Prius Or Pickup?

August 13, 2018
In this fascinating look at contemporary politics, political scientists Hetherington and Weiler (Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics) set out to explain what really causes the extreme political polarization seen today. They conclude that, for white Americans, it is not political ideology but underlying “worldviews” (expressed by where they live and work, which cars they buy, and even which styles of coffee they prefer) that determine their political affiliations. They find evidence of two opposing worldviews, which they call “fixed” and “fluid”: the first is more fearful of outsiders, change, and uncertainty and favors hierarchy, and the second is more welcoming of complexity, nuance, and unfamiliarity. They argue that a “marriage of worldview and party” in American politics began to develop in the 1970s as party leaders reorganized their platforms around issues, like race, that touched voters’ worldviews—a sharp departure from the mixed-worldview political parties of the past, when the overriding American political issues were taxation and government size. The authors convincingly argue that the consequences of this polarization are deep and “toxic” in a book that will interest watchers of the political landscape of recent decades. Agent: Jill Grinberg, Jill Grinberg Literary Management.

August 15, 2018
Big data comes to the service of big generalizations about American tribes, and it speaks volumes about how we divide along many fronts, not least of them political.As University of North Carolina-based political scientists Hetherington and Weiler (co-authors: Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, 2009) write, if you're a conservative, you'll tend to buy an American-made truck and have a dog, whereas if you lean left, you'll have a cat and a hybrid or foreign-made passenger vehicle. The causal relationships are a little fuzzy, but a look at the amygdala shows that conservatives tend to be more certain that danger lurks just around the corner and more attuned to survival--thus the big growling vehicle and the big growling dog. Liberals, conversely, tend to think that people are inherently good and that the world is mostly a safe place. By the authors' account, most people are neither wholly conservative nor wholly liberal in their worldviews, though their positions tend to harden when confronted with someone who doesn't agree with them; there are reasons for that as well, some of them related to media diet, the subject of an engaging side discussion. The resulting "politicization of everything" plays out everywhere: If you're a lefty, you'll head to Starbucks, if a righty, to Dunkin' Donuts; if you're a Hillary Clinton voter, you'll watch tennis instead of football, if you watch sports at all. That said, there are limits: "For their part, the Redds don't watch football with the same relish anymore. They're sick and tired of the fact that everything is a political issue now and don't believe the anthem, in particular, should be one."A fascinating way to look at the fracturing of a nation presumed to be united; it's one that offers little hope for less polarization anytime soon.

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