A theory of political polarity
Part 1 of Journalism x Advocacy, pre-fall
Spending just three weeks in DC engrossed in politics has already convinced me to change the theme of this platform, yet again.
Gone is dispo-thoughts (which if I’m being honest, wasn’t catchy at all) — replaced unceremoniously by “Passport Politics.” Description: “cultural currents, political crossroads.” I like this title because many of my political and quasi-political musings are rooted in an appreciation of experience across boundaries and genre — academic, geographical, you name it. Maybe I’ll bother to put up a more detailed rumination on this later.
For now, it’s fitting that this third iteration of my Substack is a multi-parter on synthesizing journalism and advocacy as agents of change in a polarized America. Or — how little each of these do by themselves.
The first classroom I entered in Fall 2023 was a mahogany-colored journalism seminar room at UNC — fittingly called “Halls of Fame” — adorned with frames of regal-looking people who I’m sure did cool things in their time. Seated around the oval arrangement of tables were several students in classical journalism, and several in political communications. I had a polite amount of speechwriting experience, but no college academic credential in either practice.
Throughout the semester, I stuck mostly to comms-world, writing fake speeches and posing as a fake press secretary for a house rep candidate. We even made a hype playlist to play for speeches and events. At the end of the class, I (as a half-joke) suggested as feedback that the journalism students be forced to play a comms role in the campaign simulation, and vice versa.
At one of the most respected journalistic-educational institutions in the country, these fields occupy different polarities. Beyond select core classes, journalism students at UNC’s Hussman school take distinguished electives from Advertising / Public Relations students (who ostensibly commit themselves to explicitly political agendas). These two are described as a professional-academic crossroads, but at what cost?
This Fall, I’ll have a chance to see through my psuedo-complaint of this segregation to its idealization, co-designing a weekly class on ‘advocacy x journalism —> theories of change’ with a friend of mine (well-trained in classical journalism), in which the two of us will also be the sole student participants. Our professor from last fall, with experience in academia, journalism, and organizing alike, will facilitate. Our goal? Interrogate the assumptions that entrench us in our silos (mine being advocacy/comms) and break them down to build back better.
At both the level of process and of outcome, we’re asking ourselves a question of polarization — polarization of profession, and of political identity. The former is a model of the later so I think it useful to consider both (I say this as political identity is much more complicated and multidimensional than profession). Perhaps in ruminating on the former I might encounter some revelation to apply to the later.
This piece will mostly be a recycled analysis of polarization that I was introduced to in that classrom last Fall, which establishes some context and stakes for this larger thought-project in addition to serving as a standalone article. The multi-parter will additionally be the measuring stick against which I contrast my (hopefully much more developed) opinions at the end of a hopefully-productive academic semester, situated against a calendar year that is already shaping up to be one of the more consequential in the history of democracy.
A battle of narratives
The dominant frame of polarization is profoundly negative, and from my vantage point it reads something like the following:
Our country is becoming more and more polarized, which means people are becoming more divided along ideological/political lines. We escalate political disagreements and see the “other side” as morally reprehensible. People afflicted by polarization become disaffected by the sheer amount of political disagremeent and subsequently radicalized, actively harming our democracy.
A graphic from a Brown Uni article
Here’s a release from Princeton researchers that toots the horn pretty convincingly:
Much like an overexploited ecosystem, the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States — and much of the world — is experiencing a catastrophic loss of diversity that threatens the resilience not only of democracy, but also of society, according to a series of new studies that examine political polarization as a collection of complex ever-evolving systems.
…
Ultimately, as social interactions and individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society. — Princeton
The less-championed counter narrative might go something like this:
Disagreement is crucial to healthy democracy and is the number one mechanism for political change. A society where people are not in verbalized, uncensored political disagreement disaffects all but the most privileged and powerful who want to maintain the hierarchical status quo — this is the reality of a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and historically unequal country like the United States of America.
This take doesn’t sound so heretical, but it is often framed out of discussions about polarization — a shame! The crucial point that I’ll return to over and over is that disagreement and polarization are different shades of the same phenomenom.
For those of us who do not want to think of ourselves as doomed to a disaffected, and ultimately, diseased democracy, there has to be a negotiable “in-between” — between “too much disagreement divides us unnecessarily” and “too little disagreement excuses power inequality.” Clearly, we’re talking about a sliding scale instead of a binary good/bad. So how do we (advocates, journalists, participants in any of the other error-correcting insurance policies of healthy democracy) meet people where they are?
1: Time scarcity/information abundance
The flood of digital technology into media has brought with it an unprecedented amount of information:
Consider the options available to eager political news consumers in 1995. They might have had a hometown paper or two, a handful of radio stations, the three nightly newscasts, the newly launched CNN, and, if they were really hardcore, a couple of magazine subscriptions.
Fast-forward a decade. Those same consumers could fire up Internet Explorer and read almost any newspaper in the country — and most of the major newspapers of the world — online. For political opinion, they had a dizzying array of magazines, any op-ed page they chose, and, all of a sudden, a countless number of blogs. On television, CNN had been joined by Fox News and MSNBC. On radio, satellite began crowding the airwaves with more political commentary. In pockets, the launch of the iPod kicked off the age of podcasting. And the quantity of available political information has only multiplied since then. — Ezra Klein, Vox
Conversely, Americans generally don’t have much time to be pontificating about politics (versus, say, cooking dinner and unwinding after a long day at work). These two realities work against each other, leaving your average American disaffected.
Here’s a WaPo headline from a decade ago: A ton of people didn’t vote because they couldn’t get time off from work. This has improved since, but going to fill out a ballot is supposed to be the easiest part of the voting process — the commitment to figure out one’s position in a democracy where each voice supposedly matters, this is even more daunting.
So how does this have anything to do with disagreement and polarization?
Imagine a time where your political choice wasn’t so clear and simple, where there wasn’t such a thing as “two distinct political camps.” Imagine how much more difficult individual voter decisions would have been. From 50 years ago:
Entitled Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System, the ninety-eight-page paper, coauthored by many of the country’s most eminent political scientists and covered on the front page of the New York Times, pleads for a more polarized political system. It laments that the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why. “Unless the parties identify themselves with programs, the public is unable to make an intelligent choice between them,” warned the authors.
…
Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina notes that when Gerald Ford ran against Jimmy Carter, only 54 percent of the electorate believed the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party. Almost 30 percent said there was no ideological difference at all between the two parties. — NYT, Ezra Klein
When voter issues have been split into segregated camps, when political choices are clear, and when election results carry high stakes — these are inescapable qualities of a polarized political climate. It’s also how many people make their decisions in an information-abundant, time-scarce society.
People respond to simple calls framed as high-stakes; it’s how democracy becomes more participatory. They become apathetic in the face of complex, high-dimensional requests that indivdually don’t matter so much.
“Not knowing where to disagree” can be just as damning to democracy as “disagreeing on too much.”
2: Post-truth politics and moral clarity
I’ve only ever heard two people use “post-truth politics” in conversation. Once was in an interview for a scholarship, and I had no idea what the interviewer was talking about. Another time was past midnight next to a food truck in Hoi An, Vietnam — a British dude joined me as I was eating a banh mi, and as he pulled out a cigarette he asked my opinion on post-truth politics, full-stop. I don’t remember any other part of the conversation. So here’s my answer to his question, I guess.
The banh mi itself was unfortunately really underwhelming
Post-truth politics is a magnifying glass held to the anti-polarization narrative — where division is not just drawn along political or ideological opinion, but on matters of basic “objective truth.” Where one person’s opinion can conceivably refute “objective” findings and observations from institutions like science (COVID is a hoax! Fake news is fake!). Where the self is regarded as its own institution.
When we as an American public cannot agree on what is factual and what isn’t, how can we come together as one? How could we ever prevent our differences from consuming us?
Conversely, moral clarity is a magnifying glass held to the counter-narrative — moral disagreements cut through the mudslinging and troublemaking and allow voters crystal-clear electoral choices. In fact, owing to the federalist nature of American democracy, the more national an election, the more it is framed in moral terms.
Take the 2024 US Presidential election. On practical policy issues, the two candidates seem to be converging (for the same theoretical reason that gas stations set themselves up right next to each other to maximize their profit — this is its own rabbit hole but the election theory is really interesting to me as a math student). After Trump convinced his Republican cronies to block border security legislation (to be able to continue bashing Biden for his failure to protect the border), Biden passed an executive order doing something to a similar effect.
Meanwhile, on morals and principles the candidates are distancing themselves from each other as much as humanly possible. Increasingly, this election is being framed as a moral choice.
Given that our two narratives are reflections of the same sliding-scale phenomenom — that of disagreement in American democracy — it follows that post-truth politics and moral clarity share some characteristics of their own (indeed, that is why I chose to focus on those two).
Moral clarity always involves some sacrifice of nuance, some embrace of “our truth” versus the “other truth.” Democrats criticize Republicans for their pro-life abortion stance on the basis that they are anti-gun control, anti-healthcare expansion, etc. (things that Democrats argue save lives). Republicans criticize Democrats for an apparent inability to resolve their warring factions of institutionalism and progressivism.
I tend to think of student contributions to the political sphere along these lines, as a workable case study. Yes, students, who are seen as the innocent kids who don’t know better, who stereotypically spout rhetoric aligning unconditionally with some moral value or another without any regard for nuance, who remind others of their truths and their lived experiences and seek to elevate them as much as possible. You old people wouldn’t understand, students protest, how much it traumatizes us to have to pay back exponentially more student debt and suffer through exponentially more gun violence and so forth. This sense of separation through disagreement builds solidarity, it frames a clear moral choice, and yes, it shaves off the elements of the truth (in fact generations prior all experience some version of their own coming of age).
This medium article explains the overall point much better than I ever could:
If idealistic students who have never felt the gut-punch of the world at large don’t push us to improve and progress and think differently, I’m not sure who will. Most people are too jaded to bother. Their naïveté is their strength, and it does have an effect, albeit slowly.
…
My liberal arts education — home of the sensitive, snowflake liberals that the news loves to hate — did ruin me for the real world in many ways. But we should hope that we can all be similarly ruined; only then, when we’re all too naïve to sneer at hope, can we have a chance at building the world we need. I’m proud that I can’t be easily placated, that I can’t find satisfaction within a broken system. — Medium, Mira Fox
3: Best man wins? Or instead a hierarchy of power
If the two narratives I present above are two points on a continuous sliding scale, then one of the thumbs that moves that scale has to do with hierarchy and inequality.
Increasingly for the progressive left interested in the power imbalance between the have’s and have-not’s, any indictment of polarization might feel out-of-touch.
Of course, the logic goes, we’re going to have two sides to this issue, and of course those two sides are going to be entrenched. Oppression that has bred in-group solidarity amongst the resistance is not equally the fault of both sides, and polarization reveals the extent of deep-seated inequity rather than being its own problem. More affirmatively, it might be more appropriate to ascribe polarization as a necessary sacrifice, an inevitable side effect of disrupting the American social order.
A paper by two UNC professors explains this argument further, if you’re curious (I will put the link in when I get back onto my laptop). It takes BLM as an operative case study — yes, the protests created polarization if only because they revealed fundamental questions about the American ethos that have yet to be answered. Yes, our society is multi-ethnic and multi-generational, and a strong, forceful articulation of difference might be polarizing, but it necessary to keep our country moving forward — at the speed of trust.
These competing frames reveal important debates about neutrality, in journalism and beyond — but that’s for next time.
A final note: I was motivated to write this as its own separate piece because “civil discourse” is becoming its own niche for politically-minded students and educational institutions. Most of the time these are very well-intentioned. But their basic premise on polarization always feels frustratingly incomplete, and a reflection, in all honesty, of the out-of-touch-ness that has come to plague academic politics. Maybe this is a take that I’ll flesh out later, but I’ll leave it here for now.