The Dislike Engine

Affective polarization, the effect where opposing partisans have an active dislike for the other party, and its voters, leads to inanity like the National Security Advisor adding a journalist to a sensitive chat being conducted on a non-secure (at least by government standards) platform, and then making lame excuses for it.

Michael Waltz should have been shown the door, and the whole lot of people on the chat, including Vice President Vance, should really be feeling the heat. This sort of sloppiness has no viable justification. But the Trump Administration is circling the wagons, and attacking Mr. Goldberg, and eventually this will all blow over. Because who are the voters who are supporting President Trump going to look to for accountability here? The Democrats?

Because what affective polarization does is make the other side worse. No matter what happens. In large part because it shifts the locus of attention from what was done to who did it. And when actions are judged by the actor, rather than on their own merits, the verdicts tend to turn on people's perceptions of what kinds of people they're dealing with. And in a nation where "our side" and "their side" are often taken as signifying "good" and "evil," those perceptions can be very black-and-white.

The other down side of this mode of thinking is that there's never any benefit in doing something that doesn't play to one's own supporters. If the Trump Administration did admit that proper protocols weren't followed, meted out discipline and took concrete steps to improve, this wouldn't earn them anything... Democratic lawmakers and their voter bases wouldn't have any real incentive to give them credit for taking the right steps... the incentives of affective polarization are to move the parties father away from one another, and isolate them. And in that environment, accountability is a weapon, and little else.

But this is the path the United States is on, and so there's little to be done but make the best of it. Even if the best won't be very good.