We are surrounded by “downright evil.”

So say more than 40 percent of Americans – and they’re referring to their fellow Americans who happen to belong to a different political party.

A recent academic paper by political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, presented at the National Capital Area Political Science Association conference in January, concludes that the extreme partisanship of recent decades has made millions of Americans intellectually insular and emotionally numb. As a result, these hyper-partisans – and, to be clear, all of this goes for members of both major parties – feel little or no sympathy “in response to deaths and injuries of political opponents.” Some even show “explicit support for partisan violence.”

A key reason for this “moral disengagement” is that partisanship in the cable-TV and social-media age has proven exceptionally good at dehumanizing one’s ideological opponents. Kalmoe and Mason’s unpublished paper, which digs into two 2017-2018 “nationally representative surveys,” found that about one in five Americans believe that those on the other side of the partisan divide “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”

Could the extreme partisanship in this country really have reached such an awful point?

Consider the following questions/statements posed in a 2017 national survey, followed by a graph from the academic paper that shows the percentage of respondents who agree – or, in the words of the paper’s authors, “who place themselves on the ‘morally disengaged’ end of the spectrum.”

MD1: Would you say [opposing party] are a serious threat to the United States and its people, or wouldn’t you go that far?

MD2: Only [own party] want to improve our country.

MD3: [Opposing party] are not just worse for politics – they are downright evil.

MD4: If [own party] break a few rules to oppose [opposing party], it’s because they need to do it for the sake of the country.

MD5: If [opposing party] are going to behave badly, they should be treated like animals.

MD6: [Opposing party] deserve any mistreatment they get from [own party].

MD7: [Opposing party] have their heart in the right place but just come to different conclusions about what is best.

MD8: [Own party] are not just better for politics – they are morally right.

MD9: Many [opposing party] lack the traits to be considered fully human – they behave like animals.

MD10: Breaking a few rules to help [own party] win does no lasting harm.

From “Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates & Electoral Contingencies,” by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason.

Kalmoe, in an email, says the results aren’t actually as bad as they may seem, noting the difference between ordinary partisanship and extreme partisanship. “Our immediate goal with the project is to encourage political scientists to recognize the fuller depth of U.S. partisan animosities,” he says. “We are partly reassured by our results that show the breadth of these extreme attitudes is limited to a small portion of partisans, even as we worry about any endorsement of these views. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans reject these extremes. That's our main take-away with what we have so far.”

That small portion of hyper-partisans, however, is worth worrying about. Kalmoe and Mason’s work indicates that the nature of recent extreme partisanship provides people with the “psychological distancing” that allows them to rationalize physical violence and discrimination against others. The political scientists write that it often leads to schadenfreude – “deriving pleasure from the unfortunate experiences of others.”

The academics note that the views showcased in the surveys “represent a level of extreme hostility among millions of American partisans today that has not [previously] been documented in modern American politics.”

You might think that the best antidote to such partisan hostility would be winning elections. The research actually suggests the opposite.

“[E]xperimental evidence,” the paper reports, “shows inducing expectations of electoral victory give strong partisans more confidence to endorse violence against their partisan opponents.”

Read Kalmoe and Mason’s study, “Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates & Electoral Contingencies.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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