Why We Are Polarized

From political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a good review essay of Ezra Klein’s new book about political polarization:

Aside from a throwaway line or two, Klein misses the crucial synergy between minority movements and leftist ideology. He shies away from taking too close a look at his tribe: the largely white 8 percent of Americans the Hidden Tribes report labels Progressive Activists. Commenting on Matt Yglesias’ Great Awokening among white liberals—who are now more likely to see America as racist than black liberals—Klein hints that greater sensitivity to minority concerns is an inevitable adjustment to demographic realities. This ignores the fact that the Awokening is an ideological innovation, a fundamentalist upsurge of John McWhorter’s religion of antiracism, in which white liberals worship at the feet of high priests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, eagerly lapping up his anti-white sermons. As allies, they achieve moral purity, this-worldly absolution, and a superior status to their un-woke brethren.

The wave of woke innovations—from trans activism to microaggressions to white fragility—is treated as an overdue ‘democratization of discomfort’ caused by demographic shifts. But Klein seems to elide the distinction between feeling uncomfortable as a minority in a largely white male environment and being trained by an ideology to be hypersensitive to non-slights like someone wearing a Chinese prom dress, saying “you guys,” or writing a novel about minority characters. The rising number of Catholics and Jews in American universities at midcentury did not produce a trope of “Protestant fragility” or “Protestant privilege,” yet the rising share of nonwhites is supposed to explain the progressive obsession with “white privilege.”

Klein hasn’t imbibed the wisdom of Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture: that feeling disrespected or offended is largely a cultural construct. Being outraged by a speaker you haven’t heard of addressing an audience somewhere on campus is not an untutored reaction, but a cultivated ideological performance. Reporting this to the campus authorities while drumming up a flash mob on twitter is an irrational “speech is violence” response that bears a resemblance, say the authors, to Aaron Burr challenging Alexander Hamilton to a duel over an insult.

Kaufmann says that there is no question but that the GOP and right-wing media have done their part to fuel polarization. But, he says, Klein “fails to see that contemporary progressivism contains a fundamentalist impulse that warps judgment on its holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality. On these questions, many media outlets are unable to see that they are guided by faith rather than reason.” Kaufmann goes on:

As I argue in my book Whiteshift, these are questions we should be able to calmly discuss and compromise over. Lamenting ethnic change, as Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson have (perhaps clumsily), is not the sin Klein suggests it is unless their statements reflect hostility toward an outgroup rather than attachment to an in-group or to the traditional ethnic composition of America. And decades of psychological research confirms that these sentiments are not correlated. To render the least charitable interpretation of Ingraham and Carlson’s remarks in an attempt to land the “racist” jab drives an important conversation underground, where it festers, fanning polarization.

Kaufmann praises the Klein book overall, but he says that progressives declaring certain values as “sacred” — that is, not up for discussion and compromise — and by using institutional dominance to advance those values in policies, make it harder to reach accommodation with conservatives. Read the whole thing.

This commentary reminds me of a conversation I had with a Southern friend today about how complex race relations are in the South, and how the human reality defies ideology. There was this case of a progressive white pastor who came into an all-white congregation, and began urging them to integrate the church. He was not wrong to want the church to be open to all. What he didn’t understand, though, was that racism was not the only reason (and maybe by that time, not the reason at all) why black people weren’t part of that congregation. The progressive pastor seemed to have the view that black people would want to come to that mainline Protestant church if they felt welcome — and that the only reason they wouldn’t feel welcome is the racism (real or perceived) of the congregation.

What he didn’t understand, according to people in that congregation, was that black people in that town were devoted to their own churches, which had a very distinct worship style — one quite different from that particular white Protestant congregation. Why should black people give up their churches — the churches that their ancestors had been worshiping in for generations — to come to the white church, especially when the style of worship was not what they had come to love? And why should those white congregants have wanted to change their worship traditions to draw others?

The pastor — who was young and relatively inexperienced — was right to oppose racism, but he didn’t recognize that there was a lot more going on with church culture in that town than his liberal ideology could account for. His beliefs were actually pretty patronizing towards local black Christians, with their unspoken assumption that black folks would naturally prefer to worship with whites, in the white Protestant style, if not for the whites’ presumptive racism.

That pastor greatly polarized his congregation, and was eventually transferred after a significant number of them left.

To be fair, I have heard similar stories about young conservative Catholic priests who have come into a more or less liberal congregation and changed things so quickly that they seriously alienated the congregation. To be sure, there’s an important difference: in the Catholic cases, this had a lot to do with the conservative priests bringing the parish back to liturgical and doctrinal norms that previous liberal pastors had let slide. The Protestant case I brought up had nothing to do with theology, and only tangentially with liturgical norms. Still, I have heard over the years from older conservative Catholic priests who have criticized younger ones who come out of seminary with the right ideas and sentiments, but who construe the world in such a way as to make enemies of people unnecessarily.

It’s like this with politics, isn’t it? I cannot stand the way Donald Trump seems to go out of his way to antagonize others. He places more value on owning the libs than in getting things done. On the left, though, it’s hard to hear them gripe about how bigoted, intolerant, and closed-minded conservatives are when in truth, their definition of bigotry, intolerance, and closedmindedness is “doesn’t agree with progressives on every single thing.”

One more thought about modernity and partisanship — a Charles Taylor point. It seems to me that one reason why people of all kinds are so quick to fault those not like themselves is because we are all aware that we could choose otherwise. Kaufmann points to research showing that a couple of generations ago, few people cared if their kids married someone of the opposite political party. Now, they really care. People seem to think these days that because you can know about all kinds of political ideologies and opinions, you should be held morally responsible for your choices. That’s normal. The weird thing is that people of all kinds seem to care more about politics than religion — or, to be more precise, they care about politics as if it were a religion. That this happened at the same time that people in America became both more secular, and came to care less about religious difference, is really interesting.

The Protestant-Catholic divide in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital, is not nearly as socially significant as it was in prior to 1970. The city is slightly more Protestant by population, but in the late 1980s, a Catholic priest who did a lot of work on ecumenism in the 1960s until his retirement in the 1980s told me that this was a very different city when he arrived here from Belgium. Protestants and Catholics lived side by side, but in two different worlds. That’s just not the case anymore, overall. I have a sense, though, that people feel much more divided now about politics than about religion. Let me put it like this: I feel comfortable talking religion with anybody in town, but I would not discuss politics with either liberals or conservatives, unless I knew that they already agreed with me, because people would get way too emotional, way too fast.

So, question to the room: why have so many Americans shifted their partisan passions from religion to politics? Look at this new finding out from Pew Research:

Read the whole story here. I think it is truly appalling that any American would ever find it “not acceptable” to criticize the President of the United States — Republican or Democrat — under any circumstances, except perhaps some strictly limited conditions of war. These are numbers (from the GOP side) that you would expect to see Catholics express about the pope, not a free people about a president. That’s not liberals being knotheads; that’s conservatives.

(And, I want to know who is in the 14 percent of Democrats who believe elected officials shouldn’t criticize Trump on Covid response.)

Sorry for the long, rambling post. I am going to take a break from this blog on Orthodox Good Friday, so I didn’t have time to hone this thing down. I’m going to post Pandemic Diaries 30, then sign off till Saturday. Please be patient with the comments. I’ll log in at some point on Good Friday and approve them, so I won’t have a huge backlog, but I won’t be back to regular approving until Saturday.

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