On escaping the downward spiral in politics

When we only look for the worst in others, it makes us dumber... doesn't it?

The controversy du jour on RFK and severe autism has got me thinking about negative polarization in political discourse. To briefly catch you up, Robert F. Kennedy recently said that autism can be extremely debilitating. He was referring to severe autism, as he made clear in context, but his opponents seized the opportunity to morally wrong-foot a rival by misconstruing him as disparaging the whole autism spectrum, or even implicitly advancing a eugenics mindset.

This sort of motivated misrepresentation has happened thousands of times before. It is the bread and butter of political discourse in an era of negative polarization, where progress is thought to be made by amplifying, or even creating, publicity events in which the other side’s speech can be stripped of its original context, then merged with new context to promote the worst possible interpretation. But this time it got me thinking.

It seems to me that negative polarization is inevitably making us stupider and stupider as a culture. I think people, as frustrating and nasty as they often seem, are mostly trying to be good and make the world a better place by their own lights, and they mostly use their best understanding of the truth to do that. If you’re always looking for the worst way to interpret your opponents’ words, you’re likely to misunderstand them in a way that they will reasonably see as negligent and irresponsible. They’ll probably take those misunderstandings as moral offenses against them and do the same to you, prompting a revenge cycle that disrupts the fragile state of cooperation and trust.

And I think this is pretty dangerous if you, like me, have a lot of admiration and respect for the rule of law, liberal democratic institutions, and scientific progress, and you’re horrified that many of these things now seem to be under attack. I think these wonderful, hard-won features of modern societies somehow depend on basic virtues of social epistemology — of holding ourselves to the principle that, when we contribute to discourse, we should have a basically cooperative attitude. If we want nice things, a culture that can support freedom, wealth, and a decent standard of living for everyone, I think it has to be fundamentally prosocial and cooperative. That means we should seek to understand what others mean and represent that meaning accurately, whether we are endorsing or attacking their speech.

I’m sure all of this sounds so naïve, but it’s genuinely hard for me to understand how else I’m supposed to think about it. Maybe some people think we have to fight for short-term wins by any means necessary? But it seems like this is never going to end. We’re decades beyond short-term at this point. Maybe some people think we can compartmentalize? “Fight dirty” with the “bad guys” but hold better norms internally? Does that really work?

And what does “fighting” actually mean in a liberal democracy where power comes not from violence against opponents, but from persuading others to vote for your favored candidate? How much does it really help you to wrong-foot the other side in a way that is transparently misrepresenting them? How do we know the effect of that? Do most people take what you said at face value and move to support you, or do they see through it and mistrust you more? Is the idea that we’ve reached a state where all that matters is maximizing the size and energy of your “base”, people who think that the other side is evil and must be stopped at all costs? Where does that seem to be taking us, when party identification has been drifting downwards for decades? When supermajorities are disgusted with politics and most cannot name any strengths of the American system worth preserving?

I don’t want to dismiss the anger and fear that I know many people feel. I feel it too. But I don’t see how the revenge cycle can lead to a positive outcome. I think the more the two sides keep lashing out at each other unfairly, the more our meager remaining resources of trust will be exhausted completely, the more distant we will get from our founding ideals, and the more our political victories will therefore become Pyrrhic at best.

Again, I’m sure all of this is so naïve. But I don’t know how else to think, and I don’t feel my thoughts are so hopelessly misguided that I shouldn’t try to articulate them at least once.

Now more than ever, I hope you all get to have a normal one today.