Tribalism doesn't begin to describe it
If you have ideas for how to help Oregonians push back against the spread of political sectarianism, then consider The Oregon Way community as partners willing to help you out.
Kevin Frazier edits The Oregon Way. He welcomes your feedback and thanks you for engaging with these posts. In his spare time, he attends law school and runs No One Left Offline, a nonprofit focused on closing the Digital Divide.
If you took our democracy to visit the good governance doctor, you’d return with a system that’s received a troubling bill of health. The doctor would be concerned, for example, that scholars are having to come up with new, more dire ways to refer to our ailments. According to a group of eminent scholars, including Harvard professor Mina Cikara, what’s imperiling our public sphere is political sectarianism.
Even more troubling, underlying this sectarianism are deeply entrenched, unhealthy behaviors. The scholars write that political sectarianism:
[c]onsists of three core ingredients:
othering — the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself;
aversion — the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans;
and moralization — the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous.
It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere.
This formulation was detailed in an essay, “Political Sectarianism in America,” written by the scholars shortly before the presidential election. They wrote the essay because “tribalism” no longer sufficiently described just how divisive our politics have become. It’s as if the medical field had to create a new classification for a seemingly ever worsening condition.
You’d likely start to panic at this point in the visit with Dr. Good Governance. Now tribalism isn’t even potent enough to describe our partisan hostility?! Hopefully, you’d manage to stay calm, because the check up is far from over.
Surely the Doctor would also take issue with our performance on the democracy equivalent of a stress test. According to the “political stress indicator,” which predicted the Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, our democracy is “heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years,” based on an analysis by Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, and Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. This red flag led Goldstone and Turchin to coin the next decade, “The Turbulent Twenties.”
At this point, with such weighty diagnoses being tossed around, you’d probably ask the Doctor to take another look at the underlying causes. That review would likely only reaffirm the bleak assessment.
Goldstone writes that “income inequality, political polarization and state debt” all contribute to political stress. If the Doctor reads The Oregon Way, then they’d be able to point to posts from authors like Jim Moore, Cyreena Boston Ashby, and Allen Alley to show that Oregon is struggling to manage those stressors.
The Doctor would also find support for their diagnoses in the work of Gary Jacobson, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-San Diego. Jacobson, quoted in a recent New York Times article by Thomas Edsall, warned that:
[c]leavages of race, region, education, religion, occupation, and community type now put people more consistently on one side or the other, feeding the culture wars and aggravating negative partisanship.
Again, Oregonians (at least Oregon’s elected officials) have hardly been able to withstand the gravitational pulls toward the partisan extremes.
In attention to these outward manifestations of an ailing system, there’s also the attacks on the system itself that will raise concerns with Dr. Good Governance. Leading thinkers on the political sectarianism, such as Eli Finkel of Northwestern, have identified a few particularly problematic signs:
The foremost political story of the Trump era is not that a person like Trump could be so shamelessly self-dealing, but that Republicans have exhibited such fealty along the way, including a willingness to cripple the founding document they claim to view as sacrosanct.
The willingness to question core aspects of the system itself has “cast doubt on the credibility of the American system” in the minds of many Americans, according to Cynthia Shih-Chia Wang.
As reported by The Willamette Week, that’s exactly what has occurred in Oregon. According to Tess Riski, “A dozen Republican state lawmakers wrote to Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum on Dec. 11, urging her to join the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn presidential election results in four battleground states.” Those officials are listed below:
Sen. Chuck Thomsen (R-Hood River)
Sen. Dennis Linthicum (R-Klamath Falls)
Sen. Kim Thatcher (R-Keizer)
Sen. Alan Olsen (R-Canby)
Rep. Bill Post (R-Keizer)
Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson (R-Prineville)
Rep. Greg Barreto (R-Cove)
Rep. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford)
Rep. Gary Leif (R-Roseburg)
Rep. Mike Nearman (R-Independence)
Rep. E. Werner Reschke (R-Klamath Falls)
Rep.-elect Bobby Levy (R-Echo)
In this recent flare of our sectarian symptoms, it would appear that one party was more so to blame than another. But, at least at the national level, Finkel has determined that "antidemocratic trends are growing stronger on both sides."
Edsall's own research has led him to believe that this bipartisan bout with political sectarianism is likely a result of changes in our mass media. Edsall reported that the fragmentation of our news, the excessive editorializing, and impossible-to-miss slant have cumulatively made reaching consensus over the facts nearly impossible, all the while accelerating the ease with which one party’s members can see those in another as deplorable.
One researcher that Edsall consulted went as far as to say that “consuming ideologically homogeneous media produce[s] greater belief in conspiracy theories enforced by that media.”
You may have simply left the Doctor’s office at this point thinking that with so many issues, there’s no chance of a recovery. Hopefully, Dr. Good Governance would have stopped you to point out some good signs and some easy steps to follow to improve our democracy’s health.
First, the Doctor would likely point out that though there has been some questionable behavior recently, it matters that the conservative-led Supreme Court dismissed the aforementioned contestation of the election.
Second, the Doctor would applaud you and other readers of The Oregon Way for intentionally reading pieces from people across Oregon and across the political spectrum.
Third, the Doctor would encourage you to heed the advice of folks like Adam Davis and practice your ability to listen, empathize, and avoid moralizing. After all, based on professor Peter Ditto’s research, moralization is a big issue in our politics:
Our political culture has devolved into what both sides see as an existential battle between good (us) versus evil (them), and in that environment almost any lie can be believed, almost any transgression excused, as long as it helps your side.
My hope is that the Doctor would also pass along this important instruction: The Oregon Way is meant to be a two-way street—if you have two cents to share, reach out to me; if you want to invite someone to contribute, encourage them to do so; and, if you have ideas for how to help Oregonians push back against the spread of political sectarianism, then consider The Oregon Way community as partners willing to help you out.
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