2009-08-14 07:40:20

PARTISANSHIP GETS A SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT: THE VILLAGE SQUARE

Filed under: Bill Bishop, Village Square, politics
Posted by: John

Is your favorite explanation for the partisan divide that the folks who disagree with you are dumb-as-dirt? Think again.

Turns out our current political environment may be a result of certain sociological and economic trends – stir in a helping of behavioral psychology and, tada, we’re attending town halls with fistfights and swastikas.

Rewind to the middle of last century (screen gets wavy, cue up appropriate
piano riff and fade to black and white)… Generation Happy Days was
pleasantly ensconced in the suburbs, becoming members of the PTA, joining
bridge clubs and bowling leagues. We flipped on the evening news at night
and turned the dial to a choice of three stations. (Yes, for the kiddos
among us there was an actual dial and it was hard enough to turn that you
needed a running start.)

We grabbed our local paper off the door stoop every
morning and on Sundays many of us trotted off to our neighborhood church,
one of a handful of denominations that were close enough to be kissing
cousins. (Forgive the absence of synagogues in my story; I’m painting with
broad strokes.) While we were growing economically comfortable as a society,
reverberations of the depression kept our basic gene pool constructively
austere.

In the lives we led, we spent plenty of time with people who didn’t
see it our way politically – they were our friends, our neighbors, even our
spouses. We were busy having a national conversation; very much in keeping
with the founders’ vision of America… we had turned diversity into strength,
a balance for excess and a creative force.

But soon enough, American prosperity brought into existence a highly mobile
populace that had forgotten about the depression, was no longer primarily
concerned with mere surviving and naturally turned their attention to the
“pursuit of happiness” portion of the American dream. (Think Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs with basic needs mostly met.) So naturally, we moved to
cities with a center of gravity we liked and joined groups plum filled with
people like – well – us. Old-fashioned neighborhood, and the diversity it
brought, wasn’t quite as fun as the newfound made-to-fit.

While we were busy custom ordering our lives, there was an information
explosion befitting our increased desire to “Have It Your Way.” Now we had
choose-your-news sources that we could tune into to bathe in the warm waters
of agreement and oh did we ever love the warm waters of agreement (and we
told them we liked it in the ratings so they gave us more and more). Our
mainline churches began breaking clean in half as people left to worship
with the people they most agreed with. New churches representing every
stripe of individualism sprung up all over the map.

Unbeknownst to us, we were busy sorting ourselves into tribes. Think Shia
and Sunni. 100 years of social psychology experiments are amazingly
consistent about what happens next, and it is not pretty: Likeminded groups
consistently grow more extreme in the direction of the majority view. In
them, the fascinating phenomenon of the “risky shift” plays out: A group of
homogeneous people will make riskier choices as a group than any one
individual makes inside that very same group. Likeminded groups are
veritable breeding grounds for extremism.

Now here we sit in the United States of “Those People.” We watch TV opinion
news to experience what Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort” (required
reading), calls the “righteousness that is the special entitlement of
homogeneous groups.” We serve it up with a beer and munchies and the smug
knowledge that everyone who isn’t on “our side” isn’t just wrong, they’re
stupid and evil (and ugly to boot). It’s the mental equivalent of being a
couch potato and leads directly to town halls run amuck.

Next Friday in class, students: Unhinged partisanship get schooled: “Marry
Your Enemy.”

Liz Joyner is the director of the Village Square, an organization devoted to bipartisanship in politics and community. Its motto is: “Out of the many, one.”

Comments (2)

2 Comments »

1. Gee….I am really in agreement with the main point of this article. Notice how the reinforcement of beliefs has little to do with religion and a lot to do with hanging out with the same kinds of people. Good points. I do think that with the information technology available, it is also easier to dialogue with people with different views and find out why they believe the way they do. In the last year, I have been able to have short conversations with several different authors (including yourself, John) to find out why they believed what they believed or to answer questions raised in their books. In my own world, I do not know any former 60 Minutes Producers who used to be Christian but now are not and are married to a woman with Jewish beliefs/culture and who have worked with Dan Rather, and are much more liberal than me. So….it certainly can work the other way, but, I agree with much of what she says.

   Comment by Fraulien — August 14, 2009 @ 12:17 pm

2. [...] is, crosscutting relationships are so – well –yesterday. As we discussed last week, everything is trending in the direction that we find ourselves in groups of increasingly [...]

   Pingback by Purple State of Mind — August 21, 2009 @ 10:39 am

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