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What Explains Our Polarized Tastes?
Political polarization is no mystery and nothing new, nor is it anything I worry about. Opposing politicians used to beat one another half to death with canes in the Senate, and that was before 3% of the population died in a savage war against fellow countrymen. So until we see THAT level of division, I don’t fret much.
But what is more inexplicable is the conservative and liberal divergence over the non-political. Why is it in our everyday lives that we have such wildly different but predictable interests outside of the political realm? And not just that, but just by seeing an individual or asking him what he likes to do, prefers to eat, or usually wears, you can guess with about 90% certainty how he thinks about political and social issues.
Take clothing. If you see a young man wearing Converse shoes, skinny jeans, and horn-rimmed glasses, you’d probably guess correctly that he’s a liberal. And see the same aged guy in ripped boot cut jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball cap, he probably leans conservative. And would it surprise you if he drove a 4×4?
And drinks? Find me a man drinking a mocha latte with whip cream and drinking bottled water at work, and I’ll show you a guy with a fading Obama-Biden bumper sticker on his Prius.
Political leanings affect food choices it well it seems. I feel pretty lonely in the organic section of the store. Without being an FBI profiler, I can feel pretty sure that the wiry, high-pitched voice fellow picking out kale chips and almond milk didn’t campaign for Romney.
Music is no different. I get into a car with a guy playing insufferable pop country and another car blaring Bob Marley, it is almost depressingly easy to guess what they believe about gay marriage or carbon emissions.
I don’t know if there is some accepted sociological reason for this. In a previous thread recently, I called it the “collective unconscious” decision-making where we gravitate towards the habits and interests of people most closely within our “tribe.”
It’s depressing to a certain extent, that most of us are really that predictable. I’m no different. Oh sure, I like the occasional vegan salad and frou-frou drink at Starbucks, but there’s no mistaking me for a liberal with my Glock t-shirt, gas-guzzling truck, gun rack, and Clark Kent-esque closet full of identical clothes (jeans and button downs).
As much as I despise the implications of the phrase, maybe there is some truth in the totalitarian saying that “Everything is political.”
Published in General, Politics
It may be an unavoidable byproduct of the kind of organizing efficiency that micro-targeted digital advertising makes possible, and once possible, just about inevitable. Even in the Fifties, Vance Packard’s bestseller The Hidden Persuaders repeated the claims of a (then) arrogant-sounding social scientist who said that if a young man with a certain style of eyeglasses drove a Studebaker (by then reduced to a tiny manufacturer of gorgeous cars that appealed to mildly rebellious consumers), he probably also smoked Viceroy, drank blended whiskey, listened to jazz on hi-fi equipment, watched CBS and voted Democrat.
He was probably right. I can picture that guy. Can’t everyone?
Yes, I remember back to my high school band days. I used to go to jazz clubs and occasionally play the sax on improv night. I started donning a pork pie, tinted colored glasses and picked up smoking a pipe. Jazz musicians were so wildly distinguishable from the more uptight Orchestra kids.
These are co-emergent signs of deeper facts about people as individuals, and by extension of people as a species. Please Read Thomas Sowell’s _Conflict of Visions_ and Steven Pinker’s _The Blank Slate_.
In most cases, arguing will do no good.
My husband drives a hybrid and designs zero-net energy houses in the People’s Republic of New Paltz.
Lots of people assume that tells them a lot about him. They are wrong.
And enjoying Bob Marley’s music doesn’t make one progressive. There are lots more subversives than you might think.
The guy who runs the fish and game club is town is a gun’s rights progressive, if that contradiction doesn’t make your head explode..
People are more interesting, in my view, than their political affiliation.
As an organic-food-eating-user-of-alternative-medicine-massage-therapist, you may easily imagine the assumptions people make about me. If only my political views were more recognizable, because it’s a daily challenge to keep my mouth shut and thank you, Ricochet, for allowing me to release the steam that builds up between my ears!
On the other hand, I consider appreciation and knowledge of classical and other traditional music (folk, jazz, old music in general) to be a conservative trait, but few of the people whom I know to have that bent are conservative (think Garrison Keillor, if you can stand it–I can’t). Ditto on the seriously religious, and producers of big families. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
That said, I don’t really doubt our tribal instincts or our too-often boring predictability, but I do have a question, Byron Horatio and others: In your experience, are conservatives or liberals more likely to jump to conclusions? I live in a very blue area, so my experience is mostly limited to liberals making the jump. We conservatives seem to proceed in a very gingerly fashion to feel each other out. Then we jump for joy.
I think there are more young skinny-jeans wearing bearded hipsters who are conservative or politically moderate than most would guess (myself being one of them.) I can enjoy an outspoken socialist musician like Billy Bragg or laugh at the Daily Show but still remain a conservative. My rule of thumb when meeting other young people is if they are not particularly outspoken about political or social issues, they are probably closet conservatives. At least, I hope so, because often times I do feel like I’m deep behind enemy lines.
…and views the purport to be non-political. I am a physicist and you let me know a scientist’s political party affiliation and I can guarantee what their view is on global warming. That is howI know it isn’t science.
I have noticed and been bothered by the great polarization. I don’t like it, and think it contributes to the decline in civil society. There are likely many contributors to the situation. People try to make everything political. The left seems particularly quick to sort and hate and banish. They are made very uncomfortable by someone “off the reservation”. I have noticed it on the right with a hostility to bicycles. How did this ever happen? Sometimes, a bike is just a bike, and a rider is just some guy making his way to work.
What really worries me is that government employment seems to increasingly correlate to leftist behavior, which now includes making everything political and weaponizing the bureaucracy. This is really really bad.
I’m a conservative and a drama teacher. Do I get the outlier prize?
I think you are correct about the general trend.
I appreciate all the trend buckers. It makes life more interesting when people have eclectic interests unpredictable from their social group. When I began attending a secularist book club this year, I think I would have surprised fewer people by saying I was extra terrestrial than saying I was a Republican.
The 90% figure is just a ballpark. Stereotypes and first impressions get a rap, but we wouldn’t have them if they weren’t useful or helpful in predicting behavior.
I don’t know if either group is more or less likely to jump to conclusions. My sense is that liberals are just because of how hostile they can be to speech and ideas they don’t agree with. It’s possible to live in a bubble without ever being exposed to conservatism. For a conservative to tune out liberalism is to be a hermit.
I believe religion has entered politics in a greater way than any time since the abolition movement. Many on the left have left traditional religions and have adopted progressive policies as their religious core beliefs. There leftist beliefs are what assure them they are good people. Whereas there is a group of those on the right who still place their faith in traditional religion, but believe that policies of the left threaten their religious freedom and practice. These issues make politics very personal.
I think that part of this trend is that there is now a market for “[insert cause du jour]-conscious” products. So, if you’re consuming that product, which may in fact be inferior in a lot of empirical ways to the “standard” product, it’s an overt signal to others that you take a certain political stand within a consumer culture (Lileks, undoubtedly, would use the word “preening” to describe this phenomenon). Back in “the day,” you could either buy Tide or Clorox, but there was no eco-brand for your laundry detergent. In some ways, we should laud this as a market-oriented development, but you’re right that it leads to cultural stratification.
Unfortunately, such cultural signals have always been present, except maybe in other ways. Country v. city v. suburb is something that’s always been culturally imprinted, but not necessarily related to political affiliation.
P.S. I’m a lawyer who drinks Starbucks Americanos all the time (and owns a fancy espresso machine), but I’m very right wing. In that way, I buck some trends, although I also live in the suburbs and defend “The Man” in court, so I’m stereotype-conforming in other ways.
As my college aged sister in DC would say, you’re at the top of the “hierarchy of privilege.”
I’ve known people who were essentially refugees, who have understandable reasons for jumping to another region of the country. Not necessarily ones I agree with, but comprehensible reasons.
For example, one of most longtime friends (from 15), like me a fellow New Yorker, moved out to California a few years after I did because it was freer, more open and laissez-faire compared to the east coast. Unlike most Jewish people, especially lawyers, he’s a small government radical. Maybe it’s not an in-spite-of, but a because-of. Now he’s moved on to Austin, with much of the reason being that it’s a gun friendly state. If your soul is built around open carry/constitutional carry, you belong in Texas, the mountain states, or Dixie. He sure thinks so. “So when are you moving out?” he asks. Not ever; we’re from the same town but different backgrounds.
On the other hand, the strongest liberals I know tend to be from someplace unfriendly to liberals. Their “horror stories” sound exaggerated to me, but then I never grew up there. You know the drill: the entire town, including the GM dealership, was owned by Boss Hogg, whose spoiled sons raped and pillaged at will, and whose daughter was a snobby cheerleader and queen bee of the local social set until she had the biggest, fanciest wedding the town had ever seen. Everyone in town was mean and materialistic.
The future liberal was miserable until a sympathetic relative or friend told them about the college’s NPR station. There, they heard fearless truths no one had ever dared speak. It led them to Rachel Maddow and the Huff Post, and here they are: righteously indignant to the ends of their days.
Frankly, I think this is a trend as old as humanity itself. People have always flocked to groups whose members have had similar attributes as themselves, and those groups have tended to advocate for similar (political) interests.
Even 50 years ago, you could probably come up with a good approximation of the heritage, political leanings and cultural values of almost anyone in the metropolitan NYC area just by knowing their street address and age – and even more so after talking with them for about 30 secs.
In fact, if anything we are probably more varied than we have ever been in our past. What were the chances of a stodgy, conservative Benny Goodman listener and a subversive Chuck Berry fan sharing the same office back in the early 60s? Much lower than a country music redneck and a wannabe Rastafarian doing so today.
Brilliant.
In many ways, I’m an outlier. I listen to obscure bands, sample macchiatos at third-wave coffee houses, catalog mid-century modern architecture, enjoy artisanal tapas, and until recently drove a Volvo. These lefty-sounding interests have tricked several unsuspecting liberals to follow me on social media.
But I also watch football, shoot guns, and camp in the Arizona backcountry. I live to create cognitive dissonance.
Did CBS lean younger back then?
People tend to select news sources based on their editorial stance, but then might be influenced by the house style in other areas as well, consciously or unconsciously.
Picture Peter Robinson eating a Tofutti Cutie and there I am. I could probably claim the frozen treat makes me an outlier but after the last bite nobody would confuse my affiliation.
My suspicion is that people choose their styles and preferences first then choose their political positions accordingly. Or a lot of people anyway.
I wear Converse shoes and horn-rimmed glasses. I’m not skinny enough for skinny jeans though.
This fashion description does, however, describe most of the people I’ve met that work in the graphics design and/or web development departments of right-of-centre political parties.
Most people just follow along with the majority of their surroundings. I know at least two people personally that believe would be conservative if they lived among majority conservatives. They simply follow.
kylez
Did CBS lean younger back then?
Yes, simply because there were no “younger” choices to pick from. But the interesting thing about CBS back then was its schizo split, not unlike the Democrats as a whole: as Claire Booth Luce said, they were half “lynch-loving Bourbons” and half Stalin’s stooges. In CBS’s case, they were half Edward R. Murrow and “CBS Reports: Harvest of Shame”, and half “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres”.
Except for the tee-shirt part (I rarely ever wear them), that pretty much describes me. And although I am a country music fan, I find pop-country insufferable as well.
I do, however, drink Starbucks cappuccino and have bottled water at work.
But that’s balanced out with my love of Iguana cigars and Maker’s Mark.
Conservatism also correlates (in a 60/40 kind of way) with being older, or male, or married, or religious, or military, or law enforcement, or pale skinned. And there’s certainly some lifestyle choices that correlate with those things. However, one could argue there’s no reason for those lifestyle correlations to exist either.
An aside: it probably does make sense that defenders of the second amendment are more likely to sport holsters as a fashion choice.
Well, there is nothing better than visiting my wife’s uber-liberal relations in the summer surrounded by their revolving door of progressive guests discussing some of our mutual interests: opera, silent film, Victorian cookery, or 19th century French writers to suddenly drop a load of facts that discombobulate the assembled bright lights from the near-by liberal arts college; and then say, oh, and by the way, while you were trashing talking the following, please note I’m also one of those Christian, conservative, rural small-town, redneck gun owners, who voted for Bush/Romney, and attended some pathetic state University, and now may I show you my latest firearms purchase?
The look on their faces is priceless, and it works every time.
At the same time, I find myself bored to tears with many conservatives in social settings, because I live (at least mentally) in two worlds, the artsy-fartsy and small town rural. In one I’m behind enemy lines, and the other has so changed that it is all but a memory. In my native village today I have no real connection all but the tiny remnant of people in their late 70-90’s that still live somewhat in that world of religious and cultural continuity. A world I embraced as a child only to see it die out in front of me.
So I am just a poor wayfaring stranger passing through this world of woe.
Stereotypes exist for a reason, but there are always exceptions. I enjoy Mr. Marley as well, but I have no desire to ever “get lit” let alone march for climate issues that didn’t exist when Bob died. But we all know that our clothing is, to some effect, a costume. What I wear when I am a school teacher differs from what I wear as horror movie podcaster. We pick up cues from our community on various levels and the innate desire to fit in with our peer group can steer our choices to some degree.
External forces can also drive these decisions. Conservatives more likely to shop at WalMart? Shouldn’t be a shock given how much the left has demonized the company. I don’t know that conservatives have embraced it, but they haven’t been chased away.
Or look at the marketing campaigns of Coke and Pepsi. Coke sells itself a great deal on tradition, while Pepsi is the “choice of a new generation.” Which one is likely to appeal to conservatives, which to liberals? I don’t think either company deliberately choose to align themselves with a particular constituency, it just happened.
Agreed. I also recommend The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt argues that we instinctively favor evidence that support our preexisting notions of what is correct or proper. Put another way, Haidt believes that we all have a number of strong convictions that we cannot actually prove. Furthermore, Haidt observes that humans generally do not actually bother to start the process of marshaling facts to defend their preexisting opinions or positions until after their sense of correctness is challenged or somehow threatened by external critics.
I think of myself as a Red Stater Trapped in a Blue Stater’s body. I am Christian, attend a liturgical church, 20yr subscriber to First Things but I work in Hollywood as an editor and not on family fare shall we say. Most of my friends tend to be Liberal, probably because culture is stronger on a day to day level than religious belief. But since 9/11 the cognitive dissonance has been increasingly hard to ignore. I can’t go full Red Stater though, I just can’t…. at the same time the Democrat party seems to increasingly be my enemy. It’s very disconcerting.
What has become increasingly clear is that most people’s politics are emotion based and not really fact based. Or more properly the result of a desire to fit in socially. There is a style and an image people like to see themselves fit into and the rest is mostly rationalization.
Count Grecula, you ought to check out 6foot2’s L.A. meetup-sounds like a great way to climb out of the catacombs!