Running Scares

According to Axios: "Negative polarization — the intense dislike of the political opposition — is driving politics to the point in which we forget what our favored candidates even stand for."

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. But what I think that negative partisanship (the more common term for this phenomenon) tends to mean that it doesn't really matter what people's favored candidates stand for; it's just assumed that they are the right things.

The gist of the article is that candidates for office, either running for re-election or challenging an incumbent, can raise substantial amounts of money to fund their campaign efforts (usually in the form of advertising to people normally unlikely to vote) by "caricaturing the opposition as uniquely evil." Again, I'm not so sure of the truth of this statement. I would submit that it's more accurate that politics has gone from matters of policy to matters of right and wrong. And when the assumption is that opposing partisans are supporting something that's actively wrong, there doesn't have to be anything unique about it. That said, it's true that American politics has become rife with accusations that whoever is running from "the other side" is intentionally backing wrongheaded policy out of an intent to injure people who shouldn't be injured, generally people who are part of the political coalition that the candidate in question supports.

So Republicans use their particular (and peculiar) definition of "woke" to refer to people and institutions who are presumed to have it out for Conservatives and/or "White working class" voters, and Democrats cast Republicans as deliberately targeting ethnic and sexual minorities to maintain their appeal to racists and bigots. And, to be sure, each party has a much longer list of hobgoblins to trot out of those don't inspire people to give. What else is new?

Not much, because the politics of fear goes back a long way by now. It's rare, it seems, for politicians to be credited with a workable grasp of human psychology, but that is what's at work here. Psychological research into the cognitive bias known as loss aversion has found that people are much more tuned into to what they have to lose, as opposed to what they have to gain. If people's subjective feelings of pain at a given loss are twice as intense as their feelings of pleasure at gaining the same amount, it stands to reason that to gain maximum motivation, one should concentrate on what people stand to lose.

And so politicians do. And if one understands loss aversion to play a role in what people expect to gain or lose from an election, negative partisanship is a perfectly rational mindset; even though it's one that primes people to be much more attentive to their political opponents, and what costs those opponents' policies are likely to impose, than to the benefits of their own side winning. And this, too, works in politician's favor, as it frees them from having to go into a lot of detail on the promises they are making.

In the end, it all becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although (or maybe because) I don't see myself as a partisan, I've gradually shifted from attempting to find the candidate who I think will do the most good to looking for the one who will likely do the least amount of damage. Because Washington is a Blue state, that tends to be the Democrats; they don't have to rely so much on turning out low-propensity voters that they feel the need to "scare people's face off." But not even that completely prevents them from fear-mongering. All of this conspires to make the sort of positive, benefits-based campaigning that I would prefer pretty thin on the ground. But such is the way that people work.