoint in the media is Tucker Carlson who, along with friends at Fox News, has driven up ratings by spewing hate speech across all manner of contentions and conspiracy theories. But the so-called mainstream media” have played a part as well. Its coverage of critical issues frequently eschews meaningful context, opting instead for sports-like accounting of winners and losers, and spotlighting star players. Moreover, its longstanding tradition of supposed objectivity, or bothsideism, is a shady variation of bifurcation fallacy, implying the two parties are equally at fault for the current dysfunction, when clearly they are not.
Good News, Bad News
Not surprisingly, many Americans are concerned about their present state of affairs, and anxious about where the country is headed. The good news is they may not be as hostile to each other as reckoned. According to Stoney Brook University professors Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, ideologues who are ferocious in their convictions are fewer and farther between than assumed and reside at the edges of the political spectrum. In fact, note the scholars, they comprise only 15 to 20 percent of the population.
The bad news is these outliers significantly skew the degree of polarization. That is because they are considerably more involved across various measures of political activity, from attending more rallies to contributing more money to invariably voting in both primaries and general elections. They also spend more time on social media, where regularly interacting with kindred spirits can transform them into outrageous versions of themselves.
Nonetheless, it is possible for people to edit their binary notions. Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson have had the courage to put patriotism over partisanship. Once stalwart anti-abortion advocates Reverend Robert Schenck and Frank Schaeffer have largely disowned the movement. But it is exceedingly challenging to achieve.
Those who allow their opinions to be bifurcated often do so because they don’t truly understand the problem at hand. Multiple polls by YouGov, for example, have found that most Americans are rather ill-informed about abortion. Yet they may not think so. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias, which postulates that the less persons know about an issue the more confident they are in their judgements. And as long as they seek information that confirms their preconceptions, no matter how unfounded, it remains difficult to convince them otherwise.
The more amenable individuals and organizations are to engage with vastly different ideas and opinions, the less threatened they are apt to feel. Although their continued isolation on land, online, and within their minds serves to reinforce their willful ignorance. And while the European Journal of Social Psychology research has surmised that a viable third political party could possibly diminish the extent of polarization, it is improbable the current camps would afford it the opportunity.
Whatever the case, all of these are long-term proposals. But later this year most Americans will be able to vote, if not their conscience, at least their preference, to affect the direction of the nation. Alas, the outcome may be based on the binary choice between inflation and democracy.
