For those who missed it, I found a part of today's APR particularly interesting and wanted to call extra attention to it.
Up until the mid-1980s, the typical American held the view that partisans on the other side operated with good intentions. But that has changed in dramatic fashion, as a study published last year by Stanford and Princeton researchers demonstrates. It has long been agreed that race is the deepest divide in American society. But that is no longer true, say Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, the academics who led the study. Using a variety of social science methods (for example, having study participants review résumés of people that make both their race and party affiliation clear), they document that “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial hostility.”
Americans now discriminate more on the basis of party than on race, gender or any of the other divides we typically think of — and that discrimination extends beyond politics into personal relationships and non-political behaviors. Americans increasingly live in neighborhoods with like-minded partisans, marry fellow partisans and disapprove of their children marrying mates from the other party, and they are more likely to choose partners based on partisanship than physical or personality attributes.
See it in myself. When I find out someone I've just met or known for awhile is a republican, I think less of them. I just do. I have no close friends who are republican. Used to, but that didn't work out. I could never marry a republican, and I don't want to live in a red state. Ever.
There was a time in my youth one could find common ground w/republicans. My dear old now gone dad was a lifetime republican, and one of the kindest, fairest, warmest, funniest people I have ever known. But then He was an Eisenhower Republican, the likes of which today would be considered centrist Democrats.
My mother OTOH, is a Fox addict republican. A bright, incredibly talented and loving woman who gave me so much in so many ways, and who I love dearly. But I don't respect her in the area of politics. I resent that as a senior she takes every benefit from the government available to her, and then goes and votes to see to it that I don't get the same, not to mention her grandchildren. I survive the anger by refusing to talk politics with her.
The difference between my father and my mother as republicans, is one of era and temperament. Dad never paid all that much attention to politics, but always voted republican based on his ideas of what that meant, and never updated for the times. Cared less than ever about it all as he grew older, found his heaven on earth fishing on the river and watching Golf TV, a sport he had a passion for and could no longer play. Politics was a small slice of the pie for him, not a membership in a cult of ideas. There were lots of folks like my dad back in the day.
My mother has embraced what the GOP is today. In her elderly years it has become a badge of identify for her, and one she is so avid about, it's impossible to talk to her about it without disliking her immensely. She would say the same about me. And both of us would be right.
So in the roots of my family, I see my own partisanism, and the evolution of it. And it's not something you can apologize for, there's just too damn much at stake. But it is something I'm increasingly aware of in how I think about those I interact with.
There was a time I thought it helpful to talk with those across the aisle. How could we come to a doable place if we didn't talk? Isn't communication central to any kind of agreement?---sensibilities I never thought I'd abandon, but I have. These days I avoid talking with republicans like the plague. If one pipes up at a party or family get together, I head for another room. I do this based on too many experiences of failure in any kind of discourse that my current sensibilities can tolerate.
The divide in parties has always been about the role of government, but today it's about so much more. It's about one's values at the deepest part of who one is. And there doesn't seem to be much common ground if any, anymore. It's about fear and loathing, it's about judgment, it's about anger, it's about a whole lot more than politics.
The reasons why are as wide and deep as the divide, and the irony of the words Barack Obama first became famous for has never been more pronounced. "We are not the red states, or the blue states, we are the United States of America."
But we're not united, and it is our politics now that divide us more than anything, even the color of our skin, or who we worship, or who we have sex with, although all are a part of the great divide. Sadly, I don't see that changing much in my lifetime, short of a disaster that would force us together, and who can hope for that?
So what say y'all? What are your experiences living in the great divide, and how has it effected and changed you?