First of two parts
Toledo resident Erin Kramer was shopping at Meijer in a Moms Demand Action shirt when a man approached her to ask why she wanted to take away everyone's guns.
She clarified that her goal was not to ban all weapons but rather to create stronger gun control regulations to promote safe practices and prevent children or dangerous actors from acquiring weapons.
As the conversation continued, the man flashed a gun on his hip, explaining that he always carried it for safety. By the end of the discussion, the two realized their different opinions stemmed from a shared value of protecting their families.
For the man, he felt he needed a gun to keep his family safe. For Ms. Kramer, she wanted to try to guarantee that her kids would be safe at school each day. The conversation didn’t cause either one of them to change their opinions, but they each left feeling like they understood and respected the other side of the argument a little bit more.
“It’s really important to be respectful of the person on the other side, because probably they have a really good reason why they feel the way they do, just like I feel I have a really good reason why I feel the way I do,” Ms. Kramer said.
Over the last two decades, those kinds of conversations have become less and less common. Americans as a whole have grown more hostile toward people they disagree with and, in turn, more reluctant to actually discuss and debate the issues.
A commonly-used scale called a feeling thermometer, where respondents are asked to rate groups between 0 (very cold toward them) and 100 (very warm), illuminates the extent of affective polarization, or dislike of the other party.
A 2023 study published by the Carnegie Endowment shows that over the last 40 years, people have steadily rated members of their own party between 60 and 70, or slightly positive. Across the same time period, feelings toward members of the other party have fallen from a neutral 50 down to 20.
Sam Nelson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toledo, said that one common explanation for this growing rift is what political scientists call partisan sorting.
“People are sorting into the parties based on social identity characteristics like race or religion, and that’s intensifying the divide between the parties because we don’t really spend a lot of time anymore with people who don’t think like us or aren’t supporting the same party as us,” he said.
The declining influence of civic institutions, like churches or rotary clubs, that bring people of different viewpoints together has contributed to this shift, he continued. Moreover, as politicians legislate on social issues like abortion or racial inequality, many of these institutions have been forced to adopt political affiliations.
Lucas County, with a slight Democrat majority inside of a majority Republican state, faces the challenges of polarized dialogue as much as nearly any metropolitan area in America.
Ron Johns, a conservative from East Toledo, explained he does his best to engage with liberals he meets but has found it difficult to actually make it past the name-calling he hears from the other side.
“A lot of people have been indoctrinated to feel like someone that’s conservative might be racist or homophobic,” Mr. Johns said. “And this sounds divisive, but the problem is, this has been pushed very hard by someone like President Biden, is the idea that somebody that just follows Trump is a deplorable. ... I really don’t feel like you should ever be saying like, ‘Hillary Clinton or someone is unredeemable; they’re deplorable.’”
He said politics has come to feel more like clashes of religious worldviews than actual policy debates. Among conservatives, he explained, it can often feel like their religious institutions are under attack. On the other side, women, transgender people, and other groups can feel like politics are starting to infringe on their bodies. In these cases, policy itself makes it difficult to find compromise.
However, even in lower-stakes matters, the chasm separating Democrats and Republicans remains. A more common analogy that many people refer to is the idea of politics not as religion, but as a competition between two sports teams.
David Gedert, who grew up in Royal Oak, Mich., before moving to Toledo, explained that this competitive spirit has affected not just discourse, but also the way people view the facts. This sort of one-sided perspective is what pushed Mr. Gedert to switch his partisan identification from Democrat to independent.
“I definitely grew up a Democrat, and I saw everything through that political lens, or, I think more accurately, partisan blinders, where you’re seeing everything from one team and you’re thinking, ‘What did my team say?’” he said. “I don’t think politics should be a team sport. It’s not a sport at all. So definitely, I started Democrat because I saw everything in black and white, and you’re team red or team blue, and now I definitely don’t think it’s healthy to look at the world that way.”
The media has both caused and responded to this teamsmanship, as many outlets, especially major national TV broadcasts, have embraced a partisan tilt both in terms of the topics they cover and how they analyze them.
The rise of social media as a news source has achieved a similar effect, as algorithms can create filter bubbles that show people the best of their side and the worst of the other. When people cannot agree on the objective facts themselves, it is difficult to start any debate over opinions.
Ms. Kramer said that, in her mind, the rise in partisan media is largely to blame for this phenomenon.
“People on social media and even with news now, they gravitate toward how they feel,” Ms. Kramer said. “They just want to be validated. I know people on both sides, people who only watch MSNBC or people who will only watch FOX News, and then they’re getting the news they are used to and they want to hear. It is challenging now to know the difference between right-wing and left-wing news and something that is reputable and just giving you the straight news.”
The growing divide does not merely have social impacts. It also changes the electoral landscape facing politicians. Coupled with gerrymandered districts, hyperpartisanship encourages candidates to run on more extreme platforms since they need to cater to their party base rather than the center, Mr. Nelson explained.
This, in turn, squeezes out moderate or independent candidates who might be more prone to compromise. Alfonso Narvaez, who has run for city council several times over the past decade first as a Republican and more recently as an independent, has experienced this shift away from the center.
“[In 2011], when you were doing door to door, you could talk to people and actually have a conversation,” Mr. Narvaez said. “After the pandemic, I ran in 2021, people were more hesitant. They either didn’t want to talk politics or they would ask you what your party affiliation was, and I would say, ‘Hey, I’m an independent,’ and you would instantly either get shot down or they didn’t want to hear anything. That was the one thing I noticed off the bat: there’s no middle ground anymore.”
Mr. Narvaez also struggled to find donors who were excited about giving to a self-described “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” candidate. On the national level, similar factors have enabled two widely unpopular individuals to emerge as, and remain, the presidential candidates for the major parties.
And as Toledo prepares for Nov. 5, partisan tensions are likely to keep escalating. However, both citizens and organizations are working to combat this trend with a shared conviction, summarized by Mr. Gedert.
“I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. The Democrats aren’t perfect. The Republicans aren’t perfect. But we’re all in this together so let’s try and get this figured out,” he said.
Most Popular
Comments / 0