How your vote became your identity

This is our glass. On this American life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, his entire life took a sharp, unexpected and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right, because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And I'm B.A. Parker. Parker, you may have missed this, like, with the tsunami of everything else happening in the world right now, but... I want to talk to you about this Sharia-free America caucus. What exactly is that? So, okay, in late December, this congressman from Texas named Keith Self started a new caucus in Congress. That he said he was forming to keep out the influence of Sharia law in the United States. Sharia poses a unique and profound danger. It is far more than a personal faith. It is a comprehensive system of governance, culture, and domination that enforces submission through violence. What does he think Sharia law is? Man, I don't know. But the paperwork on the creation of this caucus from Keith Self is kind of vague, like on what Sharia entails, but it's clear from his own words that he sees the existence of Muslim Sun America as evidence of creeping Islamist indoctrination. All cultures are not morally equivalent, whereas Christianity is the religion of peace, of reconciliation of love. Islam is a religion of the sword. And he's not the only one because he boasted that his Sharia-free America caucus now runs 60 deep. Wait, 60 members of Congress? Yeah, so, you know, I wanted to look up the numbers because I was curious about what this kind of messaging from Republican leadership might signal to rank and file Republican voters like what it tells us about the way they feel about things. And the numbers I could find were from right after the Muslim ban, you know, during the first Trump administration way back in 2017, but the New America Foundation found that more than 70% of Republicans held negative views of Muslims. What? Yeah, right? Compared to 42% of the general public. 42%? Still kind of high, not gonna lie. Yeah, it's not, it's not great. But I mean, suffice it to say, not liking Muslims is now like an unremarkable position, maybe even an expected position for Republicans to hold. And that's coming from the top down. So I got pulled down this rabbit hole because, you know, I thought the way that people picked their political party was a result of their personal ideology, right? Right. I mean, me too. You have a bunch of views on policies or the way you think the country should work, and then you pick whether the Republicans or the Democrats match up most closely with that. Yeah, that's the way I think most of us think this works. But people who study political behavior are like, nah, that's actually completely backwards. They say we generally tend to take on our party identifications from, you know, the folks around us, whether that's our parents or our neighbors or our friends, the people at our churches or mosques, whatever, right? And then we match our politics to those of the party we belong to. Okay, so here's a good example. Like, so polls showed that at one point, the majority of black Americans were opposed to same-sex marriage, and that was true right up until support for same-sex marriage became the official position of the party, you know, during Barack Obama's second term in the White House. And so not too long after that happened, when they asked black people again about how they felt about same-sex marriage, the majority of black folks said they supported it. So because black folks overwhelmingly identify as Democrats, which we've talked about before on the show, and they identify as Democrats regardless of whether they are conservative or liberal or whatever, when the party that black folks belong to moved on same-sex marriage, then black folks moved on same-sex marriage. Exactly, and shifts like this happen all the time, and the political scientist Lilliana Mason told me that it's happening more often and for everybody. There was a time when our party was the thing that we voted for, and, you know, we felt psychologically connected to the party. The party wins, we feel good, if the party loses, we feel bad. But there's still all these other parts of our identity that we have that are linked to our, you know, sense of self-esteem and our place in the world. So Lilliana is talking about our racial identities and our religious identities, and like, you know, whether we identify as runners or readers or parents. But she says that something has changed as a lot of us millennials and Gen Zers were coming of age politically or just becoming old enough to vote. She says that we are now living in an age of what she calls mega-identity. What's happened in the U.S. over the last many decades is that these really important identities, like racial and religious identities, have become associated in our minds with our party identity. So when we go vote in an election, we're not just feeling like our party wins or loses, we're feeling like our party and our racial group and our religious group and all these big parts of what makes us who we are. All of those things get wrapped up in the outcome of the election also. So I think we sort of knew that people's views on all kinds of issues around race and justice, like policing or affirmative action or whatever, were shaped by which party they vote for. But she's saying actually the ways we think about our own racial identities are shaped by the parties we vote for too. Yes, and she said that this thinking is warping our politics in all kinds of really consequential ways. It's created these conditions where if you're a rural voter, you are expected to say hate gender neutral bathrooms or dozens of legislators from one party can form an anti-Muslim caucus. And that's just how things work now. And so that's what we're getting into today on Quote Switch. What happens when our political party becomes the prism through which we see every other aspect of our identities? And she says that the way that our party has been looked at has been looking into the ways that our party affiliations have become more entrenched and louder parts of our lives. And she's the author of a book called Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity. And she says that back in the day, it was very common to have like Republicans who identified as more liberal or Democrats who identified as more conservative and that their political parties didn't tell you much about all the other ways they identified as people. It wasn't automatically predictable if you found out someone was a Democrat or a Republican, you weren't able to predict probably what their religion was. Or if you could identify someone's racial identity by looking at them, that didn't necessarily mean that you could identify their partisanship. And these things that weren't really very well predictive of each other 50, 60 years ago, now it's a lot easier to predict. So if you know someone's race and religion, you can guess pretty well at what their partisanship is and you're going to be right a lot of the time. It's not always 100% predictive, but the correlations just have become a lot stronger between these kind of cultural and social identities and the party that we identify with. So you said that there's this much tighter link between these other identities we have and our partisanship, like our racial identities, right? So how did the emergence of partisan mega identities change how we think about issues and policies related to race? Like how did we get here? Yeah, so there's a concept that the political scientist Michael Tesler calls racial spillover effects. And what that means is like there were policies that before, let's say Obama, right, you could know somebody's position on health care and that wouldn't actually give you a lot of information about their racial attitudes. Right, knowing someone's positions on health care, they could have a variety of different racial attitudes. After the Obama administration, health care attitudes and racial attitudes are very tightly connected. So what happens is that when our politics becomes more racialized, the things that we used to think of as not racial have become racial. So it's easier to guess people's preferences about things that technically are really not about race at all. As long as we know what they think about racial equality, we can guess a whole bunch of different policy positions. So just to be, you're saying that like if you know how someone feels about the Affordable Care Act, you can probably tell, like, you could tell how they feel about any number of issues. Like you probably tell about how they feel about like policing or something like that. Right, and that was not the case before the Obama administration. So basically like if you go to, you know, 2005, what a person thought about health care and public health care was not a good indicator for you of what they thought about policing. But after the Obama administration, those two things became connected in people's minds. So it became easier for us to guess one from the other. And so the spillover is basically saying like there was a time when health care, we didn't think of health care and racialized terms, but after Obama was a major proponent of the Affordable Care Act, then we applied our racial attitudes to how we evaluated health care policy. This might sound like a stupid question, but is that because Obama was black? Yeah, yeah, it's a huge part of it. And one thing that Michael Tesla actually looks a lot at is how essentially just having Obama as the president, regardless of what he did and regardless of the positions that he had or even whether or not he talked about race at all, which he did less than a lot of our white presidents, the fact of him being a black man in the White House was itself an indicator for a lot of people that they could apply their ideas about race to what they wanted government to do in a way that they hadn't necessarily before, or that people maybe who were not paying a lot of attention to politics in the past, the signal of what Obama looked like was such a simple and easy to read signal that it allowed them to connect their racial attitudes to a bunch of other political attitudes that they hadn't really connected before. Okay, but the sorting, like the partisan sorting along racial lines that we see in American politics, that sort of happened decades before Obama, right? So that basically, the process of racial sorting started in the 1960s after the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, after which white Southern Democrats were very, very unhappy about that civil rights legislation. Those Democrats, though, hated the idea of being Republicans. They would never, ever identify as Republican because for them, the Republicans were the aggressors in the Civil War. So for them, they couldn't imagine themselves even knowing someone who identified as Republican. But so what ended up happening is that then it took a full generation for them to move away from the Democratic Party because there was nowhere else for them to go. And ultimately, their children were able to identify as Republicans because they didn't grow up with the same kind of feeling about the Republican Party that their parents had grown up with. So it took a whole generation, which is decades. And then at the same time, the 1960s and 70s, we also had women's rights movement and we had a lot of other sort of like movements towards social progress across multiple dimensions that weren't just racial, but also even religious, right? We had evangelicals becoming much more engaged in politics of the 1970s and 1980s, and especially in the 90s. And so all of this period was people kind of looking at politics through new lenses and thinking about like, well, if I am this identity, then which party do I belong in? Because in the 1950s, for example, those things were not very clear to people. It wasn't clear based on your social identities, which party you should be in. We're somewhat of this on our team the other day, but in the 60s, even in the 70s, you had people like George Romney, Romney's dad was the governor of Michigan, who was the person behind the Fair Housing Act. He was one of the people who was saying, like, our housing system is racist and we need to do something about it on a national level. He was a Republican, right? Like, they were liberal Republicans at the time. Right. And we had Strom Thurman, right? You're saying it's Strom Thurman, right. And this is like one of the craziest things is that in 1950, the American Political Science Association put out a letter to the country saying we need our parties to be more different from each other. They're too similar. They're not giving the people a clear choice. And so if we don't give people clear options to choose between them, then this isn't even really a very good democracy because there's nothing to choose from. And so they were actually advocating more polarization in 1950 because they thought that the parties were too similar. Be careful what you ask for political scientists. I know, I know. And it's funny also because the sort of constellation of things that we think of like these are Democratic values or these are Republican values are not even things that like neatly align. Like, there's no reason that if you're a white evangelical that you also need to be like a dog get supporter of the free market, you know what I mean? Or like of just like unregulated capitalism. Those things don't necessarily need to go hand in hand, you know, but they do. No. Well, they do because we're packaging them so well. And the other thing is that like the way that our politicians talk to us is more of a kind of full narrative storytelling way of explaining things. And so when they tell us that this is what we believe that we as an our party, we believe this, then people kind of go along with it. And in fact, there's been political science experiments where people have kind of reversed the positions of the parties and presented them to people. And they just randomly say this is either the Democrats position or the Republicans position. People always choose the policy that is associated with their party, even if they would have disagreed with that policy. If you just do it without any party labels at all. That's banana. That is bananas. Wow. And actually the funny thing is in that experiment, you ask them what influence did your party's position have on your opinion about this policy. And everybody says no. I was not influenced at all by my party. And then we say, do you think other people are influenced by their party? And they say, yeah, definitely. Most people are definitely influenced by their party's position, but I'm not. I'm not me. Yeah. So wait, so it sounds like you're saying that the mega identity is this thing that is working in people's like self concepts, even if they don't understand the way that they themselves have this mega identity. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the insidious things about, you know, political psychology is that we're all actually influenced by the same things. I mean, we're all people. And every single one of us thinks that we are, you know, completely independent, logical, rational thinkers. But every human is influenced by group cues, right? It is really important for us to feel like we are connected to our groups and we will actually change our positions to feel connection with our groups rather than not change our positions and feel in conflict with our groups because we really need that association. That is fascinating. I mean, to sort of bring us back to like our partisan moment, right? Yeah. Essentially, you have Republicans viewing beating Democrats as like the most important thing. And Democrats beating Republicans feeling like that's the most important thing. It's like the primary goal for people who have strong partisan identifications. And that's true even when they have shared mutual interests and they see, I guess, differences between sort of policy preferences as greater than they actually are because of this like identity they have, right? Even when the parties are not far apart on things, people see them as more dramatically, more just have greater disparities between the positions of the parties. Right. We overestimate the extent to which people in the other party are extreme in their policy preferences. We overestimate the extent to which people in the other party are socially different from us. So people assume that the Democratic Party is like 60% black. And it's like the truth is that it's like 25%. Republicans assume that about Democrats. Democrats assume that Republicans are like 60% wealthy people making over $250,000 a year. And it's actually 2%. And so we create these social categories of people in the other party that are over-representing groups that we think we dislike. And also over-representing the extent to which those groups actually are making up those parties. And we think that most people in the other party are extreme on policies that we care a lot about. Like, I mean, really important policies like abortion or gun control or policing. Like we assume that people in the other party disagree with us more than they do. And in fact, you know, in government, yes, there is extreme polarization in terms of our elected officials. But the vast majority of Americans are actually not very extreme in most of their policy preferences. There are things that we agree on massively that we think of as intractable problems. Gun control and abortion are two of those things where there's massive agreement across the country on at least some elements of the types of policies we should have. And our elected officials are just not interested in any of the things that we can all agree on that we could compromise on. Because it's not in their interest to remind us to compromise with each other, right? They want us to stay on our sides. They want us to assume the worst about people on the other side. So it sounds like, tell me if this is the wrong way to think about this, but it sounds like the racial resentments of the 1960s created a new sort of partisan reality, right? But now it sounds like what you're saying is like, or like current partisanship is supercharging racial resentments or people's racialized ideas about each other? I think it's more like before this process of sorting happened, there were plenty of people who were super racist, right? But they weren't necessarily going into the voting booth and making their decision in the voting booth based on that attitude. Because the divides in the 1950s, especially the racial divides in the 1950s were within the parties, right? There were white supremacists in both the Democratic and the Republican Party, and they were fighting with their fellow partisans about racial issues. They weren't fighting Democrats versus Republicans until that civil rights legislation happened, and then it became clear that the Democratic Party was the party of civil rights. And ironically, right, it actually is a good development politically in the sense that when both parties are internally divided on something, we make zero progress on it. Like we can't make progress if each party is within itself divided. If one party takes a position, then there's a potential in a two-party system, there's a potential that actually we can make some real progress here because there's a whole political party devoted to it. It's more political power, and in fact, when the Democratic Party really took on the mantle of civil rights, it was more political power than the civil rights movement had had in a very long time forever. I mean, except for going back to the Civil War, there hadn't really been, you know, in a two-party system, one whole political party saying like, we're going to make this happen, and we're going to have progress. And the other thing that happened is it wasn't just racial, right? It was also about gender rights. It was also about gender identity, and we forget, I think, how fast all of this has happened. We have human lifespan, so like we don't really think historically, but like in terms of like historical view, the rapidity with which we've made actual progress in terms of racial equality, gender equality. Same-sex marriage is only 10 years old in the United States. You know, my own mother couldn't get a credit card without her husband's permission until she was 28 years old. The protests of the summer of 2020 were the biggest and most racially diverse protests on behalf of civil rights we've ever seen. There was certainly a backlash to that. But the amount of progress that we've seen has been remarkable. And what we're living through, I think, is really the two parties taking opposite sides on whether we want to keep making this type of social progress, or whether we want to go back in time to a period when the traditional social hierarchy was sort of white Christian straight men at the top of the default top of the hierarchy, you know, was the way that everything kind of was structured and everyone knew what to expect and quote-unquote knew their place. And that has become the divide between the parties, and so all these identities are roped in with that political argument that we're having. Like, I don't want to make it sound like the fact that the Democratic Party has kind of taken this one position and the Republican Party has taken the other is necessarily all bad, right? It has allowed a lot of progress to occur. That is really fascinating. I mean, okay, so we're coalescing around certain ideas around race, but it wasn't that long ago that like, even though anti-Muslim sentiment has been sort of like bubbling around, and like in the ether of American political discourse since like 9-11 at least, right? It was also the case that like politicians like, you know, George W. Bush, who was a Republican, would say like Muslim Americans are, you know, validly and legitimate Americans, and like we, you know, they're hardworking people of faith, and like there were still political costs for Republicans to be, or anybody, political officials to be seen as like xenophobic or racist. And we fast forward today, we have the Sharia-free America caucus, and there's no real internal rebuke among Republicans. And so this link between racial attitudes and party, at these two points, is like becoming sort of totalizing, right? Yeah, the norms really have changed. You know, it's easy to think of American history as this like constant progress forward, but actually we've gone backwards a lot since even the early 2000s in terms of our ideas about what's appropriate to say and what's not as an elected official. I would say that there's a couple of things that I would use to explain this anti-Sharia caucus. The first is that I'm not sure that they even know what Sharia means, right? It's clearly like a signaling tool for just disliking people who are a different religion and have brown skin, most likely. Sharia is like a shorthand. It's like, Sharia is like woke or DEI or one of those things, like carrying all this weight like in the rear. Right. It's a way to say I don't like this group of people without saying I don't like this group of people. Right. So there is still some norm there, right? But in fact, one thing that we've actually been seeing is that some elected officials have been really being explicitly anti-Muslim. But one thing that we have seen is that the makeup of the Republican Party has also shifted. And the people who kind of came in with the wave of Tea Party Republicans in 2010, they really replaced a lot of older Republicans who didn't behave this way. So it wasn't that elected Republicans changed the way they behave. It's that the people who used to behave in a certain way were replaced by people who were much more willing to behave in ways that were openly either discriminatory or just sort of attention-getting. And in the 1980s, we would have considered improper political behavior for an elected official or someone in Congress. 1994, Newt Gingrich helped this a lot because he put out a memo called the GOPAC memo where he taught the new freshman who had come into Congress in 1994, which was the first class that had a Republican majority in the House for 40 years. Right. And he taught them how to speak the way he spoke. So the memo was called how to speak like Newt. And this included calling Democrats names like, you know, like evil, cancer, vile. And then when they talked about Republicans, they should say family and home. And that was almost a permission slip to teach elected officials that you can use insults. You can use bad words to talk about your political opponents. That hadn't really been considered professional behavior before that. And the Tea Party class, the Freedom Caucus came in and kind of accelerated all of that. And in fact, in my own research, I've actually found that in the electorate, Trump sort of finished this process by attracting people to vote for Republicans. So this is just regular voters who, before Trump was around, were not really identified with either party. But one thing they had in common was that they really just didn't like a bunch of traditionally marginalized groups, including black Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and LGBT people. And the people who didn't like those groups in 2011, before Trump was a major political figure, those people became Trump fans when Trump showed up on the scene. And he brought them into the party in a way that actually made them a larger portion of the electoral base of the Republican Party. Whereas there's always been this part of the Republican electorate that was sort of intolerant and fringy. But the sort of leadership of the party had always thought, like, well, we can keep this under wraps. Like this is just like the weird cousin that we kind of need to have invite to Thanksgiving, but like we don't need to do everything they want to do. Trump invited enough people who shared those views into the Republican Party that they became the majority, particularly in primary elections for Republicans. And so that supercharged the progress of electing more and more people who were motivated by this type of animosity and who were really willing to say these things out. To say these things out loud that previous elected officials weren't willing to say. Huh. I'm curious about the other side of this now, which is like, what is the emergence of mega identity mean for the millions of people who don't belong to either party? Now, I'm thinking of people who are unaligned, but who do have ideological priorities. So like, what does this mega identity stuff mean for them when they feel like it's because I'm a lefty or I'm a really progressive person that I can't vote for Democrats because they don't take up any of the causes that I care about. Yes. So there's a couple of things. One is that the people who call themselves independence, the vast majority of them, they tend to behave like partisans. Like they'll vote the same way in every election, but they don't want to be associated with one of the two parties for a number of different reasons. And that could be individual psychological reasons. But it could also be that they don't share the same identities that are sort of like the main identities that the party holds. So, now this is also easier for Republicans because for Republicans, the set of identities is like white, Christian, rural, male. Those are the sort of traditionally high status identities are the Republican Party's social identities. And Democrats end up being sort of everyone else. So that's less of a cohesive set of groups. But one thing I found in a study that I did with my colleague, Julie Ronsky, is that Republicans who are not members of the sort of that set of very clear Republican identities, they feel less attached to the Republican Party. So if they're not Christian or not rural or not really conservative or not white, people who are missing one of those key Republican identities tend to be less strongly attached to the Republican Party. So these, if you have sort of a conflicting identity or a cross cutting identity, it can be kind of a a a weakener of your partisanship. And the same is also happening on the left. If you're an evangelical Democrat, for example, you can be a slightly less strong, strongly identified Democrat because you're a member of a group that tends to be associated with the other party. And so if you have one or more cross cutting identities, so identities that are not consistent with your party, then often that is what leads you to not identify as a partisan in that party. Because you're like, well, I'm not really one of them because I'm, you know, I'm different from them in this one important way. But I will say that like the other part of your question is sort of like what's happening with the younger people. And I do think a lot of these norms are becoming weaker with with young people right now that this sort of community norm around who you're supposed to vote for is weakening, partially because partisanship is actually weakening for young people because for a lot of young people, I mean college students right now don't remember a time before Trump. So for them, politics is is the Trump era politics. And for those of us who do remember a time before Trump, right, we think of this as like the worst politics. It's mean, it's full of it's full of insults and bad behavior and and law breaking and rule breaking and norm breaking. And for young people, this is just politics for them. This is what it is. Yeah, it's just regular. It just really turns them off. They're kind of saying like, I don't actually I don't actually want to be part of any of this. Like, I don't trust you people to be doing to be doing things responsibly right now. So OK, so do you think that this this weakening sense of partisanship among younger folks, could that arrest this like partisanship as identity doom spiral that we seem to be in? I don't know. I mean, maybe. Or I'm just like this is that's the that's the I guess it's a hope. I don't know. We don't know what happens when people move away from believing in the political system. I mean, one thing that we do know is that like polarization can decline if people move away from the political system, but also moving away from the political system is really rejecting democracy in a lot of ways. And that's usually where we see violence emerge is when people reject the political process, they turn to extra political means. Any other avenues to get things done or to sort of advance their political goals? Right. And in essence, democracy exists to manage conflict in a peaceful way and to allow a transfer of power to occur in a peaceful way. It's the only way that we've discovered that can do that. If what our elected officials are doing is alienating young people from the process itself of politics, then that does risk having a much more chaotic, potentially violent method of engaging politically. But for young people, the concern is that by unmooring them from a political system and by undermining their trust in institutions and the way that we've found democracy to work in the past, it may open them up to a type of politics that is not democratic and is more based on force and disruption than kind of compromise and legislation. That's not scary at all. I mean, the legislation is not working. I understand it, right? It's easy to understand. But democracy is not the best. No, democracy is the worst system of government except for all the other ones. Exactly. Right, right, right. Who said that? I feel like it's like Churchill or something. It might have been Winston Churchill. Lillianna Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity. Thank you, Dr. Mason. Appreciate you. Thanks so much for having me. And y'all, that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPRCodeswitch. That's all one word. If email is more your thing, ours is Codeswitch.org. And of course, subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app, or you know, wherever it is, you get your podcast. You can also subscribe to the Codeswitch newsletter by going to npr.org slash Codeswitch newsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and public media and you get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Codeswitch. This episode was produced by Jess Kong. It was edited by Dalian Martata. And we've been remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Codeswitch Massive. That's Christina Kala. That's Xavier Lopez. That's Lea Danella. And that's Jelanda Sanguini. As for me, I'm Gene Dunbee. I'm B.A. Parker. Be easy, y'all. Hydrate. Thanks for watching.