Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide

by Marc Hetherington

This probably seems like a controversial claim. If people’s political beliefs are hardwired, wouldn’t it mean that Americans all emerge from the womb as Democrats and Republicans? It doesn’t: physiology does not determine how people behave politically. Instead, how a person’s physiological differences express themselves depends on that person’s environment—the context in which he or she lives. It is the combination of wiring and environment that is important, not solely one or the other. Most research on ordinary citizens identifies early-childhood socialization, particularly the role of parents in a child’s life, as one of the biggest determinants of that child’s future political outlook. Other forms of socialization—whether people’s parents and those in their communities were Republicans or Democrats, religious or not, rich or poor—are important, too. The genes children inherit from their parents are thus one factor among many. Indeed, physiology and socialization likely reinforce each other—but not always. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it well when he observes that we’re born with a “first draft of the mind”—a first draft that can be edited, if not completely rewritten, by familial, social, and cultural contexts.

Biopolitics research finds that liberals are different on average from conservatives in the way they react to the world. But the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are more slippery than one might realize. In truth, there are two versions of both categories, one type that is more operational (signifying whether a person values more government taxing and spending, or less of both) and one type that is more symbolic (signifying whether someone values order and tradition, or individual autonomy and the freedom to challenge tradition). The more important of these two versions for most people, the version that defines their political identities, is the second one—the symbolic one. In fact, it is very common for Americans to label themselves symbolically as conservative, but express operational policy preferences that are actually liberal, and vice versa. That is because a staggering percentage of Americans don’t understand what it means to be an operational conservative or liberal. This is an important point that we will return to later, but the upshot for now is that, if researchers like us want to study people’s actual ideologies, we need to be careful, and very specific, about the sorts of questions we ask.

Matching the responses from the Wilson-Patterson Inventory with the results of the eye-tracking tests, the researchers revealed that conservatives dwelled much longer on the threatening objects than liberals did. Whereas liberals spent less than a half second more time looking at the negative images than the positive images, conservatives spent more than one and a half seconds more looking at the negative than the positive. Given that the exercise lasted a total of eight seconds, the difference is so large that “one vision specialist referred to it as an ‘eternity,’” according to Hibbing and his coauthors. This finding demonstrates that conservatives are more sensitive to danger than liberals.

Although there are a number of qualities that people feel children should have, every person thinks that some are more important than others. I am going to read you pairs of desirable qualities. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have. Independence versus respect for elders Obedience versus self-reliance Curiosity versus good manners Being considerate versus being well behaved

Americans are so oblivious to what ideological labels actually mean that they even identify themselves as adhering to ideologies that they fundamentally disagree with in many respects. For instance, many people call themselves conservative and say they believe in small government. But, when asked about whether government ought to spend more or less on specific programs, they consistently answer that they want more. Are people who call themselves conservative actually conservative if they almost always want government to do more, not less?

Sure, plenty of liberals, also, name their boys Michael, David, James, and John. But the data show (yes, there are data for this sort of thing!) that liberal parents, at least those who are well educated, are much more likely to choose more-obscure names than conservatives. Liberals also favor names that begin with softer, more feminine-sounding letters, such as L and S. If you run into a little boy named Liam at the playground, you can be pretty sure whom his parents voted for in the last election. In contrast, conservative parents tend to favor names that begin with harder, more masculine-sounding letters like K, B, and D. So James and Mary named their kids David, Kathryn, and Ben. The Bleus’ daughter is Esme.

Republicans and Democrats look across the political divide and see people with whom they have precious little in common. These fundamental differences reinforce in Americans’ minds the conviction that their political opponents aren’t just sparring partners in a contest with a clear beginning and end. They’re dangerous adversaries who threaten the nation’s well-being. Thus, like a warring tribe, they must be beaten—whatever the cost.

Gallup asked a sample of Americans whether the economy was “getting better” or “getting worse” the week before the 2016 election and again the week after. In the preelection poll, only 16 percent of Republicans said it was getting better, whereas over 60 percent of Democrats thought it was improving. In the postelection poll—administered only days later—48 percent of Republicans, triple the percentage before the election, suddenly thought the economy was getting better, while the percentage of optimistic Democrats dropped by about fifteen points. There were no new GDP numbers. The Labor Department hadn’t released a new jobs report. Inflation hadn’t changed. All that was different was that Donald Trump had been elected president.

Most Americans are proud of their democratic system, warts and all. Among the key pillars of that system is the Constitution, with its robust protections of individual rights, enshrined in the Bill of Rights; a free press tasked with holding those in power accountable to the public they are meant to serve; and broader limits on the power of those in authority provided for in the Madisonian system of checks and balances, in which the ambition of one branch of government is offset by the ambition of another.

Similarly, in 1966 a Harris poll asked whether Martin Luther King, specifically, was “helping or hurting the Negro cause of civil rights.” Only 36 percent said helping while 50 percent said hurting. It wasn’t just King. It was the whole movement. On the eve of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the summer of 1965, a Harris survey asked whether demonstrations by African Americans had helped or hurt the group’s cause. Given that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed the year before and voting rights were on the cusp of passage, it is hard to imagine how a person could say the demonstrations had hurt. But that is what a plurality (45 percent) of Americans said, with only 36 percent saying they had helped.

The impact of these dramatic actions on American public opinion was predictable, but still stunning. The amount of confidence that Republicans expressed in the FBI plummeted during Trump’s first year in office. Because the Republican Party has traditionally been the party of law and order, party stalwarts’ pre-Trump opinions of the bureau were very favorable. No longer. In a January 2018 survey, only 38 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in the agency compared with 64 percent of Democrats. Similar surveys taken around the same time a year earlier show that GOP support for the FBI dropped by over twenty points in just one year. This is Motivated Reasoning 101: Republicans who elected Trump president are motivated to believe just about anything, up to and including conspiracies about the FBI, to protect themselves psychologically after having pulled the lever for Trump in 2016. Trump’s

“My grandmother heard what she wanted from a leader who promised simple answers to complicated questions. She chose not to hear and see the monstrous sum those answers added up to.”