Polarization 1: Modes

Everyone writes about political polarization, but the term itself is rather new.[1] In brief, it refers to a process where “extreme views on some matter of public policy have become more common over time” (McCarty 2019: 9). In Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s terms, a polarized society is one in which political differences near-exclusively appear as antagonisms rather than agonisms. David Plotke’s formulation is also helpful: he likens polarization to distance in a room. A highly polarized room is one in which all occupants are huddled in corners (distance and extremism), yell at each other (intensity), and refuse to join with other corners (anti-integration) (Plotke 2024: 8). It’s the worst party you’ve ever been to.

We all know these ‘extremes’. Think, for example of the viciousness of discussions over gun control and abortion in the U.S., or the European refugee crisis and the Israel-Palestine conflict internationally. Think too of the difference between recent presidential debates in the U.S.. In 2008, Republican nominee John McCain could reasonably defend his opponent, Barack Obama, against nativist attacks: “He’s a decent family man”, McCain insisted, “that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues”.[2] Eight years later, Republican nominee Donald Trump routinely encouraged his followers to chant “Lock her up!”, explicitly participating in a for a call for the arrest of his opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.[3] The former case outlines a basic, shared commitment to ideals of liberal democracy, while the later demonstrates a new state of extreme political polarization. A family man versus a criminal.

The literature on political polarization is unbelievably large. Its most classic articulation comes from Giovanni Sartori’s (1966, 1976) seminal reflections on political parties. This is not the time for a thorough literature review.

Much of the writing on the topic, however, is quite new: more journal articles on the topic were published in the five years between 2018 and 2023 than in the forty-two years between 1975 and 2017 (Schedler 2023: 336). Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne’s 2020 study American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective is one such recent engagement with the topic. Their study – a comparative analysis of ‘affective polarization scores’ derived from over eighty national election surveys between 1996 and 2017 – broadly aims to situate American polarization debates in an international context through a comparison of quantitative data. Their definitions are the most important thing for us here. Gidron et al. define ‘affective polarization’ as “how strongly the party identifiers in the public prefer their own party to its opponent(s)”, based especially on “citizens’ feeling and emotional responses” (Gidron et a. 2020: 3). The authors further split ‘affective polarization’ into two components: “dislike” of other parties and “like” of one’s own party (Gidron et a. 2020: 3). Positively quoting Levitsky and Ziblatt’s hugely famous How Democracies Die, Gidron et al. contend that “the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division” (3). Their arguments are persuasive!

Their study reveals a problem with the polarization literature: they, like so many others, underexplain the specific content of polarization. We hear endlessly about disagreement: a ‘check’ against an ‘X’, a thumbs up against a thumbs down, a yes or a no.[4] We can rightly say that “most scholars hold an intuitive notion of polarization as a bimodal distribution of observations” (Fiorina & Abrams 2008: 566). This obscures, however, the notion that extreme disagreements could be incomparable. Plotke’s ‘room’ analogy repeats this error: he fails to specify different kinds of distance (ex. horizontal versus vertical) or different kinds of separation (ex. screaming versus humiliating jokes). The Gidron et al. piece provides a particularly frustrating solution to this problem with their ‘affective polarization score’ (Gidron et al. 2020: 18).

This formulation relies on data from a ‘feeling thermometer scale’, a single-axis evaluation of the ‘levels’ or ‘intensity’ of affective polarization across societies (Gidron et al. 2020: 7). The result is an awkward formulation of ‘hot’ feelings against ‘cold’ feelings.[5] I of course understand that this decision has massive utility in integrating previous, larger surveys with similar poll designs, and it enables a relatively clean cross-country comparison. But this is not how polarization works! We do not all disagree in identical ways! The authors begin to work through this problem in their differentiation between so-called cultural debates (“who we are”) and economic disputes (“who gets what”) (Gidron et al. 2020: 70). They thus bump up against the non-equivalence of recognitive and redistributive questions (see Fraser). But they stop too short.

Even more typical is Avinash Dixit and Jörgen Weibull’s (2007) move. The economists begin with an intuited reading of the state of political polarization – a gut feeling about debates over Thatcherism and Vietnam in the 1970’s – and then immediately move to questions of explanation and measurement. They declare, with very little justification, that they “witness political polarization in many parts of the world” (7351). Interpretive depth is sacrificed for data measurement.  

We need a better understanding of what polarization is. I propose that polarizing feelings pull us in different directions, create different questions, and contain different understanding of the political subject. They should, I want to argue, be analytically differentiated. This is not an entirely new argument. Some scholars have insisted that “polarization is multidimensional in character” (DiMaggio et. al. 1996: 693). Others have called for distinctions between “attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors” (Prior 2013: 104). Still others have insisted on five distinct characteristics of polarization: social characteristics, fundamental values, political positions, voting behavior, and residences (Fiorina & Abrams 2008: 567-577). These approaches all have the right emphasis on differentiation, but they nevertheless maintain a singular, hegemonic idea of ‘polarization’ that these differences can be collapsed into. I want to go further.

I will here consider the irreducible differences between four modes of affective polarization in the American context: 1A) memory, 1B) sexuality, 1C) anger, and 1D) economics.

1A) Many Trump supporters (and analysts of the Trump phenomenon) point to the importance of memory and nostalgia in Trump’s appeal. Simply put, Trump authorizes a specifically nativist mode of nostalgia in which White Americans are encouraged to fantasize about a return to the past. This involves a conceptualization of politics in which the enemy disappears: the post-Civil Rights Black American does not exist, there is no Welfare Queen, there is no immigration crisis, etc. Conversely, much of the post-Civil Rights leftist imaginary relies on a weakly messianic imagination of a future free of racial and sexual discrimination. The most popular versions of this argument come, of course, from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Barack Obama’s ‘Change’ campaign, and Kendrick Lamar’s hit-song ‘Alright’. This imaginary too transforms politics: society is radically unlike its past, successfully overcoming a traumatic history of anti-Black and anti-indigenous politics.[6]

1B) Separately, many analysts insist that part of Trump’s appeal lies in his authorization of masculine sexual enjoyment without prohibition (i.e. “I assault women, and you can too”). This is frequently paired with a repressed enjoyment of homosexual conviviality (esp. expressions of love at rallies). This is a mode of polarization in which the absolutely private (sexuality) is paired with the absolutely public (politics). Moreover, it is a mode of politics wherein the object of fantasy is stretched across friend, self, and enemy. The subject one is polarized against is murky. We need only to think of Simone De Beauvoir’s seminal reflections on the woman’s unique position of oppression and romantic entanglement with her oppressor in The Second Sex, or Sigmund Freud’s transformative power of sexual relations via the interplay of ‘desire’ and ‘identification’. Sexuality is complicated!

1C) Consider too polarization like anger. Perhaps closest to sexuality, anger imagines a mode of politics premised on the elimination of the other. This involves a whole slew of violent fantasies and final climaxes (ex. urges to ‘let it all out’ on J6). Most importantly, it involves the transformation of political contestation into battle. This is an exchange, but it is a specifically bodily one. This contains, following Schmitt’s description of war, a kind of polarization that promises to be the last polarization, an (imagined) fight that “is then considered to constitute the last war of humanity” wherein the ‘enemy’ becomes a “monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed” (Schmitt 2007 [1932]: 36). While typical accounts of polarization rely on a vast and unbridgeable distance between two poles, my account of polarizing anger destroys one pole.

1D) Finally, consider economic polarization. This is the most distinct. Beyond the complexities of emotion, economic polarization appears relatively simple: ‘you are my enemy because you steal from me’. We can here imagine an orthodox Marxist interpretation as an unbridgeable opposition between the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. No fantasies, no urges, no desires, just historical materialism. To go back to Plotke’s model, the room becomes a hallway.  

Simply put, I am trying to say that we cannot reduce the feelings of oppositions based on such divergent experiences as memory, sexuality, anger, and economics to one scale.[7]

Works Cited

DiMaggio et. al. 1996: 693

Dixit, Avinash K. and Jörgen W. Weibull. 2007. “Political Polarization”. PNAS. 104(18): 7351-7356.

Fiorina, Morris P. and Samuel J. Abrams. 2008. “Political Polarization in the American Public”. Annual Review of Political Science. 11(1): 563-588.

Gidron, Noam, James Adams, and Will Horne. 2020. American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McCarty, Nolan. 2019. Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press.

Plotke, David. 2024. “Polarization in Contemporary American Politics”. Lecture Notes, Unpublished.

Prior, Markus. 2013. “Media and Political Polarization”. Annual Review of Political Science. 16(1): 101-127.

Schedler, Andreas. 2023. “Rethinking Political Polarization”. Political Science Quarterly. 138 (3): 335-360.

Schmitt, Carl. 2007 [1932]. The Concept of the Political. London: University of Chicago Press.

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[1] The etymology of ‘polarization’ is fascinating. The modern term was coined in 1811 by a French physicist to refer the oscillation of waves. It derives the 1550’s modern Latin polar, referring to the north and south poles of the Earth. But the term lacks a Greek root! Many of our most cherished political concepts can be traced back to the Greeks: demos, agora, polis, and the like. They possess – if you believe in it – something of the wisdom of the Greeks, a deep and true insight into the very nature of politics. ‘Polarization’, on the other hand, provides a new approach, coming to us instead from the natural sciences. Is this the best way to understand politics?

[2] McCain usage of the term “fundamental” may conflict with my reading.

[3] Another eight years later, those very same center-Left Democrats have taken to calling for Trump’s imprisonment: “Lock him up!”. This is a typical example of a strategic co-option of political slogans. More interesting, however, is the demonstration of a mutual agreement that threats of imprisonment are the proper terrain of politics.

[4] The two-party system in the U.S. recreates this error, flattening substantively different political aims into ‘Republican’ versus ‘Democrat’. In some sense, we’ve fallen into Marx’s classic critique of religion: humans created religions and then subjugated themselves to those same systems as followers, forgetting their creative (and thus masterful) role in world history. Similarly, Americans possessed wildly creative political imaginaries (see Arendt) and then created bicameral political systems that reduced those imaginations to a binary. We have forgotten this original creative moment, misunderstanding that binary as the true depth of our political imagination.

[5] We should recall here one of the most insightful formulations of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ feelings in the history of social theory: Max Weber’s comparison of the ‘hot’ intensity of charismatic authority against the ‘cold’ calculation of bureaucratic rational-legal authority. This conflict is, as we all remember, finally worked out in Weber’s “Politics as Vocation”, wherein Germany faces not a “summer’s front”, but a “polar night of icy darkness”.

[6] Theorists of the ‘afropessimist’ tradition and particularly pessimistic scholars in the post-colonial tradition hold an analogous view: the West is irrevocably committed to violence against Black persons and/or Indigenous persons. This follows the same rule as above.

[7] Social theorists of the late 19^th and early 20^th century help us see this. Breaking from the chokehold of Marxist economics, both Max Weber and Antonino Gramsci saw the urgent need to theorize the dual power of culture and economics in political life. For Weber, persons generate power in social contexts from two distinct processes: finance (class) and culture (status). For Gramsci, different classes possessed conflicting ideologies, religions, and relationships, all requiring the work of an intellectual to morph differences into hegemonic blocs. Weber and Gramsci show us that politics happens on different levels at the same time.