Some months ago I blogged an interesting bit of research showing that partisanship is wired into a part of the brain where logic doesn’t reach. Via Aravosis, Dick Meyer at CBS News muses about that study as well as another bit of recent work showing that not only are many of us nuts, but the nuts are taking over:
According to Arthur Brooks, a professor at the business school at Syracuse University, the number of partisan brains is increasing. And they may be becoming more partisan; more precisely, they seem to hate their opponents more.
Specifically, Brooks studied polling collected by the one of the biggest and most important ongoing demographic surveys, the General Social Survey.
…In 1972, even though the country was heated up over Nixon and Vietnam, only 4.9 percent described themselves as either extremely liberal or extremely conservative. That rose to 6.6 percent in 2004, an increase of about one-third. Though the baseline percentage is small, a 30 percent increase still potentially effects a couple of million votes.
…Brooks also found a disturbing level of what he calls “personal demonization” in 2004 Another prestigious, long-running survey, the American National Election Survey, collects public opinion data using what it calls “feeling thermometers” — for example, on a scale of zero to 100, zero being the sub-human low, how do you feel about members of Congress? Or conservatives? Or liberals?
Scores below 20 are very rare. Brooks says, “No one gets zeroes, not even Hitler.”
But in 2004, lots of people gave out zeroes. They were — surprise, surprise — self-described liberals and conservatives, and they gave zeroes out to their ideological enemies
Twenty percent of self-described extreme liberals gave “conservatives” (the word used in the question) zeroes, while 23 percent of extreme conservatives gave “liberals” zeroes. So about one-fifth of the people at both ends of ideological spectrum consider those they disagree with “dead to me,” to use Tony Soprano’s words.
Surveys describe things rather than explain them so I can’t say that this explains anything in particular, but it does give some weight to what we all more or less knew already. The number of people who view their political opposition as intractable, evil and wrong definitely seems to be on the rise. On the upside, going by the article’s numbers the Randroids only amount to one to two percent of the population. On the downside, those are often the people who care enough about politics to log on and argue about it.
Postscript…If you arrived late to the whole demonization thing and want to catch up, you can start with a handy 1996 memo by Newt Gingrich. Uber-pollster Frank Luntz has also proven invaluable, enriching our discourse with gems such as the use of ‘Democrat’ as an adjective.