We don’t know what is causing what, unfortunately, as is often the case in sociological research. We just know that being older and living in or near a city seem to go along with partisan prejudice in general. This may be because, according to decades of research into how prejudice operates, humans are more likely to discriminate against groups of people with whom they do not have regular, positive interactions. (In Europe, some research suggests that anti-immigrant sentiments tend to be higher in people who live in homogeneous neighborhoods near—but not among—immigrants.)
And in America, people who live in cities (particularly affluent, older white people) can more easily construct work and home lives with people who agree with them politically. They may be cosmopolitan in some ways and provincial in others.
Americans now routinely guess one another’s partisan leanings based on what they eat, drive, and drink (Dunkin’ Donuts? Republican; Starbucks? Democrat), according to a working paper by the University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Hye-Yon Lee. And based on these unreliable cues, they say they’d be more or less likely to want to live, work, or hang out with one another.
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.
In parts of America, it is markedly more uncomfortable to be perceived as a Democrat right now. In other places, it is very isolating to be outed as a Republican. …
Conflict and protest are vital to democracy. But whenever people begin to caricature one another, anywhere in the world, predictable tragedies occur. Fixable problems do not get fixed. Neighbors become estranged, embittered, and sometimes violent. Everyone ends up worse off, sooner or later. “This is the great danger America faces,” Representative Barbara Jordan of Texas said in 1976. “That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.”
Partisan prejudice is different from other forms of prejudice. It is not yet embedded in all of our institutions, the way racism has been. But the evidence shows that it distorts our thinking, just like other kinds of prejudice. “Just like with race, the problem is that when people stereotype, they miss the variation within a group,” says Stanford University’s Neil Malhotra, who has researched political behavior for more than a decade.
Fundamentally, partisan prejudice is another way for one group of humans to feel superior to another. New research suggests that it is now more acceptable in some areas of life than racial prejudice. In a 2012 experiment, the political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood gave nearly 2,000 Americans implicit-bias tests and found that partisan bias was more widespread than racial bias. About 70 percent of Democrats and Republicans showed a reflexive bias for their own party. (Take a version of this test here.)
Of course, it can be harder to tell someone’s political leanings than someone’s skin color. And it’s hard to develop an implicit-bias test that mimics realistic, everyday encounters. But when people think they can guess someone’s political leanings, they discriminate accordingly.
In a 2014 study, Karen and Thomas Gift at Duke University sent out 1,200 resumes, tweaking some to suggest a candidate with previous experience in a Democratic or Republican organization. And employers seemed to notice. In a conservative county in Texas, a Republican applicant had to submit about five resumes for each positive callback. By contrast, a Democratic applicant needed to submit seven resumes to get a callback. (And the Republican candidates had a similar disadvantage in a liberal California county.)
What makes this kind of prejudice unusual is that it is currently very easy to defend. What is wrong with discriminating against someone based on political values? After all, unlike race or sexuality, politics is something you choose. If you choose unwisely, maybe you deserve to be judged accordingly.
Yes and no. We have more choice over our politics than over our sexuality, without a doubt. But the vast majority of people follow their parents’ lead when it comes to party affiliation, just as they do with religion. In fact, some researchers have even found that political tendencies are significantly influenced by genetics, with identical twins sharing even more political opinions than fraternal twins.
Most people adopt a political team at a young age and very rarely change—regardless of whether they make more money or need more government help at different life stages. Political preferences are not rational or linear decisions, even though they feel that way. “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives,” Jonathan Haidt writes in his book The Righteous Mind. “Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”
About four in 10 Americans identify as independent today, but even they pick sides. Most independents consistently lean either right or left in their voting behavior over time and tend to exhibit similar prejudices as people who claim a specific party.
As politics have become more about identity than policy, partisan leanings have become more about how we grew up and where we feel like we belong. Politics are acting more like religion, in other words.
This is partly because partisan identities have begun to line up with other identities, as Lilliana Mason describes in her book, Uncivil Agreement. Making assumptions about people’s politics based on their race or religiosity is easier than it was in the past. Black people get typed as Democrats; people who go to church on Sunday are assumed to be Republicans. (But as always, stereotypes still mask complexity: About half of black Americans go to church at least once a week, for example, a far higher rate than that of white Americans.)
In other words, partisan prejudice now includes a bunch of other prejudices, all wrapped up into one tangled mess. “Americans are really divided, but not in terms of policy; they’re divided in terms of identity,” Mason says. “And the more identities come into play, the more salient they are, the harder it will be to agree, even if policy positions shift.” Politics are becoming a proxy battle for other deep divisions that have almost nothing to do with environmental regulation or tax policies.
Hope is embedded in all these maps: This kind of prejudice is malleable. That is why it varies so much from place to place. By cultivating meaningful relationships across divides, by rewarding humility and curiosity over indignation and righteousness, people can live wiser, fuller lives. They can also learn to speak one another’s language, which means they might one day even change one another’s minds. This happens organically in some places, we now know. Maybe it’s time to think of these outliers as rare and interesting, worthy of our attention, before they become extinct.
Click on the link, and you will see that Dane County is in the 100th percentile for Democratic prejudice against “the political other,” Republicans. Milwaukee County is in the 99th percentile. Democrats also appear “considerably more prejudiced against Republicans than Democrats elsewhere,” in Dane and Milwaukee counties, to no one’s surprise.
Maybe it’s time for Republicans to boycott Madison and Milwaukee. Or eject the Axis of Evil from the state.
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