Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity

"Lilliana Mason is one of the leading political scientists studying identity. This book, Uncivil Agreement , really signaled with convincing evidence that identity is the chief division between Republicans and Democrats in the US. (It’s only about the US, unfortunately. I know some of your audience is international. Apologies for picking such parochial books, in some sense!) She really took on the idea that voters are fundamentally rational and are voting on the basis of self-interest and showed that we will go to extreme lengths to protect our identities and attack the identities of others, even if those identities are pretty meaningless. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She draws upon classic social psychology from the 1960s and 1970s to show that even the seemingly most meaningless identities, we can suddenly start to defend if they are threatened. Then she asked the question, ‘Well, if we have this tendency to blindly defend our identities and attack those of others, then what would a political party do, armed with the full resources of media campaigns and micro targeting, or other types of extensive campaign tools, with these same, human tendencies?’ And her answer is that identity has come to subsume all of the other things that used to predict our political position. It used to be that our education or class or gender would be predictive of what we think about an issue. Now, more and more, it’s simply our identity. I agree. It is tempting, when one makes identity central, to think of these things as almost intrinsic. You are born a conservative or you were born a liberal. What’s interesting is the way that issues become stitched together into a narrative. Why should we, a priori, assume that one’s attitudes about sexual orientation should be linked to one’s attitudes about the military? And yet, when you look at the ways that these things become tied together, Lilliana Mason would argue, I think, that it’s political parties that strategically draw boundaries around issues that they know will coalesce support. The story that she tells is about how political parties change and stretch the identity of the political party to encompass larger groups of people. And then, over time, these things seem almost natural—but, really, they are the effect of political strategy. It’s true. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? That’s an important point, because you were asking about optimism earlier. One point of optimism that many people will have—both in the US and Britain, I think it’s fair to say—is that we don’t really care for our options. In the US, for example, if you ask people classic survey questions like, ‘How concerned would you be if your son or daughter married a member of the other party?’ When we look at those trends over the last 40 years, it’s disturbing because huge numbers of people are now saying that they’re really worried about this. But, in a clever experiment, some political scientist instead asked, ‘Would you rather have a son/daughter-in-law who talks about politics a lot, or one who is from the other party?’ And time and again, people just don’t want the in-law who talks about politics. It does suggest that a lot of our animosity towards the other side is simply driven by our distaste for politics in general, at least in the US. Yes, and one of the things that we’re observing is that the opportunities for offline contact between Republicans and Democrats in the US is really shrinking. A recent study showed that there’s now such residential segregation (by political party), that there are shockingly few opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to interact with each other, apart from in these online settings. And, certainly, the Covid pandemic has exacerbated that problem."