Who Are You Going To Hate Next?

The 2001 film Conspiracy has stuck with me for nearly two decades. It's based on the Wannsee Conference where the Nazis developed what became known as The Final Solution. The script is taken from the only surviving transcript of the meeting.

The film contains two elements that haunt me. First, the meeting is conducted in a matter-of-fact manner with a working lunch. The arguments are never about whether genocide should occur but how to most efficiently implement it.

Second, Kenneth Branagh who plays Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi who conducted the meeting, retells a story designed as a warning. 

The story's moral is that hate should not become so all consuming  so that when the object of hate is gone one has nothing left to live for.

The story is becoming more salient in 2020 as I foolishly read the comment threads on various blog posts or Twitter threads. Anyone to the political left of Joseph McCarthy is a communist who threatens to destroy the American Republic and anyone to the political right of Angela Davis is fascist who threatens to destroy American Democracy.

Politics has gone far beyond the "tastes great/less filling" type of debate. In fact, the political vitriol has become closer to the religious hatred satirized in Gulliver's Travels where arguments over whether whistling being a vice or a virtue could lead to war. In short, for some, political opponents are now someone to hate.

I don't know how widespread the hatred is or how deeply it has set in. I'm certain, however, that once hatred becomes entrenched as part of a pseudo-religious doctrine, there will always be a new target to hate. If that entrenchment occurs, we may all look back at 2020 with nostalgia.

How Much Partisan Prejudice Do South Dakotans Exhibit?

This afternoon, I spent a little too much time clicking on South Dakota counties in the maps that accompanied this Atlantic article "The Geography of Partisan Prejudice."

First a caveat, I'm not vouching for the methodology behind the ratings.

To do this assessment, PredictWise first partnered with Pollfish to run a nationwide poll of 2,000 adults to capture people’s feelings about the other party. The survey asked how people would feel if a close family member married a Republican or a Democrat; how well they think the terms selfish, compassionate, or patriotic describe Democrats versus Republicans; and other questions designed to capture sentiments about political differences. 

Based on the survey results, Tobias Konitzer, the co-founder of PredictWise, investigated which demographic characteristics seemed to correlate with partisan prejudice. He found, for example, that age, race, urbanicity, partisan loyalty, and education did coincide with more prejudice (but gender did not). In this way, he created a kind of profile of contemporary partisan prejudice. 

Next, Konitzer projected this profile onto the broader American population, under the assumption that people with similar demographics and levels of partisan loyalty, living in neighborhoods with comparable amounts of political diversity, tend to hold similar attitudes about political difference. He did this using voter files acquired by PredictWise from TargetSmart, a commercial vendor. Voter files are essentially data snapshots about all American adults, based on publicly available records of voter registration and turnout from past elections, along with data about neighborhood variables and demographic traits. In this way, PredictWise was able to rank all 3,000 counties in the country based on the estimated level of partisan prejudice in each place. “What I find most striking is that we find a good degree of variation,” Konitzer says. Some states, like Texas, show a real mix of prejudiced and nonprejudiced counties; whereas Florida is very consistent—and fairly prejudiced—from place to place.

South Dakota, like Texas, has a mix of counties. According to the survey, Faulk County is in the 1st percentile which means that "99 out of every 100 counties are more prejudiced against the political 'other.'" On the other hand, Sully, Stanley, and Haakon counties are all in the 100th percentile which means no other counties are statistically likely to be more prejudiced against the other party.

If one looks at the home counties of a few random bloggers, Yankton is in the 56th percentile, Brookings is in the 85th percentile, and Brown is in the 96th percentile. As for South Dakota's county, Minnehaha is in the 93rd percentile.

Besides using a complicated methodology, a few reasons exist to doubt profile. When one clicks on Pennington, stats are presented for Perkins, and Potter seems to have moved next to Harding. (As an aside, the counties that I cited stats for all seem to be in the right spot.)

That caveat aside, the article cites a couple of other studies with some disturbing conclusions: 

In general, Republicans seem to dislike Democrats more than Democrats dislike Republicans, PredictWise found. We don’t know why this is, but this is not the only study to have detected an imbalance. For example, in a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, half of consistently conservative respondents said it was important for them to live in a place where most people share their political views—compared with just 35 percent of consistent liberals. But a more recent survey, conducted in December by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, found that Democrats were the ones showing more ill will—with 45 percent saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Republican (versus 35 percent of Republicans saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Democrat). So it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but what’s clear is that both sides are becoming more hostile toward one another.

It also points out how the polarization can lead to deeper problems:

We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A. This may seem silly—harmless, even. But it is uncomfortably reminiscent of stories from conflict zones abroad. In Northern Ireland, for example, an outsider visiting during the Troubles had no way to tell unionists and nationalists apart. They were pretty much all white Christians, after all. But the locals themselves routinely guessed one another’s identity based on their names, the spacing of their eyes, their sports jerseys, the color of their hair, their neighborhood, or even how much jewelry they wore­. This process came to be known as “telling.” If a reliable cue didn’t exist, people would make one up. It was a way to move about in the world in a time of profound tribalism, during which 3,600 people were killed.

If anybody is wondering, I prefer to eat at Arby's and get my coffee at Caribou whenever I have the option.

Charting Different Political Universes

I know!  I need to move on! The fact that political affiliation seemingly determines the color of the sky one sees fascinates and worries me. 

The following chart from Axios provides a solid visual of how Republicans see Trump far differently than independents or Democrats. I am not vouching for the poll's methodology, but the visual illustrates the diametrically opposed views of Trump I have been reading and deepens my belief that gap is widening dangerously.

Axios online poll conducted June 16-17.