What Do We See When We See Our Opponents?

Source: Canva Pro

It’s commonplace for political observers to decry the polarization that afflicts our political scene here in the United States. I include myself among the number of those lamenting our mutual hostility.

The causes of our alienation from one another when it comes to politics are usually ascribed to things like the online world, the 24/7 news cycle, our cell phones, disinformation, money in politics, Republicans, Democrats, Fox News, the New York Times—pick your cause and start slinging the blame. Most of these in themselves don’t seem to be sufficient to account for the monster we have unleashed, so maybe it’s some sort of grab bag of all of them.

Now there’s a study that sheds a little light on the mystery, if it is one, or at the least gives us one more reason to glare at each other from across the political fence with mistrust and loathing: We don’t understand each other.

Whatever the topic the researchers asked about, whether it was immigration, race, the death penalty, military spending, or abortion, it turns out that while we understand the views of people like us, we grossly distort the views of the other side. For example, Republicans believe that just under a third of all Democrats are LGBT, whereas the real number is 6 percent. And Democrats believe that more than a third of all Republicans earn over a quarter of a million dollars per year, whereas the actual number is 2 percent.

We have distorted views of each other, in other words. We create opposing figures in our minds and ascribe all sorts of opinions to them, building up an image of someone easy to dislike—because they believe everything we don’t, only more so.

It was Ronald Reagan’s communications team that brilliantly started the practice of embodying the enemy by taking an outlier from the news and intimating that this person, who was easy for the public to dislike, was representative of a whole tribe of them. This is how we got "welfare queens" who were bilking the system of huge amounts of money through fraud, driving fancy cars, and living high off the hog. It was much easier to hate a vivid symbol like that, than a statistic.

And so modern identity politics was born. It has devolved to a point where the vice-presidential candidate of one party has repeatedly (and falsely) accused people in his own state of being illegal immigrants, when they are not, and of eating their neighbors’ pets, when they haven’t. This tactic comes directly from misunderstanding your "opponents"—in this case, assuming that because someone is a different color and comes from somewhere else, they are necessarily lawbreakers and practitioners of repugnant habits.

Politics, at its core, carries with it an implicit promise to take the power seriously and act with a sense of responsibility. In order to return to that state of affairs, perhaps we all need to take a deep breath and pledge to try to understand each other better.