Tag Archives: polarization

Dopamine Nation

Sociologists, political scientists and historians all confirm the effects of rapid social change. For that matter, most Americans recognize those effects: when the world one inhabits seems different every day, when previous cultural assumptions are being upended daily, widespread disorientation and animus shouldn’t surprise us.

We are at one of those moments in human history when change–especially but certainly not exclusively the almost daily advances in technology–challenge the millions of Americans who grew up with telephones anchored to walls, written messages sent via the post office, and cars that required far more extensive human control.

I am one of the millions of older Americans who watch grandchildren using devices we only dimly understand, and struggle to comprehend the dimensions of–and arguments over–Artificial Intelligence. I’m not one of those who reject these creations out of hand, but I do recognize an uncomfortable fact: we really don’t know how these “advances” are changing human and social behavior.

And that admission brings me to what is perhaps the most pervasive and troubling of these new communication mechanisms: the proliferating social media platforms and the algorithms producing the dopamine that keeps users glued to them.

A recent article in Lincoln Square was appropriately titled, “Life Under a Clicktatorship.”

The article began by noting that the faux “Situation Room” portrayed on Trump’s social media during the Maduro kidnapping had (inadvertently?) shown a screen with X in the background.

With the best intelligence systems in the world at their fingertips, they were checking X in the midst of the mission? Combined with the curtains separating some section of Mar‑A‑Lago from the rest of the President’s resort, the images create an almost surreal air. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands.

The article noted that Trump effectively uses social media to draw attention, reshape norms, and fuel conspiracy theories–in this case, turning “avowed MAGA isolationists into enthusiastic colonial imperialists overnight.” But the challenge we face is, as it insists, far more worrisome and widespread than the single talent of our demented President.

Social media operates like a drug. It feeds us dopamine and rewires our brains’ reward pathways, and those “unhealthy dynamics” are made worse by the anonymity offered and (as the article notes) the fact that “standing out online often demands being awful—channeling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories.”

These characteristics of social media have been shown to have a profound effect on voter behavior. They also affect how policymakers use public power. The author argues–pretty persuasively–that the members of Trump’s administration aren’t just using social media to support their preferred narratives. There is evidence that many of them are deeply addicted to it.

We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.

The Trump administration is made up of a cabinet of posters. For many, that’s how they won Trump’s attention. The head of the FBI, for example, is a podcaster—that’s his main qualifier for the job.

They view the world through a social media lens in a way that is plausibly corrupting their judgment and undermining their performance.

Thanks to the nature of the current information environment, most Americans occupy information “bubbles.” I certainly do, and I rather imagine most of my subscribers are right in there with me. That said, most ordinary people still don’t spend much time on social media–a fact that motivates those the article dubs “outrage farmers” to compete for followers by engaging in outrage and employing bots programmed to exacerbate division.

Those who spend excessive time online exhibit more and more extreme behaviors in order to keep the dopamine coming. And as the author points out, living in these bubbles distorts reality far more for the rich and powerful, who already have limited contact with ordinary people.

When government officials are addicted to social media, they prioritize pleasing their audiences rather than their constituents.

For instance, the Podcaster/Director of the FBI reportedly fired veteran FBI leaders to curry favor with online critics. USAID was the first federal agency killed by online conspiracy theories—with tragic results.

At a time when Americans are already deeply polarized–social media addiction is deepening our divisions. It’s a problem.

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The Real Polarization

Maybe–just maybe–the Americans electorate isn’t as polarized as we’ve been led to believe. Maybe the real polarization is between We the People and our elected overlords.

A recent article from Persuasion recited some interesting data

  • 91% of Americans agree that we all have the right to equal protection under the law.

  • 90% of Americans agree that we all have the right to freedom of speech.

  • 84% of Americans agree with freedom of religion for all.

My first (dismissive) thought when reading those numbers was “how many Americans define these terms in the same way? How many of us actually know what the jurisprudence says these principles mean?” The article began by suggesting a different dismissal–an understandable disinclination of respondents to admit that they actually don’t support these foundational principles.

But then…

But the numbers concerning politics are even more troubling: 60% of Americans agree that both Biden and Trump are too goddamned old to be president. 80% of Americans agree that elected officials don’t give a shit what people like them think. 70% of Americans agree that we pathetic ordinary people—i.e., not rich or famous—have too little influence over the decisions scumbag members of Congress make. The same depressing poll reveals that 63% of Americans agree that most or all politicians are whores—that they ran for office just to make money—and a whopping 85% of Americans agree that whatever made them run for office, it sure as shit wasn’t to serve the public.

The article proceeded to document a very real division between what average Americans believe and the beliefs motivating the policy choices of our elected officials.

In a Pew Research poll from May 13, 2024, two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That would be bad enough, but even more agree that life doesn’t begin at conception, and that moreover embryos should not be considered people with rights…  

Meanwhile, in a recent Gallup poll, 71% of Americans say they don’t give a shit who you marry, i.e., they support same-sex marriage. If we as a nation agree on gay marriage, what’s next? Guns? 

Yes.

A recent public opinion survey from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions “found broad agreement among Americans for gun violence prevention policies—regardless of their political affiliation or whether or not they own guns.”..In a recent Fox News poll of all places, 87% of Americans agree on the need for background checks, 81% of Americans agree on the need to enforce existing gun laws, and 80% of Americans agree on the need to require mental health checks for people purchasing guns. 

There’s more, but we get the point. The people we elect–especially in states like Indiana–are very definitely not representing the desires or perspectives of their constituents.

So–why, you might ask, are reasonable people, people who aren’t racist, homophobic, misogynistic “Christian” nationalists– electing wacko culture warriors like Jim Banks and Todd Rokita? Why is the Indiana GOP running a ticket headed by MAGA Mike Braun and theocrat Micah Beckwith? These are all candidates wedded to a Christian Nationalist agenda–an agenda that wants to prevent women from exercising autonomy over their own bodies, that insists libraries should be banned from carrying books that portray LGBTQ+ people, that wants laws forbidding medical assistance for trans children…the list goes on.

Those poll numbers that reflect what we might call a lack of appropriate respect (cough, cough) for elected officials (okay, a definitely negative image) are the result of a deeply-disturbing structural issue: gerrymandering.

As I have explained multiple times, partisan redistricting–aka gerrymandering–prevents us from engaging in elections that truly reflect the wishes of the voters. Here in Indiana, where there is no referendum or initiative, we are at the mercy of a legislature that is the only body legally empowered to introduce a nonpartisan method of redistricting.  In other words, we depend upon the people who benefit from the current system to change it. (Yeah, good luck with that…)

If democracy means anything, it should mean that We the People are able to select/elect representatives who actually represent us. Clearly, that is not the world we currently inhabit.

In Indiana–and other states that have similarly distorted systems –the only elections that reflect the will of We the People are those that cannot be gerrymandered. The votes for statewide races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Senator and Attorney General (and of course, votes for the national ticket) will be the only votes that truly reflect Hoosier sentiment. 

Those of us in states like Indiana need to send a message to our legislative overlords by voting overwhelming BLUE for those positions in November. (Perhaps they’ll notice, although I’m not holding my breath.)

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It’s All About Race

I’ve been working my way through the numerous books–both the physical ones and the ones on my Kindle–that have been piling up on my nightstand, and I’ve just finished How Democracies Die. It’s a book that has generated a lot of discussion, for obvious reasons. The two scholars who wrote it in 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, have spent their academic careers focusing on the ups and downs of democratic governments around the globe. That focus has allowed them to draw conclusions about the normative elements that serve as guardrails protecting democratic institutions, and about the signs  warning of democratic collapse.

There’s a lot to absorb from the book’s copious descriptions of democratic failures in a wide variety of countries–and the authors make no bones about the reality of the threat to American institutions posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s all pretty grim–and entirely persuasive.

That said, I was particularly struck by one of the book’s central observations–probably because it confirms my strong belief that support for Trump/MAGA is almost entirely rooted in racism.

About halfway through the book, the authors identified two democratic norms that are essential to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. In other words, acknowledging the legitimacy of one’s political opponents, and “forbearing” to abuse or over-use institutional weapons like the filibuster or Mitch McConnell’s legal but shockingly undemocratic theft of a Supreme Court seat. Extreme polarization erodes those norms; as they write, when societies sort themselves into political camps whose world-views aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

When the authors analyzed what had allowed America’s politicians to sustain basic democratic norms for a period running roughly from the collapse of Reconstruction through the 1980s, they came to a very troubling conclusion–that during that time period, “The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion.” To the extent that America operated with bipartisanship and experienced reduced polarization during that extended time period, those outcomes “came at the cost of keeping civil rights off the political agenda.”

In the final paragraph of Chapter Six, they write

America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

That paragraph confirms what a growing body of research has verified–and what any semi-sentient observer can see. The election of Barack Obama unleashed the overt expression of formerly-suppressed hatreds. It seeded the growth of White Christian nationalism, the huge reaction against anything seen as “woke,” the efforts to de-legitimatize efforts at inclusion–and explains the utter inability of most reasonable, non-racist Americans to understand the animus and fury of the MAGA movement.

That paragraph explains so much–as does a sentence in the final chapter, in which the authors concede that it is “difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities give up their dominant status without a fight.”

Even a cursory look at the current crop of GOP nominees up and down the various state ballots shows them publicly expressing opinions that would have been met with horror not all that long ago. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, homophobic…meanwhile, the numerous Republican campaigns expressing hostility to immigration from the south hardly bother to veil their racism.

It’s been a long time since the Civil War. It’s been a long time since the South was able to dismantle Reconstruction. These days, the country’s accelerating social and demographic changes are making it increasingly difficult to maintain the dominance of White Christians. It’s the recognition of–and hysterical reaction to– that reality that explains Trump and MAGA. How Democracies Die warns us of the way that movement threatens not just social peace/tolerance, but the continued operation of America’s democratic institutions.

I keep thinking about that slogan “The South will rise again.”

It did. It’s now called the Republican Party, and How Democracies Die documents a lesson we have yet to learn: the persistence of this country’s deep-seated racism poses an existential threat to human decency, civic equality and the continuation of American democracy.

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Allow Me To Translate..And Pontificate

In a recent column in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall once again returned to the subject of political polarization, and–as is his typical approach–quoted scholars on the subject. As a former member of that tribe, I will admit that the problem with quoting academics is the occasional impenetrability of the language. (It’s not a problem limited to academia–not long after becoming Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I was counseled by a member of the national staff to stop sounding like an “ACLU lawyer.” Every career has its jargon…)

At any rate, allow me to quote–and then translate–one of the scholars who responded to Edsall:

Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.

In other words, polarization isn’t just a matter of individual hostility for those on the other “team.” Political leadership bears considerable responsibility for MAGA resistance to democratic norms. The polarization reflected in our everyday conversations is cultivated by political “culture warriors” like Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Green and her Indiana clone, Jim Banks. As a different scholar (one evidently more comfortable with normal English usage) put it:

I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two, or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.

A recent study evidently found that widespread popular opposition to anti-democratic policies is insufficient to prevent their adoption. That research found that what the scholars called “backsliding behavior by elites” occurred irrespective of a lack of public approval or support; and that much of the problem is rooted in the fact that “Americans, despite their distaste for norm violations, continue to elect representatives whose policies and actions threaten democracy.”

In other words–and this will most definitely not come as a shock to any citizen who’s been paying even the slightest attention–virtually all of the current dysfunctions of governance are caused by the various doofuses we’re electing. (I cannot restrain myself from reminding you, dear readers, that it is frequently thanks to gerrymandering that we are electing these performative, anti-democratic culture warriors.)

As another scholar opined,

Whatever techniques might exist to reduce citizen animosity must be accompanied by efforts to reduce hostility among elected officials. It doesn’t matter if we can make someone more positive toward the other party if that effect is quickly undone by watching cable news, reading social media, or otherwise listening to divisive political elites.

In other words–as several of the researchers contacted by Edsall confirmed– positive effects of efforts to intervene and ameliorate polarization “are almost immediately nullified by the hostile rhetoric in contemporary politics.”

A professor of psychological science at the University of California-Irvine attributed the persistence of polarization to what he dubbed a “moralized political environment,” and that phrase resonated with me. I am hardly the only person to see today’s political disputes as evidence that contemporary political combat takes place between partisans who hold significantly different values. 

As Edsall noted,

The issues dividing the parties have changed. When the two parties fought over size of government, taxes, social welfare programs, it was possible for partisans to imagine a compromise that is more or less acceptable even if not ideal. Compromise on issues like abortion, gender roles, L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the role of religion is much more difficult. So losing feels like more of a threat to people’s values.

From my vantage point, we have moved from good faith arguments about the proper approach to various issues–the “how”–to arguments about “whether.” Rather than debating, say, the best way to feed poor children, we confront self-identified “pro life” politicians who simply oppose spending any tax dollars on food for poor children. Rather than debates about America’s global role and the least dangerous way to approach Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine, political figures like Braun and Banks vote–as conservative George Will wrote–“to assure Vladimir Putin’s attempt to erase a European nation.” Etcetera.

We aren’t having “political” arguments. We are having deeply moral ones.

Survey research confirms that a majority of the American public is on the right side of those moral debates–but that obsolete political structures allow MAGA Republicans–a statistical minority– to ignore We the People.

Political structures empowering ideological minorities are the reason we can’t just “make nice” and “all get along.”

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The Importance of How

The essential question that faces all policymakers is “what should we do about problem X.” That question has two parts. Once problem X has been identified, and a goal has been established (solving problem X), the remaining question becomes how. 

After all, we could dramatically reduce crime by locking citizens in their homes between, say, 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. We could reduce the transmission of flu by decreeing that all Americans wear masks during flu season. You can probably think of other methods of approaching social problems that would undoubtedly achieve their goals, but would simply create hostility, division and other problems.

Of course, deciding the proper “how” requires some fundamental agreement on the nature of the problem. We’re seeing this now, with the issue of immigration. Republicans define the problem as too many of “those people” entering the country; Democrats see it as the challenge of distinguishing between criminals and legitimate refugees entitled to help while hampered by obsolete laws and a dramatically under-resourced system.

When I taught my Law and Policy students, I focused upon the importance–and complexity–of those “how” solutions. Do we have broad agreement on the problem and what a satisfactory solution might look like? If so, how do we craft a policy that will achieve that solution without inadvertently creating or exacerbating other problems?

I recently read a Washington Post column that focused on a vivid example.

There is a grim, fairly popular story of the American social contract that goes roughly like this: Motivated by entrenched racial hostility, the greed of the rich (or maybe something else), the richest country on the planet refuses to develop a true welfare state that might secure the well-being of its citizens.

The column proceeds to examine the extensive social science research confirming the nature and extent of America’s inequality, and the multiple social problems that have been attributed to poverty and inequality.

Taxation and redistribution have been successfully resisted, branded as illegitimate scams to feather the beds of welfare queens. Globalization and technological disruption have been embraced even as the institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable workers — unions, minimum wages — have lost their power to provide for a dignified living.

In this American story, the less fortunate — Black, Brown and White — are left to scratch by as best they can, often falling into a deep well of misery. The rich engorge themselves way beyond anything seen in other wealthy, industrialized societies of the West. And yet, though the destitution is clear for all to see, recent research suggests that the story built around it is, at best, incomplete.

In fact, as a number of researchers have confirmed, the United States spends a lot of money on redistribution–on that word Republicans find so repulsive: welfare. The problem isn’t that we haven’t funded programs intended to help the needy, the problem is how those programs work–or (mostly) don’t.

Inequality might not cause these symptoms on its own. Instead, many of America’s social maladies stem from the strategies it has chosen to mitigate the lopsided distribution of income, which leave its citizens singularly vulnerable.

The essay went on to suggest “fixes” with which I largely disagreed, because I have concluded that the worst aspect of America’s social welfare system is its tendency to divide, rather than unify our citizenry. (Our patchwork “system” is also wasteful, far too bureaucratic, and inaccessible to the working poor, but those are problems for a different post.)

As I have repeatedly argued, public policies can either increase or reduce polarization and tensions between groups. Policies to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion.  Currently, far too many Americans have very negative attitudes about welfare programs for poor people. In contrast, overwhelming majorities approve of Social Security and Medicare. That’s because Social Security and Medicare are universal programs; as I’ve previously noted, virtually everyone contributes to them and everyone who lives long enough participates in their benefits.

Just as we don’t generally hear accusations that “those people are driving on roads paid for by my taxes,” or sentiments begrudging a poor neighbor’s garbage pickup, beneficiaries of programs that include everyone (or almost everyone) are much more likely to escape stigma.

In addition to the usual questions of efficacy and cost-effectiveness, policymakers should evaluate proposed programs by considering whether they are likely to unify or further divide Americans. Universal policies are far more likely to unify, to create social solidarity–an important and often overlooked argument favoring a Universal Basic Income.

In our current, highly polarized political environment, we need to focus on whether the solutions to social problems unify or further divide our quarrelsome nation.

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