As Usual, Tonight’s Winner—and Loser!—Is ‘Partyism’

The most startling—and telling—poll I read before
tonight’s election came in a Sept. 22
column from former Obama White House
regulator/administrator in chief Cass Sunstein:  

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats
said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter
married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers
had reached 49
percent and 33 percent. 

There it is, ladies and Germans, your real
Last Acceptable Prejudice. This the engine behind such odd
human behavior as political parties sending creepy,
we’re-watching-you
letters to voters before Election Day,
campaign ads showing either party abetting Death
itself, anti-interventionist, pro-immigation activist Grover
Norquist
urging a Team R vote over anything else (and doing it well!);
or even aging journalists
having the occasional sad that a retired rock drummer may have
attended a Tea Party rally that one time.

Let’s go back to the research:

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean
Westwood, political scientists at Stanford
University, conducted a
large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found
people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial
bias. […]

In a further test of political prejudice, Iyengar and Westwood
asked 800 people to play the trust game, well known among
behavioral scientists: Player 1 is given some money (say, $10) and
told that she can give some, all or none of it to Player 2. Player
1 is then told that the researcher will triple the amount she
allocates to Player 2 — and that Player 2 can give some of that
back to Player 1. When Player 1 decides how much money to give
Player 2, a central question is how well she trusts him to return
an equivalent or greater amount.

Are people less willing to trust people of a different race or
party affiliation? The researchers found that race didn’t matter —
but party did. People are significantly more trusting of others who
share their party affiliation.

Pause a moment to savor just how gross
this is (the mounting political bias, not the receding racial
animus). Democrats should automatically trust John Edwards more
than, I dunno, Bob Dole? Ted Stevens should get the nod for
Republicans over Russ Feingold? To cite a personal anecdote, I
married into a family of French Catholics—they could have been
“displeased” at the unbaptized Amerloque, but
that would have been pretty messed up to the daughter they love and
trust, non? (Current
box-office trends in France notwithstanding.)

Any election night is a victory for what Sunstein calls
“partyism”—the tribal pull of collective political action, in-group
rallying, organized hatreds. But it’s also the most vivid
demonstration project of how partyism is suffering a long-term and
richly deserved demographic decline.

In a
long piece at Vox.com about Gamergate, Ezra Klein used
some of Sunstein’s cited studies to point out (and decry) “the
politicization of absolutely everything.” Excerpt:

Politicized media outlets and activist information sources have
incentives to cover the worst of the other side, and to play to the
fear, anger and even paranoia of their own side. Structurally, each
side only becomes familiar with the most extreme members and
interpretations of the other side — and so comes to loathe and fear
them even more.

But as Nick Gillespie, no stranger to
the politicization of everything, pointed
out over at The Daily Beast,

Sure, dead-enders are more bitter than ever. But what Klein
can’t acknowledge is that fewer of us actually invest in our
political identities. That helps explain why party
self-identification keeps heading south and approval for political
parties has been on the skids for a long time.

Does it ever. Those parents seriously considering getting mad at
their daughters for marrying outside the designated major party may
want to drink in this recent Gallup chart, which shows that the
leading political self-identification of EVERYONE YOUNGER THAN AGE
59 is neither Democrat nor Republican, but “independent“:

Look, too, at who was
tuning this latest election out as the Partyism was kicking
into high gear the last few weeks:

Perhaps even worse for the long-term health of the two big
parties, it was the independents who leaned closer to the tribes
who were turned off the most:

When even a “wave” election like tonight was ultimately
an election
about nothing (aside from hating on
Obama and his ‘care),
all that life-and-death urgency from the Partyists begins to feel
like electro-shock therapy on a corpse. The target audience after a
while can’t help but respond accordingly.

Watching the analysts on Fox News tonight—George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, Brit Hume—it’s striking how unanimous they are that
this election really doesn’t have much to do with Republicans
suddnely waking up and smelling the vision; they just didn’t get in
the way of a restive electorate during a particularly painful
six-year-itch. This pendulum swing will soon be widely
misinterpreted as a meanginful shift toward pro-Republican
sentiment in the electorate, but the long-term trendlines remain
clear: Fewer and fewer people see their identities as either
Democrat or Republican, making each election cycle that much more
volatile, while hopefully opening up the political process to such
long-overdue developments as
rolling back the drug war and maybe even pushing the newly
victorious Republicans a teensy bit closer to the fiscal
responsibility they’ve been
dining out on for years.

Unsettling addendum: David Brooks
decries partyism; Jonathan Chait
defends. NOW WHAT DO I DO???