--:-- Noelle King: Americans are more politically polarized than ever, you may have heard. The only garbage I see floating out there is just supporters. We're so polarized that seven years ago, political scientists at Johns Hopkins started asking Americans questions like, do you think people who vote for the other party are evil or even less than human?
--:-- Noelle King: This is the type of thing that we measure in other countries because it's the type of attitude that exists before if there's a mass violence event. It doesn't always lead to violence, but whenever there is sort of mass violence, you have to have these dehumanizing and vilifying attitudes present beforehand. Because otherwise, it's hard to harm another human being and still feel like a morally good person.
--:-- Noelle King: The results may disappoint, but not shock you. What might shock you, though, is that we're starting to corral areas of our lives that were apolitical into partisan frames. Today Explained presents Polar Opposites.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Noelle King: yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com. I'm Noelle King. A shining example of American hyper-partisanship is playing out in Florida. Next week, voters there are making a choice about their school boards.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: My name is Jeff Solacek, and I am an education reporter at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. So today on the show, we're going to be talking about a change that may be coming to school boards in Florida. Let's talk first about how they currently operate.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: School boards, generally speaking, meet once or twice a month, and they are in charge of things like policies, expelling students, setting all sorts of calendars for when kids go to school, which is important for us right now as we're looking at hurricane makeup days.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And what we find is that you have school board members who like to say that they are doing things for the best interest of children, not for political purposes. And that's where this whole issue of should they be partisan or not be partisan comes up.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Because some people say as soon as you add the party politics to the elections of school board members, what you wind up with is more partisan and less policy. So at the moment, if I'm running for school board in a particular Florida county, does everyone know what my party affiliation is? You're not supposed to.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: You're supposed to be able to talk about what your politics are. So you could say, I really support Governor Ron DeSantis and the things that he stands for. But you're not supposed to say, I am the Republican nominee for school board.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Because right now, in our Constitution, it says that you are to be a nonpartisan elected official. What are Floridians being asked to change this year? The request is to basically do away with the nonpartisan elections and to make it so that everybody runs as a party affiliate.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: So you would have a Republican primary, a Democratic primary, and then those would winnow out the candidates to the representatives from each party. They would go to the general election and face any no party candidates or write-ins or whoever's skipped the primary process because they didn't have a party.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And that would be how it would be selected. How would you describe the stakes of this decision? What's everyone worried about? I think what they're worried about is that people who don't spend the time looking into the actual things that these candidates stand for and are hoping that the R or the D will substitute in for all of the things that they believe in and represent will make a difference.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And that suddenly you'll see, you know, a political school board, one that is based on people who voted based simply on political party as opposed to the issues. In the last few years, school board members will not meet with people that are not of their same party, even if they have kids in their district.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And that is incredibly problematic. And I'm concerned that this will perpetuate that problem and not fix it. And the U.S. is very divided, and we know that politics get ugly, and it seems like a school board is a place where at least we don't have to get as ugly as we have been elsewhere.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: So why do proponents of this measure want the school boards to become political? Really, since we had the pandemic and people got really upset about masks and schools closing and things of that nature, people started to really take sides, and school board meetings did become very political.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Our country is certainly heading towards communism and mask mandates are just the beginning. Mandatory vaccines are next until we have no freedom of choice at all. You had a lot of shouting and screaming going on.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: These are our kids, not yours. Where are yours? And here in Florida, at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, sides formed. And what you had basically was people taking the Republican or the Democrat position and they say, now you should know who, you should be transparent.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: You should know what these people stand for. Like all the other constitutionally elected officers, it would make sense, I believe, that school board would be just the same as county commission and governor and president and all those other type of offices out there that they would be partisan.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And the R and the D are stand for a lot of the things You know what they stand for not just on education issues but on a whole variety of issues How do you want to spend taxpayer dollars What do you think about the philosophy of parents and all the other things
--:-- Jeff Solacek: It supposed to be just a good easy substitute Be clear Tell the truth Why should you not tell the truth of what you stand for and who you are? Where is this push coming from? If we were to say, go right up to the top and say, who wants this? Who wants this?
--:-- Jeff Solacek: The Republican Party in Florida, the lawmakers in the legislature pushed this agenda and they got it onto the ballot. The reason why the kids will be better off under this bill is because you have these school districts that are managing billions of dollars.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: I encourage everybody to vote yes in this resolution because at the end of the day, the voters deserve full transparency when it comes to elections. The Florida Republican Party is the one pushing to make the school boards political.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: The top, the tippy top of the Florida Republican Party would be Governor Ron DeSantis. How does DeSantis fit in on questions of local county school boards? Ron DeSantis has really taken steps that no other governor in Florida really has ever taken before.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Let me tell you something. You start messing with our kids, we've got problems. Back in 2022, he made it clear that his education agenda, which is heavily involved in the parental rights movement, as he likes to call it, is something that he wants to see supported at the local level.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children. In 2022, he endorsed a whole bunch of candidates for school board. I think it was 30.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And he had very good success rate with that. He asked them to sign a form basically saying, I support your agenda. And then he endorsed them, put money behind them. These school board races, they will reverberate in significance.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: I used to not think as much of them. I'll admit, I mean, I would research. He continued to do that in 2024 with a little less success rate. But and he also started attacking incumbent school board members who he didn't like.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: And so the first time he just endorsed people who he did like. This time he came out against people who he didn't like. You have a leftist school board member that was denigrating one of our folks as being a token.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: How disrespectful is that? Is that the kind of person you want on the school board? Someone that's derogatory and is controlled by the union?
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Indicating very clearly that his agenda is one that he wants to see in place. And those sitting school board members who did not support his position would not get his support and actually somebody else would.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: So Floridians do get to vote on whether or not they want this. What is the polling data telling us? Do they want this? The most recent poll that I saw was from the University of North Florida, and it showed about 40% support, which is far short of what it would need to pass in Florida.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: You need to have 60% to pass an amendment. But there was also a 30% undecided in there. And also, it's a poll. And so, who knows? Who knows what's going to happen exactly? But it has a chance, but a small chance, I think.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: So could the fact that Florida residents themselves seem like maybe they don't want this, could that be a sign that Florida is not as politically divided as we thought, or that people are kind of retaining their senses and saying, no, for goodness sake, we have to do this everywhere else.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: Let's not do it in the school too. I think that Florida is pretty divided in a lot of ways, but I think that people have been tired of the division when it comes to the schools. It got really old listening to people scream and yell about things that most people don't want to deal with when it comes to their children and education.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: They want to see their children be educated. And I think we've seen with the election results that we had just in August that a lot of the candidates who Moms for Liberty and groups like that, the 1776 Project and Ron DeSantis backed, did not do well even in heavily Republican counties.
--:-- Jeff Solacek: It's a hard question to answer because there's a lot of politics still out there. And also now we have, you know, hurricane weariness. So it's kind of hard to say what people are thinking anymore.
--:-- Noelle King: That was Jeff Solacek of the Tampa Bay Times. Coming up, a political scientist who gave Americans permission to say our worst. And we did.
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--:-- Noelle King: Support for the show today comes from Life Kit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your life kit? I'm asking.
--:-- Liliana Mason: I am an associate professor of political science at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. And I study political psychology and political polarization and attitudes about political violence.
--:-- Liliana Mason: Two main parties in the United States, Democrats and Republicans. What do you know as a scholar, as a researcher? What do you know about what we think about the other group that is incorrect?
--:-- Liliana Mason: Everything. Oh, we all overestimate the extent to which people in the other party are extreme in terms of the policies that they would prefer. We also overestimate the degree to which the party is made up of groups that we kind of think of as like the stereotypical groups associated with the party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: So Republicans think the Democratic Party is majority black. It's not. Democrats think that the Republican Party is majority wealthy people who make over $250,000 a year. It's actually like 2%. And so we tend to assume that the stereotypical group that we think of when we think of the party, we tend to assume that that makes up the whole party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And we're all wrong. And in fact, political scientists and sociologists have done experiments where we correct people's misperceptions and it actually makes them hate the other party less. because they hadn't realized that the party wasn't made up of maybe people they didn't like or wasn't made up of people who are really extreme in their policy preferences.
--:-- Liliana Mason: We're constantly overestimating the extent to which the other party is made up of people that we assume we would really dislike. You've written two books that seem relevant here. Tell me the names of your books.
--:-- Liliana Mason: The first book is Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity. And the second book is Radical American Partisanship.
--:-- Liliana Mason: How do you define partisanship? The classic understanding of partisanship is just sort of which party you vote for based on your assessments of politics. But more recently, we're starting to think about partisanship as a social identity, meaning it's a psychological connection to the other people that are in the party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And feeling like what happens to our party impacts our own sense of self-esteem and self-worth. The traditional view is thinking of choosing who to vote for like a banker chooses an investment.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And really what we're doing today is more like being sports fans cheering on our team. That's partisanship. What is polarization? Polarization can also be two things.
--:-- Liliana Mason: It can be more than that, actually. But the classic understanding of polarization was that we are disagreeing about issues. So Democrats are really liberal and Republicans are really conservative on all of these different issues.
--:-- Liliana Mason: But increasingly what we're finding now is that our polarization is, it's partly about that, but it's also about how we feel about each other. So Democrats and Republicans really don't like one another.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And we call that affective polarization. So it's based on feelings. And really the important thing about understanding affective polarization is that it doesn't require us to disagree in order to hate each other.
--:-- Liliana Mason: We use theories from social psychology about why any groups don't like each other to explain why Democrats and Republicans don't like each other. And it doesn't necessarily require that they disagree on, you know, marginal tax rates.
--:-- Liliana Mason: Lily, does the data really say that people of different parties dislike or even hate each other? Yeah. In fact, in my first book, I looked at, asked people kind of how would they feel if their child married somebody from the other party?
--:-- Liliana Mason: Or how would they feel if someone from the other party moved in next door to them? And those types of questions, people really don't like the idea of someone, of their child marrying somebody from the other party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: Would you have sex with a Trump voter? Oh, okay. Thank you. They don't really want to have social contact with people from the other party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: and that type of feeling isn't entirely rooted in disagreement. So people who have really moderate policy preferences can still dislike, really dislike people from the other party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: In the second book, we really started to ask more extreme questions. So we asked, do you think people on the other party are not just wrong for politics, they're downright evil?
--:-- Liliana Mason: Or even do they deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals? So a dehumanization question, which is kind of the most extreme of the questions.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And we are finding that, you know, about 50 percent of partisans are willing to say that their partisan opponents are evil. And between 20 to 40 percent are even willing to dehumanize people in the other party.
--:-- Liliana Mason: She's a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. She is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the Antichrist.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And you're talking about both Republicans and Democrats are willing to do this? Yeah, it depends. I mean, it depends on the question.
--:-- Liliana Mason: So Republicans are slightly more likely to do this to Democrats. And in fact, in more recent research that I've just been doing, we actually found that it's not even just all Republicans.
--:-- Liliana Mason: It's Republicans who believe that Trump won in 2020 are the most likely to vilify Democrats, more than really anybody else in the electorate, and more than Democrats vilify Republicans.
--:-- Liliana Mason: But they're a very specific group. We the people own plenty of firearms. There's more gun owners than enlisted servicemen, and they are not gonna go against patriots.
--:-- Liliana Mason: If you're gonna try to put me in a detention camp or try to re me I kill ya
--:-- Liliana Mason: So what we seeing really is mostly this what I called affective polarization. So it basically the type of polarization that means that we don like one another
--:-- Liliana Mason: And if you think about kind of human groups throughout all of human history, there are plenty of reasons that two human groups don't like one another, right?
--:-- Liliana Mason: And they don't necessarily come out of their differences over the appropriate size of government, right? Humans hate one another for all kinds of reasons.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And it's very much that type of kind of visceral dislike and distrust that any two social groups can have against each other that we're observing in the Democratic and Republican parties right now.
--:-- Liliana Mason: It's just this amorphous group of people. But they're smart and they're vicious. And we have to defeat them. Disagreeing on policy seems to me quite normal.
--:-- Liliana Mason: thinking that a person in the other party is evil seems a bit less normal to me. What is this rooted in, this affective polarization? Where did this come from?
--:-- Liliana Mason: A lot of this animosity between Democrats and Republicans has come out of a trend over the last many decades of not only our partisan identities being the thing that we fight over during elections, but also all of these other identities.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And over really since the 1960s, our racial identities, our religious identities, all other kinds of sort of cultural, even geographic identities have moved into alignment with our party identities.
--:-- Liliana Mason: What happens is that when we're thinking about politics and who wins and who loses, we're not just thinking my party wins or my party loses.
--:-- Liliana Mason: We're thinking if my party wins, then my racial group wins and my religious group wins and all of these other parts of my identity are winners and it feels really good.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And vice versa, if my party loses, all these different parts of my identity are also losing. And that feels really, really terrible.
--:-- Liliana Mason: So the stakes get a lot higher when we think about our electoral choices and who is in control of our government as reflective of who we are as a human being.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And so over really 50 or 60 years, what we saw was this gradual, I call it social sorting. It's a sorting process between the parties where they became socially and culturally really distinct from each other.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And that type of distinction, that when you feel like the people on the other side are so different from you, not just in their political views, but in what they look like and who they worship or how they worship and where they shop, it's a lot easier for us to dehumanize people who are just unlike us across so many different dimensions.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And that's really what we've been doing. So we started asking this question in 2017. No one had really asked Americans this before.
--:-- Liliana Mason: Basically, we got about 20% of Democrats and Republicans saying the other people in the other party are not human. And that's gone up to currently, our most recent data, it's about 40%.
--:-- Liliana Mason: The reason we asked the question is because this is the type of thing that we measure in other countries. if there's a mass violence event, this type of attitude exists beforehand.
--:-- Liliana Mason: It doesn't always lead to violence, but whenever there is sort of mass violence, you have to have these dehumanizing and vilifying attitudes present beforehand, because otherwise it's really hard.
--:-- Liliana Mason: It's hard to harm another human being and still feel like a morally good person. And really the only way to do that is to think that they are a threat to you, that they're evil and that they're subhuman.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And so when we see genocide in other places, for example, these attitudes exist before the violence occurs. And what we wanted to know was, did these attitudes exist in the American electorate?
--:-- Liliana Mason: And no one had really asked that question before. I would like to not live in this version of America. It isn't pleasant. I don't like it. I don't like hearing that people don't think of each other as human.
--:-- Liliana Mason: I'm stressed out. I want to cry sometimes and I can't. There's an election to cover. How do we, in all seriousness, fix this problem? I mean, we need to get something back, right?
--:-- Liliana Mason: I mean, one of the things I think that the last few years have done, and I think Trump is a candidate himself in particular, is really break the norms of what's acceptable behavior in American politics and in American society.
--:-- Liliana Mason: The idea that we can use racist and misogynistic language against our fellow citizens, the idea that we can tell lies and not be punished for it.
--:-- Liliana Mason: You know, a lot of the things that we are, that our politics is characterized by right now are things that 20 years ago would not have ever been allowed on the political stage.
--:-- Liliana Mason: And there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans that just remember a different time. And what worries me is that young people don't. So we're increasingly in this world where young people don't know that it ever was nicer, right?
--:-- Liliana Mason: That it ever was more kind of diplomatic. and so the things that I hope is that we can pay attention to the norms that have been broken because the only way to enforce a norm is for people around you, when you break the norm, for people around you to tell you to stop it.
--:-- Liliana Mason: Laws are enforced with law enforcement. Norms are enforced with us, with people. And the reason that shame is such a powerful emotion is because it's the way that we enforce norms.
--:-- Liliana Mason: to the extent that together as a community, right, if we see somebody behaving in a way that we think of as unacceptable, that we as a community can say to them, that's beyond the pale.
--:-- Liliana Mason: That's that you just crossed the line. I'm not accepting that kind of behavior. And we haven't been doing that to each other in many years, I think.
--:-- Liliana Mason: But to the extent that we can kind of remember what it's like to be normal people and treat each other like we're part of a community together and we're part of the same society, you know, that's something that we all can do on our own.
--:-- Noelle King: That was Liliana Mason of Johns Hopkins. Victoria Chamberlain produced today's episode. Matthew Collette edited. Laura Bullard fact-checked. And Andrea Kristen's daughter and Patrick Boyd engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
