Last edited Tue Apr 2, 2019, 08:15 AM - Edit history (1)
Our hopes lie in continuation of the changes the midterms revealed. "By far most" isn't all, and there is that vast pool of previous nonvoters.
Here's a very illuminating 538 article from last June about growth of our national bipolar political mega-identities, negative partisanship, and how people in each party view each other.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-are-wrong-about-republicans-republicans-are-wrong-about-democrats/
The defining divide in American politics is probably between Republicans and Democrats. It encapsulates all our other divides — by race, education, religion and more — and it’s growing.
This partisan divide is such a big part of people’s political identities, in fact, that it’s reinforced simply by “negative partisanship,” or loyalty to a party because you don’t like the other party. ...
Blacks made up about a quarter of the Democratic Party, but Republicans estimated the share at 46 percent. Republicans thought 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual, while the actual number was about 6 percent. Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual share was 2 percent. People also overstated the numbers of these stereotypical groups within their own party... ...
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist ... argues that
partisan identity (Democrat or Republican) has become a “mega-identity” because it increasingly combines a number of different identities.
“A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood and favorite grocery store. This is no longer a single social identity. Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all of the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.”
And which party people belong to is important because there is some evidence that instead of people choosing their party affiliation based on their political views (and changing parties if their views are no longer represented by that party),
they shift their views to align with their party identity. The clearest case of this might be polls showing Republicans with more favorable views of Russia and Vladimir Putin after the 2016 election. But you can also see people molding their political opinions to their party on other issues. Opinions of the FBI, for example. Or, perhaps, the half of Republicans who have told pollsters that they support separating children from their parents at the border.
“The danger of mega-partisan identity is that it encourages citizens to care more about partisan victory than about real policy outcomes,” Mason told me. “We find ways to justify almost any governmental policy as long as it is the policy of our own team. What is best for America, Americans or even small children is secondary to whether our party’s team gets what it demanded.”
"Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual share was 2 percent." !? Right there you can see Republicans don't exactly have a lock on not thinking. But we know that a majority of conservatives have been liberalizing culturally even as the party determined to drag our whole nation over to Ozzie and Harriet's neighborhood to live. And that scary 50% of Republicans who support separating families? 50% do not in spite of their mega-identity.
But the biggest change might come from just developing the understanding of each other that we desperately need. Liberalism has become equated with tendency toward fascism (fascism is archconservative for god's sake!!) and of course with socialism, when liberalism is actually the ideological and existential foundation of the America they want to preserve.
This article doesn't even mention what percentage of Democrats Republicans think are Hispanic, and even without
them Republicans see Democrats as over 3/4 LGBTQ and black??!! Btw, Pew puts white and indigenous Hispanics together, subtracting white Hispanics from its "white" category. About 76% of Americans are white, and only slightly less a percentage are Democrats, very proportional.
Not all Republicans are raging bigots, white or any other color, but we're talking about identity here, and how are they supposed to identify with a party they see as strongly dominated by a pair of interest groups portrayed as intensely focused only on what
their identities want and need? And then there's all that noise from the far left, portrayed as insurgent socialists and/or fascists. I'd like to see a figure on what percentage many Republicans imagine
they represent, very significant instead of very small, for sure.
Just imagine what it could mean if all America just had a somewhat better idea of who we really are.
Itm, Russia and China are already working to keep the Republican leadership in power and us out, knowing Trump will pass eventually. But note the only part of this that is about Trump is the Republican mega-identity's support of their current party leader's actions. By far most Republicans will support Pence or whoever becomes the next Republican president as well.
= new reply since forum marked as read
