Skip to main content

Getting In Touch With Your Negative Partisanship

 Our country is in a dark place. How dark it ultimately gets remains to be seen, but optimism would be foolish. So would despair, which can be incapacitating.

Yes, RBG’s death is a kick in the teeth, but it’s also an enormous distraction. All the machinations to replace her — when, how, and by whom — are going to play out in their own time, no matter what we do. The only certainty is that Mitch McConnell will do what he thinks best for him.

Dwelling on the possible scenarios will only make us crazy, and our influence over events is limited. There are plenty of shiny objects demanding our attention, so let’s not chase too many.

Because this is still, above all, about the election. No matter what we do, say, think, or fight about, this is the prize we absolutely must keep our eyes on.

If Democrats can take over the Congress and the presidency, much of what’s happening now can be mitigated. But right now, the only thing that matters is removing these criminals from office.

And to do this, I’m afraid we’ll need to let hate into our hearts. If it’s not there already.

The prime motivator of the current electorate is what Rachel Bitecofer calls “negative partisanship.” But she’s being scholarly and polite. The real word for it is hate.  

Ms. Bitecofer is a political scientist with serious analytical chops, who has become, in recent months, one of the go-to people for electoral analysis. She has parsed most of the available data from the 2018 mid-terms, and called bullshit on the conventional wisdom.

That wisdom says it was the Democratic strategy — ignoring Trump, while focusing exclusively on healthcare and “kitchen table” issues — that drove record turnout, which swept Democrats into power on a righteous blue wave.

Bitecofer shows that the wave came in spite of that strategy, not because of it. That the record turnout — on both sides — was the whole point. And that the turnout was driven, not by issues, but by negative partisanship. Each side felt the other was destroying their way of life. They still do.

Wave elections don’t come along that often, but when they do, they’re always fueled by extreme negative partisanship.

In other words, it was all about Trump. Hate him or love him. There were few shades of gray. Yes, healthcare was on our minds, but it was Trump-hate that turned us out to vote.

In recent history, Democrats have usually had the numbers to win, but they turn out too sporadically for their own good. Republicans have fewer numbers, but they turn out religiously. And yes, Republicans had their own record turnout in 2018, just not enough to overcome the wave of Democrats.

So if the mid-terms are a guide — and there’s every reason to think this next wave will be even bigger — Bitecofer says:

“The 2020 election will be a battle of the bases, with nothing less than the country’s survival as a functional democracy on the ballot. Partisanship is a hell of a drug—especially when it’s cut with a heavy dose of existential fear.”

I know that drug. I know how it got me going in 2018. Yes, I was concerned about all the life-altering issues at stake. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see they were secondary to my fear and loathing of Trump. And if I thought I hated him two years ago, I look back now and I’m appalled by my naivete. The drug is kicking in right now.

Republican voters are similarly driven. They have been conditioned to think of Democrats as godless pedophiles who will turn this country over to hordes of immigrant rapists and rampaging minorities, all of them invading the suburbs.

We can’t change their minds, so don’t even try. But we can learn from their hate.

Democrats don’t do hate very well. Hate embarrasses us. It’s too extreme, too visceral, and we’re generally people of moderation.

Real hate is as intense as love. Both live in the gut, both can cause gastric distress. Both can motivate.

The implication of Bitecofer’s work is that the only issue on the table is Trump, and it’s folly to focus on anything else. There is no better strategy we can come up with than a stomach-churning hatred of Donald Trump. We have no recourse but to embrace that hate and channel it. To use every weapon available to us to make him go away.

Each of us needs to figure out how to put the hate to constructive use. At a bare minimum, we need to give our own votes the best possible chance of being counted.

This is not a given. This is the first election, certainly in my lifetime, where the actual voting is not a no-brainer. Between the virus, the election chaos, and the breakdown of our system of government, there’s real work involved.

We each need to assess the options available in our state, understand the rules, and consider the risks both to our vote and to our health. We each need to weigh the odds and plan accordingly.

Because overwhelming turnout is mandatory. You don’t need to stress about issues. You don’t need to obsess on the Supreme Court. You don’t need to binge-watch MSNBC. You already know what you need to know.

As the Beatles might have said under these circumstances, all you need is loathe.

 

Berkley MI

Friday 09/25/20

Comments

  1. For at least six months my slogan has been, "hate Trump OUT LOUD at least once a day." It is helpful. Give it a try.
    Nice piece today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have plenty of "loathe" and I wake up pissed off every day by default, so I think I'm good to go. Thanks for the words of encouragement.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Joe Biden Isn’t Even Breathing Hard

Joe Biden hit it out of the park last week. His State of the Union speech, most agree, was pitch perfect. Even some Republicans, even some Fox pundits, even a toxic tool like Rick Santorum had to stretch to find something to quibble with, though not for lack of trying. Biden eviscerated Trump without once mentioning him by name. He castigated the Supreme Court, with all the due respect they weren’t due. He finessed the Middle East. He stood up for reproductive rights that his Catholic upbringing never allowed for. He taunted Republicans for their naked hypocrisy on immigration, called them out for their betrayal of Ukraine, and got righteously pissed off at what he’s too polite to call an attempted Christo-fascist coup. All this while demonstrating, quite convincingly, that eighty is the new sixty. What came through for me, most of all, was how much he gets off on this. You could see it in that stroll through the very venue that was his workplace for most of hi

The Trouble with Being Born

  In a red state, it’s no great privilege to be born. Certainly not from a legal standpoint. Republican-run governments are highly protective of the unborn, and are now extending legal protection to frozen embryos, at least in Alabama. If you happen to be one of those far-from-born organisms, you now enjoy all the rights of a living child. It’s when you get yourself born that things get complicated. Not that you would then lose those rights, just that they’d be widely ignored, poorly enforced, and cynically violated. But as long as you stay unborn, you’ve got lots of rights you don’t need. In Alabama — a theocracy-in-waiting — the entire nine months of your gestation are now protected by law, and violations of that law will be subject to investigation and enforcement. Logic would now say that if you, a formerly frozen embryo, were to die anywhere along that timeline, a charge of murder could be brought against anyone who might be seen as responsible. The crime

The Golden Age of Both-Siderism is Upon Us

Two things to consider going forward: One, Biden is way more popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. Two, Trump is way less popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. The common denominator here is the mainstream media, who seem bent on ushering the well-honed “both sides are bad” narrative into a golden age. The more Trump descends into a Shakespearean sort of madness, and the more the Republican party follows him into the abyss, the more the press will strain to find something, anything, that makes Democrats look equally bad. It isn’t easy, but this is their formula and they’re sticking to it. They stuck to it all through the 2022 midterms — remember the Red Wave? — and ended up looking like inept fools. There is no sign that they’ve learned anything from that. And it’s not just about their stories, or the deceptive spin they put on their headlines. It’s also about their dishonest use of polls. When The New York Times releases a poll sho