The very day that I wrote about George Packer’s New Yorker article detailing the depths of the Senate’s dysfunction, an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times suggesting a simple solution. Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track. In his op-ed piece, Ornstein notes:

The Senate, once the place for slow and careful deliberation, has been overtaken by a culture of obstructionism. The filibuster, once rare, is now so common that it has inverted majority rule, allowing the minority party to block, or at least delay, whatever legislation it wants to oppose. Without reform, the filibuster threatens to bring the Senate to a halt.

The problem has many causes, but Ornstein identifies three in particular that interact to cause the paralysis:

Part of the problem lies with today’s partisan culture, in which blocking the other party takes priority over passing legislation or confirming candidates to key positions. And part of the problem lies with changes in Senate practices during the 1970s, which allowed the minority to filibuster a piece of legislation without holding up other items of business. But the biggest factor is the nature of the filibuster itself. Senate rules put the onus on the majority for ending a debate, regardless of how frivolous the filibuster might be.

Ornstein then proposes a simple fix that would remove the silliness and obstructionism while still allowing the minority party to block or delay the few pieces of legislation about which it cares most.

An even better step would be to return to the old “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” model — in which a filibuster means that the Senate has to stop everything and debate around the clock — by allowing a motion requiring 40 votes to continue debate every three hours while the chamber is in continuous session. That way it is the minority that has to grab cots and mattresses and be prepared to take to the floor night and day to keep their filibuster alive. Under such a rule, a sufficiently passionate minority could still preserve the Senate’s traditions and force an extended debate on legislation. But frivolous and obstructionist misuse of the filibuster would be a thing of the past.

This is exactly the sort of simple fix that we at CivilPolitics.org advocate. It does no good to simply call for politicians to be more civil, or to put the needs of the country before those of their parties. But anything that changes the weapons available for partisan warfare, and that raises the costs of using those weapons, is likely to have immediate payoffs for civility in American politics. Bravo Mr. Ornstein!

–Jonathan Haidt

We recently submitted a paper for publication about libertarian morality, along with co-authors Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Jonathan Haidt.  The paper leverages our broad set of measures to tell a story about libertarians, which converges with previously reported findings about liberals and conservatives.  Specifically, all ideological groups demonstrate the same patterns whereby preferences, emotions and dispositions lead to an attraction to corresponding values and ideological narratives.  For example, liberals have greater feelings of empathy and are therefore more likely to moralize harm and be attracted to an ideology which prioritizes this moralization.  Libertarians moralize liberty, both economic liberty, similar to conservatives, and lifestyle liberty, similar to liberals.

Libertarians believe in the importance of individual liberty, a belief that may be related to lower levels of agreeableness and higher scores on a measure of psychological reactance (e.g. “regulations trigger a sense of resistance in me”).  They moralize concerns about harm less than liberals, in part because they have lower levels of empathy .  They moralize principles concerning being a group member (obeying authority and being loyal) less than conservatives in part because they have less attachment to the groups around them.

If you want to read more about what the paper, says, you can click here or download the paper here, but right now, I’d like to focus on why we wrote the paper, as I have previously written about how people are attracted to why you write things as much as what you write.

Of course, some part of paper writing is driven by curiosity and the practical desire to publish.  But in writing this paper, I have undergone my own personal intellectual journey, and I’m hopeful that others may have a similar experience. A lot of my impression of libertarianism was previously shaped by images of the Tea Party (who aren’t necessarily libertarians after all) and I thought of libertarians as uncaring, from my liberal perspective, in that they typically don’t support progressive taxes and social programs. The original title of the paper was “the Search for Libertarian Morality”, implying that libertarians are potentially amoral, and in retrospect showing my own ideological bias.

But as I read more about libertarian philosophy and looked more carefully at the data, I found that libertarians do indeed have a coherent moral code, that simply differs from my own. Like my liberal leanings, which have some relation to my dispositions and preferences, libertarians also moralize their preferences and dispositions, in ways that mirror my own processes. For example, liberals and libertarians both score high on desire for new experiences and stimulation, which may be a common reason why both groups tend to emphasize individual choice over group solidarity, compared to conservatives, as cohesive groups can limit choice.  Libertarians may be less moved by emotions such as disgust and empathy, which may lead them to moralize certain situations less than others.  But who am I to say that my moral compass is any better or worse than theirs, given my view that at some level, the basis for my liberal moral compass is driven by subjective sentiment.  I previously wrote about the dangers of liberal moral absolutism, and villainizing libertarians for not sharing my particular vision of morality would be a step down that road.

Why do we seek to publicize this paper?  In a time when partisanship dominates, policy suffers,  and people on both sides of the aisle villainize the other side, it is our hope that with greater understanding comes greater acceptance. We may not all agree about the relative merits of empathy, disgust, or reactance as moral emotions…but we all have some level of all of these emotions and can respect principles born out of these.  Even liberals can find things so disgusting that they are seen as wrong, and conservatives actually give a lot of money to the poor.  In attributing moral disagreements to dispositions, largely out of our control, perhaps we can learn to see others as different and attracted to other positive moral principles, rather than amoral and oblivious to the moral principles that are important to us.

- Ravi Iyer

There are a few political scientists who question whether the American people have become more polarized in the last ten years. (They have.) But there is no doubt that our political institutions and elites have become more polarized and uncivil in the last 2-3 decades. George Packer recently painted a grim but insightful portrait of the US Senate in a New Yorker essay, The Empty Chamber: Just how broken is the Senate? In the rest of this blog post, I’ll draw out the lessons for civil politics contained in this extraordinary essay. Packer emphasizes many of the themes we have been discussing at CivilPolitics.org, particularly the importance of personal relationships as a precursor for civil interaction, as well as the generational and macro-level trends that have made a decline of civility almost inevitable as the “greatest generation” gave way to the baby boom generation.

Packer begins the essay by discussing the arcane and absurd rules of the Senate, which make it easy for any single senator to obstruct the rest of the chamber. For example, many rules of the senate require unanimous consent. Other rules allow any senator to place a “secret hold” on any appointee that the senate is asked to vote on. That is, any one senator can object, in secret, to a presidential appointee, which prevents that appointee from ever coming up for a vote. In 2007 the rules were changed so that such holds can last only 6 days, but now any pair of senators can just alternate placing 6 day secret holds and achieve the same purpose, without risking condemnation from the press or the people because their names are kept secret. As Packer says:

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

Packer notes that the Senate used to engage in deliberation, debate, and argument. Its civility and thoughtfulness had impressed Alexis de Tocqueville. Those days are long gone:

The Senate is often referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democrat from Oregon, said, “That is a phrase that I wince each time I hear it, because the amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, is so limited.” Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat…  Tom Udall, a freshman Democrat from New Mexico, could not recall seeing a senator change another senator’s mind. “

Packer describes many factors that have led to the dysfunctional, petty, and nasty institution that the Senate is today. After describing the superb talent and bipartisan cooperation of senators in the 1960s and 1970s, Packer says:

The Senate’s modern decline began in 1978, with the election of a new wave of anti-government conservatives, and accelerated as Republicans became the majority in 1981. “The Quayle generation came in, and there were a number of people just like Dan—same generation, same hair style, same beliefs,” Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, recalled. “They were harder-line. They weren’t there to get along with Democrats. But they look accommodationist compared to Republicans in the Senate today.”

In addition…

Both [Republican Lamar] Alexander and [Republican Judd] Gregg said that the Senate had been further polarized by the rising number of senators—now nearly fifty—who come from the House, rather than from governorships or other positions where bipartisan coöperation is still permissible. “A lot of senators don’t understand the history or tradition of the institution,” Gregg said. “Substantive, thoughtful, moderate discussion is pushed aside.”

A further cause is the extraordinary time pressure of modern political life, which makes it even harder to meet members of the other party socially:

Encumbered with aides, prodded by hourly jolts from electronic media, racing from the hearing room to the caucus lunch to the Power Hour to the airport, senators no longer have the time, or perhaps the inclination, to get to know one another—least of all, members of the other party. Friendships across party lines are more likely among the few spouses who live in Washington. After Udall joined the Senate, last year, he was invited to dinner by Alexander, because Jill Cooper Udall and Honey Alexander had become friends through a women’s social club. It remains the only time Udall has set foot in the house of a Republican senator. (Vice-President Joe Biden, in his autobiography, recalls that, in the seventies, a bipartisan group of senators and their wives hosted a monthly dinner: “In those days Democrats and Republicans actually enjoyed each other’s company.”)

Illustrating the extraordinary difficulty of civil politics, reforms that you might think of as advances sometimes made things worse:

After C-SPAN went on the air, in 1979, the cozy atmosphere that encouraged both deliberation and back-room deals began to yield to transparency and, with it, posturing. “So Damn Much Money,” a recent book by the Washington Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser, traces the spectacular rise of Washington lobbying to the same period. Liberal Republicans began to disappear, and as Southern Democrats died out they were replaced by conservative Republicans. Bipartisan coalitions on both wings of the Senate vanished. The institutionalist gave way to the free agent, who controlled his own fund-raising apparatus and media presence, and whose electoral base was a patchwork of single-issue groups. Members of both parties—Howard Metzenbaum, the Ohio Democrat; Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican—took to regularly using the Senate’s rules to tie up business for narrowly ideological reasons. … The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans…. Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the Senate has increasingly become populated by “ideologues and charlatans.”

It should be noted, of course, that whether you think efficiency is a virtue depends on whether you’re in the majority:

None of the Republicans I spoke to agreed with the contention that the Senate is “broken.” Alexander claimed that he and other Republicans were exercising the moderating, thoughtful influence on legislation that the founders wanted in the Senate.

Our view at CivilPolitics, however, is that the Senate is broken. It cannot serve the interests of the nation to give every single senator the ability to derail legislation, which gives every single senator the ability to ask for special benefits in exchange for letting go of the brake. It also cannot serve the interests of the nation for the Senate to have essentially ceased to deliberate, and to have degenerated into a simple power struggle between two teams. We suspect that there are some simple rule changes that could improve the functioning of the senate, in addition to the changes to primaries and general elections that we discuss elsewhere on this site.

Jon Haidt

The Hopelessly Partisan Guide to American Politics

How do Democrats and Republicans view their political opponents?  Ken Berwitz and Barry Sinrod investigate this question in The Hopelessly Partisan Guide to American Politics:  An Irreverent Look at the Private Lives of Republicans and Democrats, a lighthearted publication examining Democrat and Republicans’ answers to surveys discussing everything from their favorite type of movies to whether they organize the bills in their wallet.  The survey reflected that people generally believe the differences between Democrats and Republicans extend beyond their political opinions (for example, most agree that Democrats are more likely to go out on the town on the weekend, and Republicans are more likely to stay in).  In fact, previous psychology research has indicated that meaningful and stable disparities in personality do exist across party lines.  Conservatives, for instance, tend to score higher on the “conscientiousness” factor of the “Big Five” personality traits (items concerned with self-discipline, organization, and planning), and liberals tend to score higher on “openness to experience” (items indicating an interest in art, emotion, curiosity, and imagination).

A More "Liberal" Room

A More "Conservative" Room

These differences have been explored in research by psychologists Carney, Jost, Gosling, and Potter (2008), who examined the offices and bedrooms of liberals and conservatives for cues to their personality, and found that liberals were indeed more likely to have items in their room indicating an interest in novel experiences and creativity (e.g., books about travel and music, art supplies, international maps), and conservatives items indicating organization and cleanliness (e.g., calendars, laundry baskets, ironing boards).  Liberals and conservatives seem to be correct in recognizing that their political counterparts have distinct interests and personality traits.  While these perceived differences are relatively innocuous, liberals and conservatives frequently see members of “the other side” as dissimilar in a very negative light.  The Hopelessly Partisan survey takes a more somber turn when the authors asked respondents to describe the characteristics of members of the opposite party.  The findings, while perhaps not surprising, shed light on challenges to positive bipartisan interaction.

First and foremost, we see that people are rather unwilling to accept their political opponents as well-meaning individuals with cogent beliefs.  Out of all of the insults hurled at members of the opposite political party (for instance, Republican “warmongers” and Democratic “freeloaders”), one of the most frequent epithets was “liar.”  Dishonesty was heavily attributed to those who disagreed with one’s political opinions. Opponents were continually ranked as having suspect motives – for example, they were more likely to be suspected of taking bribes or accepting money from lobbyists.

In these examples, we see further evidence of the “mirror image perception” phenomenon, in which opposing ideologues have nearly identical stereotypes of one another.  Corrupt motives are attributed to the side that opposes us; our ideological peers are seen as upright and virtuous.

Why are we so inclined to distrust our political opponents?  Individuals are highly motivated to defend important, self-related beliefs.  Previous research on the “belief bias” has illustrated the conflict between logic and belief in deductive reasoning: individuals tend to reject arguments that are logical, but with which they disagree, and accept arguments that, albeit flawed, are consonant with their personal beliefs.  Through rationalization, people then justify overlooking potentially logical arguments that don’t match one’s own ideas.  Furthermore, a source credibility bias can influence our decision making.  While we are readily willing to accept an opinion asserted by someone we like and admire, we refute those issued by people or groups we dislike.  We can, perhaps, readily justify ignoring an argument by attending instead to the character of the person delivering it.  By viewing those who contradict us as unreliable sources, we quell any chance of having to seriously consider their arguments.  Discrediting the proponent of undesirable viewpoints could be accomplished quite easily by asserting that the person is deceptive – thus the frequency of “liar” in heated political discourse. Read more »

Today’s lead story from Politico, The Age of Rage, probably summarizes a lot of what people think is wrong with politics. Rather than make good policy, politicians and media are more concerned with scoring points for their political ideology (hyperpartisanship). However, as the Politico article points out, their actions are largely driven by the general populace. Politicians and media reflect what people respond to, which happens to be hyperpartisanship, rather than causing the incivility we see.

…there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s lots more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president’s State of the Union speech. “The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

We reward politicians and news organizations, with our attention and our money, that engage in the very incivility that makes politics so ugly. This is true on both sides of the aisle.

At the recent meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Linda Skitka gave a talk which puts a lot of this in perspective for me. Her lab studies the dark side of moral conviction, which I call hypermoralism in the hope that the term catches on. Roy Baumeister studies a similar concept, idealistic evil. In Skitka’s talk, she demonstrates in a Chinese sample that political intolerance (e.g. “people with different positions than your own about this issue should be allowed to have their phones tapped by the Chinese government”) and social intolerance (e.g. “How willing would you be to have someone who did not share your views on this issue as a close personal friend?”) were best predicted by moral conviction (e.g. “To what extent are your feelings about this issue or policy based on your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong?”).  When controlling for moral conviction, all other variables (e.g. demographics, political position, attitude importance, and attitude strength) were all insignificant predictors of social and political intolerance. I look forward to seeing how this replicates on a US sample and how political intolerance is operationalized. Perhaps something along the lines of liberal consideration of censoring Fox news or conservative publication of what many would consider private discussion would make good operationalizations of political intolerance as they mirror what we see in reality, where considerations of privacy, context, and free speech are considered secondary to partisanship. Moral conviction may underlie the hyperpartisanship that Politico talks about.

Hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism may be another instance of the effects of what evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett calls “Supernormal Stimuli”. As the Wall Street Journal writes about her book:

As Ms. Barrett notes, modern life surrounds us with supernormal stimuli. An example: Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes can be a burden when we’re confronted with such supernormal stimuli as the 400-calorie Frappuccino at Starbucks. An evolutionary adaptation that once promised survival is more likely nowadays to produce Type 2 diabetes.

Ms. Barrett pushes her thesis too far at times, but her plain-spoken disquisition makes a strong case that supernormal stimuli “can help us understand the problems of modern civilization.”

One might even argue that supernormal stimuli—or perhaps our reactions to them—are the biggest problems faced by affluent societies.

In the case of hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism, our evolved moral senses, which allow human beings to cooperate, are now subject to the stimulus which is the 24 hour news cycle and the non-stop political campaign. Moral emotions are powerful forces, which are now activated routinely, rather than rarely.

If anybody has ideas on how to escape this cycle, I would love to hear them. Humanizing and getting to know the opposition, along the lines of intergroup contact theory, is an idea. Perhaps moral emotions can be activated against hyperpartisanship itself, rather than against individual ideologies. Or maybe with greater understanding, we can all learn to recognize supernormal moral stimuli and give them less power in our lives. Ideas welcome and I’m open to operationalizing particularly promising ideas as studies to be run on yourmorals.org.

- Ravi Iyer

As a regular reader of political blogs, I could not help but notice that a number of my favorite sites were writing about the same thing, specifically, their participation in a discussion group called JournoList, which included numerous media members such as Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight and Politico writer Ben Smith, both of whom I read with some regularity. These posts were prompted by the publication of numerous emails from this largely liberal group by a conservative blog, the Daily Caller, which recently ran this story (one of many on this topic):

On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.

Reading other people’s private emails evokes an embodied moral reaction in me. Maybe it’s motivated reasoning as a liberal myself, but I would hope that I’d find it similarly distasteful for a business to make money by posting the private emails of conservatives. Still, I think that the above paragraph is likely correct for some (not all) members of the list, along the lines of this wonderful post by Peter Ditto of UC-Irvine, concerning the ways that liberals and conservatives mirror each other in their negative attributions.  In it, he notes that a “mirror image pattern, two opposing sides in an ideological struggle having virtually identical stereotypes of each other, is a common characteristic in intergroup relations.” The idea is that when you find these mirror image perceptions, they are often more a function of partisanship and group conflict than reality.

It’s not hard to find quotes from conservatives that mirror the above observation of journolist members.  Consider this article entitled “Why does Obama hate America so badly?” My guess is that Democrats don’t hate the economy and Republicans don’t hate poor people, yet these mirror image negative attributions of malicious intent exist.

Here is the same story in graph form, using our yourmorals.org data, where liberals and conservatives rate both republicans and democrats on “warmth”…

and on “competence”….

Hardly surprising, but liberals think Republicans are cold and incompetent, while conservatives think Democrats are cold and incompetent.  (strangely, we generally think that we ourselves are both more warm and more competent than the average member of either party..:))

I’m sure that cherry picking any person’s email archive would lead to embarrassing material, but I would agree with Andrew Sullivan’s take on JournoList:

The far right is right on this: this collusion is corruption. It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism – but it is nonetheless corrupt…….

…..I’m glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what’s wrong with the media. It’s what’s already wrong with the media.

These mirror image negative perceptions are an inevitable part of intergroup conflict, so rather than morally judging the individuals involved for behavior that is likely quite common, I prefer to take this as a cautionary tale for all who want better policy. On both sides of the aisle, we should be seeking to recognize and reduce these biases, not amplify them through ideologically homogeneous discussions, such as what appeared to occur on JournoList.

- Ravi Iyer

Book Review

For much of America’s history, political parties consisted of liberal and conservative elected officials and voters. In the 1970s, however, this ideological heterogeneity began a marked shift where liberals sorted into the Democratic party and conservatives sorted into the Republican party. Matthew Levendusky presents data in The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans suggesting that this began following the decentralization of the primary election process—that is, taking the nomination process out of the hands of party bosses and letting the passionate, activists and extremists within each party vote for their preferred candidate. This change in the nomination process led to the parties running increasingly extreme candidates in general elections. Thus, as the elite became more polarized, voters became better able to distinguish between the parties and were able to better sort themselves according to their beliefs. Levendusky argues that this tendency is both good and bad, as it makes voters better informed, but can invite close-mindedness and hostility on contentious issues.

Application to Civil Politics

We at CivilPolitics agree that having engaged and informed voters is good for democracy, but see many potential negatives to having people divided into groups and sorted in such a way that sacred values enflame the competition between the groups. For instance, as people sort themselves into segregated groups, they begin to surround themselves with people with similar political beliefs as them. In doing so, we activate “group polarization” where the disagreement between the groups becomes even wider as members of each group become more extreme.

Social psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper (1979) found that this polarization leads people on both sides of an issue to engage in the confirmation bias, accepting evidence in support of one’s belief at face value, while applying strict scrutiny to any evidence in opposition to one’s belief. In their experiments, they looked at groups of people who favored and opposed the death penalty. Consistent with this attitude polarization hypothesis, they found that supporters of capital punishment found evidence in support of the death penalty more convincing than evidence in opposition to it. The reverse pattern was true for opponents of capital punishment; opponents of capital punishment found arguments against the death penalty as more convincing than evidence in favor of it.

Sorting may also lead to less contact with people who belong to different political parties. Less contact may prevent the development of relationships and respect for people with these discrepant views. Classic social psychological research shows us that without positive intergroup contact, group relations may become increasingly hostile. The lack of contact can be illustrated by the recurring statement, “I don’t know how Reagan[/Clinton/Bush/Obama] won – I don’t know a soul who voted for him.” This research finding makes sense in light of the disrespectful vitriol being spewed at Republicans by Democrats and at Democrats by Republicans. It’s easier to label something as evil if you are not friends with him/her.

Muzafer Sherif’s famous Robbers Cave research, in addition to decades of confirming experiments, suggest that even though groups can get pretty nasty with each other in competitive contexts, there are ways besides developing personal relationships that may civilize these interactions. For instance, if there is some greater goal that allows the groups to cooperate, the intergroup friction is temporarily reduced. Perhaps if politicians in America recognized the importance of civil debate in a healthy democracy, they might be more inclined to cooperate… or at least less likely to call each other names.

Read more »

In James Thurber’s Further Fables for Our Time, he writes the tale of “The Peacelike Mongoose.”

In cobra country a mongoose was born one day who didn’t want to fight cobras or anything else. The word spread from mongoose to mongoose that there was a mongoose who didn’t want to fight cobras. If he didn’t want to fight anything else, it was his own business, but it was the duty of every mongoose to kill cobras or be killed by cobras.

“”Why?” asked the peacelike mongoose, and the word went around that the strange new mongoose was not only pro-cobra and anti-mongoose but intellectually curious and against the ideals and traditions of mongoosism.

“He is crazy,” cried the young mongoose’s father.

“He is sick,” said his mother.

“He is a coward,” shouted his brothers.

“He is a mongoosexual,” whispered his sisters.

Strangers who had never laid eyes on the peacelike mongoose remembered that they had seen him crawling on his stomach, or trying on cobra hoods, or plotting the violent overthrow of Mongoosia.

“I am trying to use reason and intelligence,” said the strange new mongoose.

“Reason is six-sevenths of treason,” said one of his neighbors.

“Intelligence is what the enemy uses,” said another.

Finally, the rumor spread that the mongoose had venom in his sting, like a cobra, and he was tried, convicted by a show of paws, and condemned to banishment.

Moral: Ashes to ashes, and clay to clay, if the enemy doesn’t get you your own folks may.

This fable was written denouncing the McCarthyist paranoia that led to the blacklisting of fellow American citizens out of suspicion that they may be communist sympathizers, but the message of this tale extends well beyond the Red Scare. Today, we see that “maverick” (or, perhaps, “mongoose”) politicians who do not vote the party line are often ostracized as “black sheep” and attacked by their own folks, as Thurber suggests.

Consider Democrats’ reactions to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) running for office as an Independent after losing the Democratic Primary. Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala nicknamed him “Traitor Joe,” journalist Ari Berman described him as a “back stabber,” and television show host Rachel Maddow proclaimed him to be a “wrench in the works.” On the other side of the aisle, though, Republicans celebrated Lieberman as “a really exceptional senator” and “a national treasure.” Conservative pundits Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck all supported his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Similarly, consider Republicans’ reactions to Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) after she voted in favor of the 2009 stimulus package and the Senate Finance Committee’s healthcare reform bill. Republicans lambasted her as one of three then-Republican Senators who did not vote the party line as the “Traitor Trio”. At the same time, Democrats heralded Snowe for her willingness to compromise and leadership in doing what is best for the country.

Social psychologist Pete Ditto and graduate student Andrew Mastronarde published experimental evidence supporting this phenomenon in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Across three studies, they found that although participants generally liked the idea of a political maverick, participants viewed mavericks of their own party more negatively than their party-line counterparts. Perhaps this is part of the reason that the long-self-pronounced political maverick Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is now renouncing the idea that he ever was a maverick.

From ashes to ashes, and clay to clay, if the other party doesn’t get you, extremists within your own party may.

– Matt Motyl

The Institute for Civility in Government‘s Citizens’ Civility Symposium brought together people of all political persuasions to discuss the political process–quite civilly, I am pleased to report. While many attendees held different positions on the issues, we came to a consensus that debate in a free democratic republic should be civil. As the invited guests spoke, they shared stories of how they had been victims of America’s civility deficit.

Former House Representative Bill Archer (R-TX) spoke of how Bob Novak called him a communist on the adversarial political news show, Crossfire. Rep. Archer continued by mentioning how a fellow congressperson had called him “Hitler” and a “Nazi” on the House floor.

Former House Representative Jim Leach (R-IA) shared similar stories including one where he was called a “Fascist” and a “Communist…” by the same person… in the same sentence. Apparently, the irony was lost on the uncivil politico using those epithets, since fascism is typically associated with the far-right and communism is typically associated with the far-left.

Current House Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) shared his surprise at how soon Democrats and Republicans are segregated once they are elected to office. As they prepare to begin their careers in Washington, D. C., all new congresspeople are invited to attend workshops orienting them to their new jobs. As Rep. Cuellar walked onto one of the buses that would take the newly-elected officials to the orientation, the bus grew silent. Someone stood up and informed him he was on the “wrong bus” and wasn’t “wanted there,” a scenario reminiscent of the 1960s civil rights’ era. It turns out that was the “Republican” bus and that the parties do not intermingle in the orientation process.

This experience led Rep. Cuellar to suggest that civility in politics is, in large part, a function of the relationships politicians form with one another. In recent years, the number of congresspeople living in D.C. has decreased, making it more difficult for them to interact and develop personalrelationships.

Years of research document the many effects that this segregation may have on inter-party interactions. For example, Allport (1954) suggested that interacting with people who belong to different groups can sometimes reduce hostility and promote cooperation between groups. More recent research by Bandura (1999) and Haslam (2006) indicates that when people do not develop personal relationships with outgroup members, they are inclined to demonizeand dehumanize the members of those other groups. Perhaps this explains why liberals often depicted President Bush as primate-like, and conservatives currently depict President Obama as primate-like. This reduced contact may predispose elected officials to use demonizing language “targeting” political opponents, labeling them “Fascists” and “Communists.”

The Institute created a civil public square for an afternoon, where shared experiences allowed people with very different political backgrounds to bond and recognize that we, as Americans, benefit from listening to each other’s perspectives. Our mission, here at CivilPolitics.org, is to find ways to encourage the growth of this civil public square.

– Matt Motyl

A recent Zogby International poll found that 95% of Americans believe that civility is important for a healthy democracy and that citizens are “turned off” when politics become “rude and nasty.” With these alarming numbers, it is no surprise that three out of four Americans believe that, “Right now, Washington is broken.” This bipartisan agreement on the incivility afflicting today’s politics leads us to two questions:

1) Who is being blamed for this incivility?

Our data at YourMorals.org suggest that liberals are, not surprisingly, more likely to blame the Republican Party than moderates or conservatives are. However and possibly more importantly, we see that many liberals, moderates, and conservatives believe both parties are at fault. In other words, people across the political spectrum are willing to admit that people in their own parties are somewhat at fault. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot and allude to the addiction treatment program slogan, let’s hope that “acceptance is the first step to recovery.”



2) What can people do to help bring civility back into American politics?

A KRC Research poll demonstrates that 87% of those questioned believe that the general American public is responsible for improving civility. A full 85% of Democrats and Republicans believe that one action they could take to foster more civility is by voting against candidates who are uncivil. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of those surveyed also suggested that they, as consumers, could stop buying products from companies that promote hostile political discussions or display uncivil advertising.

These poll numbers showing that people believe they can bring about civility by their own actions are encouraging, but should be taken with a grain of salt. Social psychological research informs us that attitudes are not always very good predictors of people’s behavior. This finding may partially explain the “Bradley Effect,” which theorizes that people inaccurately respond to questions in ways that seem more socially desirable, yet still behave in less socially desirable ways. Might people simply be saying they desire civility while stoking the flames of incivility? Let’s hope not.

- Matt Motyl