The Post's weak explanations for political polarization in America

The cause isn't "evolution," "clustering", or Donald Trump. It's the aggressive American left.

Last week, in a Washington Post op-ed, Jason Willick demonstrated with data that Democrats are driving polarization in America on a range of hot-button issues, most notably immigration. He showed that the Republican position on these matters has remained essentially constant, while the Democrat position has moved considerably leftward. I wrote about Willick’s take here.

A few days later, the Post’s Joel Achenbach wrote a piece purporting to explain political polarization in America. His article wasn’t an op-ed. It appeared in the news section.

As we will see below, Achenbach threw almost everything but the kitchen sink into his explanation. About the only possible cause of polarization he didn’t consider was the one Willick documented — the left’s aggressive quest to transform America.

Now, Achenbach was under no obligation to agree with Willick’s diagnosis. Nor is he obligated to read Post op-eds by conservatives.

Nonetheless, Willick’s explanation for polarization is straightforward enough that Achenbach should at least have mentioned it, even if only to dispute its plausibility. But he didn’t.

Let’s look at the factors Achenbach cited instead. He relied, first of all, on “science.” It seems that evolution is to blame:

The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.

“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred, which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”

This is just as true on today’s political stage. There are two major parties, and their contests are viewed as zero-sum outcomes. Win or lose. The presidency is the ultimate example: There are no consolation prizes for the loser. . . .

People are instinctively prone to group identification.

“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it,” Mason said.

Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,” Christakis writes.

What’s most striking is that in the process of defining who is in and who is out of a group, enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.

Interesting as these observations are, they cannot explain the heightened polarization of America’s politics. People were just as “instinctively prone to group identification” a few decades ago as they are now. Yet the premise of Achenbach’s article is that we’ve become significantly more polarized since then.

Next, Achenbach points out that political power at the highest levels of government is a “scarce resource in this country” and that we have no parliamentary system in which multiple parties form governing coalitions. True. But this has long been the case so, again, it cannot explain why we’ve become so much more polarized lately.

Achenbach also cites “partisan clustering.” He’s referring to the fact that these days, people are “moving to neighborhoods where residents are likely to look like them and think like them.” Not only that, they are marrying people who think like them. According to a study Achenbach cites, in 1965, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent.

Interesting, once again. But partisan clustering seems more like the product of polarization than its cause.

Inevitably, Achenbach adds Donald Trump to the list of culprits. Trump, though, seems like another symptom of polarization, rather than a cause. His rise results from (1) the left’s push to transform America radically, (2) its marginalization and demonization of the “deplorables” who stand in its way, and (3) the perceived inability of the Republican establishment to fight back against (1) and (2).

I don’t deny that Donald Trump has exacerbated political polarization. People I know would have fewer ex-friends if Trump had never entered politics. But he is not the cause of the polarization.

Finally, there’s what Achenbach calls “the fragmentation of the media,” which “has made it easier to gather information in an echo chamber.” I agree that this is a contributing factor to our polarization. But absent the growth of the ideological divide resulting from the quest to push America leftward, people would be less inclined to “gather information in an echo chamber.”

The mainstream media has lost its monopoly on informing Americans in part because other outlets became technologically viable. But it also lost ground because instead of being neutral, it took the side of those who are trying radically to transform America.

In the end, the explanations Achenbach puts forth are flawed and unpersuasive. It is Willick, not Achenbach, who best explains political polarization in America.