"Why do you have to make everything political?"
By Darik de Jong
Polarization has been the subject of much debate over the last few years, particularly in the United States. Is it increasing? Why? Who is to blame? First, polarization is not confined to the United States. However, what sets our system apart is the presence of a political duopoly, dominated by the Democratic and Republican parties, which turns otherwise non-political issues into political battlegrounds.
When a new political issue arises under our current system, each party chooses a position which aligns with their constituents and their conscience. That’s the idea, anyway. Voters only have two realistic options to choose from: red or blue. Therefore, both parties are incentivized to take up diametrically opposed positions so that they maximize the contrast between them and the only serious opposition. All complex issues boil down to strict binary choices: Pro-life vs Pro-choice, more taxes or less taxes, welfare or bootstraps, etc. In short, everyone must pick a side. Those citizens who have the time and resources to come up with a nuanced opinion have no political outlet and are often left to decide between the “lesser of two evils.”
Now imagine for a moment there were a handful of political parties instead of just two. As in the previous case, the parties will consult their constituents and conscience to determine what is the most politically advantageous position to take. Since there are several different options to choose from, parties are forced to introduce more nuance in order to stand out. Standing apart from the competition is a matter of survival for political parties. As a result, voters now have five or six options instead of two. The number of options—five or 10—is unimportant. What’s important is that having only two options enables us to map out issues onto a strict binary.
Here’s how this duopoly plays out in the real world. Take the “politicization” of masks for example. Since there were only two options politically—Democrats Pro and Republicans Anti—any action or inaction can be easily tied to political affiliation. There are two parties: Democrat and Republican. There are two options: wear a mask or not. When people saw others walking around not wearing masks you could predict with a large degree of certainty what their political affiliation was. This ability to predict political affiliation based on action or inaction feeds into itself: it’s cyclical. People became aware of the message their decisions communicated to others on the street. The simple choice to wear a mask, or not, became a signal about one’s political affiliation. Independents and moderates living in highly populated urban areas, which tend to lean to the left, were incentivized to wear masks even if they didn’t particularly agree with the policy to avoid being perceived as a Republican. The reverse was true in rural areas. This political signaling is only possible under a system with two contrasting political parties.
Take the same issue in a country with a handful of political parties and such correlations are much weaker. If someone chooses not to wear a mask, they’re more likely to have conservative values, but it cannot be easily determined which political party they may be a part of. Therefore, the political signaling incentive is much weaker. People don’t need to worry as much about what their actions communicate to others about their political affiliation. And, ultimately, people are less incentivized to identify themselves and others with a particular party. Once a person’s political affiliation is tied to their identity it is difficult hard to avoid polarization.
The solutions are not simple. This mechanism of polarization goes beyond confronting your own biases and rethinking your assumptions. A good-faith debate is not going to solve this. It will take extensive policy changes to reform the duopoly, which is one of the few things both parties agree is a bad idea. In any case, it helps us understand why everything becomes political so quickly and, in so doing, better informs how we engage with the system overall.