Polarization may actually be fine

A few weeks ago, I read that Nature published the results of an extensive study on the role of social media algorithms in producing polarization. Does the news-feed feature insulate people into “echo chambers” that harden their political ideologies? For people who believe in the model of kinship cooperation, that exposure to other ideas is enough to lead to middle ground, the results were likely a shock. I suspect this was especially troubling in some corners of the church, where the myth that relationships can overcome difference takes center stage.:

To evaluate a potential response to concerns about the effects of echo chambers, we conducted a multi-wave field experiment on Facebook among 23,377 users for whom we reduced exposure to content from like-minded sources during the 2020 US presidential election by about one-third. We found that the intervention increased their exposure to content from cross-cutting sources and decreased exposure to uncivil language, but had no measurable effects on eight preregistered attitudinal measures such as affective polarization, ideological extremity, candidate evaluations and belief in false claims.

I’ve written about who bears the cost of church unity where relational bonds are seen as the solution to political and social division (spoiler: it’s the people on the losing end of the structured violence of the United States’ socio-economic engineering). But I’m also interested in the ways these myths perpetuate themselves in our broader political landscape. And social media is one of the primary scapegoats for polarization.

We already knew social media exposure wasn’t the cause of escalating division (despite what Jonathan Haidt wants you to believe) from the Boxell study in 2022, but this new study reiterates the point. (My favorite study is the one that showed how exposure to twitter accounts from the opposite party deepened the political commitments of the people exposed.) This doesn’t mean the internet plays no role in polarization, but it does suggest that exposure to new ideas is not enough to eradicate polarization.

I think social media is so often the culprit in polarization debates because it would be wonderful to have a silver bullet that could fix our problems. If we just got off Facebook we wouldn’t have white supremacists attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power in the United States (I’m being hyperbolic here, but truly the logic I’ve heard leads to this conclusion).

It turns out that friendships, neighbor-relationships, and even marriage does not shift people’s politics towards the middle or towards more openness to new perspectives. Instead, we’re witnessing an increase in fracturing relationships due to people’s political commitments. We’re talking about decades-long relationships, sometimes within the family. If relationships and bonds beyond “the political” prevent polarization – we would certainly see the fruits here.

Myths of Polarization

I’ve been playing fast and loose with the language of polarization so far and I want to address that here. One of the problems with this conversation is that we often mean different things when we’re talking about polarization. Polarization often becomes another way to say “conflict” or “deep difference of opinion.” But polarization, in its true sense, is sorting by political conviction. This happens at the level of the broader public but also (and differently) among political elites. There’s interesting social science research about all of this. In one corner is the “false polarization” research which establishes the ways in which our perceptions of out-groups are inconsistent with how those groups understand themselves. In another corner we have the work that’s happening around political elites and polarization, and how R and D party leadership exacerbates perceived polarization. In another corner we have the folks working on the place of affective polarization – that we have come to despise people from political out-groups.

I offer up this research in the background of two myths I want to lift up, two myths I find especially pernicious in the debate over polarization. And I think having better perspective on these myths can be helpful for making the world we want to live in.

Myth 1: Polarization is always equal and opposite

In 2020, NPR published an article about the breakdown in relationships caused by political factionalism during the run up to the presidential election. Their interviews were telling:

Story 1:

Davis, 42, a consultant who is Black, said he simply could not abide his friend downplaying police brutality, and harping instead on the looting and violence happening amid the mostly peaceful protests.

"I told him, 'If this is your attitude, we can't be cool anymore,' " Davis said. " 'I don't respect you now. I don't. Because people are really dying.' "

Story 2:

Conservatives can be just as quick to spurn the liberals in their lives who clash with their core values, such as life and liberty — which is the biggie for Deforest.

"They sold our country out," Deforest, a 61-year-old steelworker, said of those on the left of the political spectrum. "This election is about the soul of what America is. You can't be a free country and be a socialist state at the same time."

You likely notice the differences right away. In one case, a Black man ends a friendship because that person is downplaying police brutality and shifting the blame of the George Floyd protests towards the rare instances of looting and property damage (93% of BLM protests resulted in neither violence or property damage). In the other instance, a man falsely claims that “liberals” are attempting to turn the US into a socialist state. Despite the ardent promises from Republicans who told me if I voted for Biden I would get a socialist state, that is not materializing.

It could be NPR just chose examples to make liberals look good, but there’s evidence that this trend is more consistent than not. A study at Penn State revealed GOP voters’ bafflement about Democratic priorities and their doubt that Dem voters cared about the country. Those priorities, according to Republican voters were, “free college,” “free health care,” “free welfare,” along with greater access to the US for immigrants.

Democratic voters were far more likely to believe that GOP voters, despite being wrong, had the country’s best interest at heart. They identified GOP priorities as “harsh stance on immigration; standing up for the 2nd Amendment; promised tax cuts.”

While immigration was high priority for Democrats, climate change was actually the most significant issue for Dem voters when this study came out in 2018. But these same voters identified that barriers (including physical ones) to immigration were indeed the priority for Rep voters in 2018. Neither party guessed that the economy was a high priority for both parties (although Dem voters correctly perceived that this took the form of tax cuts for the wealthy).

It's one thing to say “I’m finding it impossible to maintain a healthy and life-giving relationship with a person who believes QAnon conspiracies” and another to announce “I don’t want to be friends with someone who would have voted against the debt ceiling limit.” Chances are you’re not actually hearing people breaking up over net neutrality (I think you should consider it, TBH) or tariffs on China even though these are very, very significant policies. We need to take seriously that we’re watching dissolving relational bonds over the kinds of concerns that have to do with the shape of our community, the dignity of other human beings, and real concerns about our futures. That’s going to take some deep work.

Myth 2: Bipartisanship and compromise is always a good

I get nervous when I see polarization language conflate the lived concerns of working-class people, immigrants, and Black people with an inability for people to meet in the middle (the technical solution to polarization is to move people from the ends to the middle). Example: There are real and serious concerns for the transition from coal to green energy for working-class folks in coal country. And that is not equivalent to the rampant climate denial that swept through the GOP over the past two decades and shaped opposition to almost all climate legislation that could have stayed the catastrophe we are facing. Most of the time, what we see across both parties is that were not being moved towards the fictive center (what’s the “center” of ending police brutality?) but towards an elitist future.

People who want to see more bipartisanship from our political elites like to harken back to the golden age of bipartisanship in 1950s and 1960s, when Ds and Rs frequently worked across the aisle, and they got a lot of things done! What kind of things you may ask? Things like the Washington Consensus, the series of free market principles that led to the privatization that is the heart of the entrenched financial inequality in our country, and has spread across the world.

The War on Terror, The Patriot Act, Japanese internment camps, US anti-immigration laws, The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, our dysfunctional tax code, the Clinton crime bill, – we can thank bipartisanship for all of these.

Centrist positions are not a natural good. Centrist climate change legislation here during the hottest summer of human existence isn’t smart or bold – it’s nihilism. Centrist positions on immigration when we have a rising tide of white supremacy in the Republican legislature only exacerbates the claim that this is a position we should consider as politically legitimate.

Do we want to see an end to polarization? It depends on what you mean, but even more so, it depends on what you want.