[NY Times] No Hate Left Behind: Lethal partisanship is taking us into dangerous territory.

kinda scary. @FranchiseBlade for the record I love you brother and I hope you thrive.

No Hate Left Behind
Lethal partisanship is taking us into dangerous territory.
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”

The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.

Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.

The mass partisanship paper was written by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland.

Kalmoe and Mason, taking the exploration of partisan animosity a step farther, found that nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”

Their line of questioning did not stop there.

How about: “Do you ever think: ‘we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died’?”

Some 20 percent of Democrats (that translates to 12.6 million voters) and 16 percent of Republicans (or 7.9 million voters) do think on occasion that the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.

We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.”

Kalmoe and Mason analyzed the data to see what kind of voter was likely to adopt extremely critical views of the opposition party:

One personal trait stood out: “Aggression was the only factor that predicted all three types of lethal partisan attitudes.”

Contrary to the expectation that the losers of elections might be more inclined to violence, the two authors determined that winning increases support for violence against the opposition.

There was “significantly more support for partisan violence among strong partisans when told their party was more likely than not to win in 2020.”

Overall, the authors wrote, “our evidence suggests that winning more than losing prompts strong partisans to feel less opposed to partisan violence.”

As partisan hostility deepens, there is one group that might ordinarily be expected to help pull the electorate out of this morass — the most knowledgeable and sophisticated voters.

According to a forthcoming study, however, it is just these voters who display the most uncritical acceptance of party orthodoxy, left or right. On both sides, the best informed voters are by far the most partisan.

In “Understanding Partisan Cue Receptivity,” Bert N. Bakker and Yphtach Lelkes, professors at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research and the University of Pennsylvania, and Ariel Malka, a professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, find that knowledgeable, politically engaged voters are the most likely “to adopt issue attitudes that are cued as party-consistent in the political information environment.” In plain language, the most active voters — those notably “high in cognitive resources” — are the most willing to accept policy positions endorsed by their party, and they are doing so not out of principle, but to affirm their identity as a Democrat or Republican. They are expressing “the desire to reach conclusions that are consistent with a valued identity.”

The authors call this process “identity expression” or a “tendency of partisans to adopt issue attitudes that are cued as party-consistent in the political information environment.”

This willingness to adopt a policy position not out of conviction but out of a desire to conform to partisan priorities reflects an urge, they write, “to bolster and protect valued political identities by expressing and rationalizing the viewpoints cued to be consistent with these identities.”

In an email, Lelkes wrote that he and his co-authors felt it important “to be careful about causal reasoning.” They concluded their article with this commentary:

Ironically, reflective citizens, who are sometimes seen as ideal citizens, might be the subset of strong partisan identifiers most likely to fall in line with the party. Since higher levels of cognitive resources and partisan social identity are associated with higher levels of political activism, the effect may be self-reinforcing, wherein political elites polarize the strongly identified and cognitively reflective, who then elect more polarized elites. The democratic dilemma may not be whether low information citizens can learn what they need to know, but whether high information citizens can set aside their partisan predispositions.

These two papers raise a set of basic questions about group identity: Why are partisan divisions sharpening now and are these conflicts likely to become more aggravated?

Robert Kurzban, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that domestic politics have taken on a moralistic, judgmental cast:

Any deviation, Kurzban continued in an email, is likely to be severely punished:

more at the link

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/...19ah3liulJIIxGyod2mfZsI9ZBDZDYrgKuHXK6LyDAJOQ