The Gordian Knot of Partisanship

Walter Lippman, America’s famed and first theorist of public opinion in the modern era, would likely be far from surprised by the extent to which the practice of politics has spawned savvy and stubbornly held opinion amongst political elites in recent times. Under the tutelage of such elites millions of attentive partisans receive their ideas about the world. Though Lippman’s highly influential Public Opinion was released nearly 90 years ago, its illumination of the way the public’s view of political actors and events relies on rehearsed stereotypes has in retrospect shown itself to be eerily prescient. As Lippman was wont to point out, for any given person at any given time, their knowledge of the factors contributing to the circumstances they find themselves in is limited. The people, places and objects that populate the social drama in which they play the protagonist can only be partially accounted for. Hence the need for stereotypes, or mental images of social categories that help us to interpret and rationalise, in the words of William James, the “booming, buzzing confusion” of our world. Here’s Lippman:

Modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a trait which marks a well-known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads.

These stereotypes are merely sketches; hollow shells of the things they represent. They nonetheless provide the material for our ideas about causation and motivation in political life: ‘The banker is greedy,’ explaining why (s)he cooked the books; ‘The fireman is heroic,’ which is why (s)he ran into that burning building. These examples come readily to mind because they are established cultural tropes. But other stereotypes are more ambiguous: In the case of the bureaucrat, the business man, the journalist, and the ‘celebrity,’ our mental images, containing normative and positive content with which we assess a person’s integrity and value as a member of society, waver. Depending on broader circumstances, the people involved in these occupations and their attendant environmental pressures can be considered both good and bad. But in either case our conclusions are based on the threadbare evidence provided by highly visible but often unrepresentative examples (the “availability bias” popularised by social psychologists).

The feelings that particular stereotypes engender appear to line up behind partisan political affiliations fairly systematically. Research is providing insights into these patterns and the way in which they manifest. Linda Skitka, Elizabeth Mullen and G. Scott Morgan at the University of Illinois in Chicago conducted a series of studies interrogating the disconnect between espoused political values and the assignment of blame in real-life instances of misconduct on the part of authority figures. Using the empirically established difference in expressed values between conservatives and liberals as a starting point – the former emphasising personal responsibility and the latter social dependence – the researchers went on to explore the degree to which these values obtained in specific cases with self-identified conservatives and liberals as their subjects.

One case pertained to Marines in Iraq who were accused of the murder of twenty-four civilians in the aftermath of a roadside bomb which had killed one Marine. The circumstances regarding the event were presented as being in dispute, with military lawyers arguing that the Marines had simply followed protocol and Iraqis accusing them of outright slaughter. The liberals in the experiment assigned blame for the bloodshed to the Marines, contradicting their general commitment to explain behaviour with reference to situational and environmental pressures. Conservatives, on the other hand, deviated from their usual disposition to blame individuals for their own actions and instead blamed situational forces.

This result was replicated in another case involving the shooting by Chicago police officers of a cougar on the loose in a residential area of the city. Whereas one might expect the liberal subjects to defend a police action which prevented civilian injury, their dedication to animal rights instead took priority, moving them to accuse the officers of disregard for the cougar’s well-being. The researchers submit that the incongruence between expressed values and the application of these values was a matter of dissonance in their evaluations of the characters involved (Marines, police, cougars) and what they represent. For conservatives, values such as self-reliance and self-discipline are imagined to be embodied in entities such as the police and the military, thus prompting them to side with these groups in situations in which they are potentially blameworthy. For liberals, the value of environmental stewardship led them to side against the police and military forces and for the cougar, a symbolic creature in the proffered scenario pitting law and order against animal welfare.

Stereotypes function as intellectual arsenal to be deployed in the face of familiar social events that trigger their utilisation, and allow us to make judgements about situations in which we have neither the time nor the opportunity to consider in their full complexity. As in the example above, our mental images of a vast array of archetypes – police, soldiers, exotic mammals – are filtered through certain ideological dispositions which inform our judgements and anchor our normative commitments. A crucial component of this process is the familiarity of these archetypes-cum-stereotypes, and thus their reliability as resources for immediate mental retrieval when called upon.

As political scientist George Marcus has revealed through his work on political cognition, people respond to familiar political threats through the rehearsed use of arguments in line with their pre-existing political orientations. It is only when scenarios are conceived of as wholly original that novel thinking, free from ideological trappings, is possible. Positing a crucial difference between “threat” (familiar) and “risk” (novel), Marcus writes:

Threat relies on unthinking, even “dogmatic” resolve, to swiftly execute habituated defensive (or offensive) actions. Risk requires that we inhibit our habits, delay action, and open-mindedly deliberate, so as to discover plausible solutions and the likelihood of missteps.

As Marcus stresses, the problem is falling back on the exercise of these ready-made “habituated defensive actions” in moments of confrontation with what appear to be familiar scenarios involving familiar stereotypes. But the truth is that many a “familiar” situation is far more novel than we’d like to think, and doesn’t comport well with our compartmentalised routines of attribution and blame. If such seemingly familiar scenarios are in fact the end result of the complex interplay between actors and circumstances at odds with our stereotypes – hinged as they are to ideologies often immune to the facts – what hope is there of overcoming partisanship?