“Politics,” they say, “ain’t beanbag.” In other words, it’s not just a game. Today, many descriptions of American political life begin with the observation that there is a great deal of disagreement when it comes to our political beliefs. And this disagreement is characterized as being increasingly rancorous, polarized, and ubiquitous. Family get-togethers turn sour over political arguments. Relationships end, or don’t ever begin, because of political differences. Red states and blue states, or, more accurately, the more rural and more urban parts of every state, see themselves as fundamentally at odds. Of course, our politicians are part of this, too. Whether they set the tone or reflect it back at us, their campaigns are notable for their relentless negativity, and their efforts at governing often seem to be an extension of those campaigns rather than vice versa.
Moreover, outcomes in American politics — elections won or lost, bills that pass or fail to pass, precedents that are upheld or overturned by courts — are explained based on diagnoses of dysfunctions in how we form our political beliefs. Citizens might be described as being affected by alternative facts, fake news, misinformation, or conspiracy theories, depending on who’s doing the describing. We might have failed to trust the experts or ended up in an echo chamber because of our news consumption or social media habits. We might be treating politics like tribal warfare, in which getting beliefs right isn’t the point, or as a cult or (in a derogatory sense) a fundamentalist religion, in which certain beliefs are taken to be beyond rational doubt and questioning them is taken to be heresy. We might be in the thralls of an ideology, emerging organically from the desires of those in power. Or we might be grasping at straws in a world too complex for our silly little brains.
In my new book Political Beliefs, I try to approach these issues by asking four questions. First, what is a political belief to begin with? Second, how do people form their political beliefs? Third, how should people form their political beliefs? And fourth, what are some important phenomena in American life that affect our political beliefs?
Some of our beliefs have obvious political consequences. If we believe a candidate is corrupt, we’ll likely vote for the other one. If we believe a policy will be bad for the country, we’ll likely support candidates who oppose it and argue against it when it comes up in conversation. In my view, lots of beliefs about politics aren’t political and lots of political beliefs aren’t about politics. My belief that there are nine justices on the Supreme Court isn’t a political belief, even though it’s about politics. But my beliefs on topics including rates of gun violence, the validity of standard economic theory, or even the details of some altercation that’s become newsworthy — such beliefs can be political. That’s because they’re controversial in a way that relates to politics.
One of the most important facts about American politics is that our beliefs about such controversies tend to cluster. This is certainly true of our beliefs about public policy: If you know what someone thinks about taxes, you can predict with some reliability what he or she thinks about immigration, gun control, abortion, and so on. But it’s also true of the other sorts of political beliefs, the ones that aren’t about politics. You can predict from someone’s stance on taxes what he or she thinks about the personal lives and motivations of politicians, what he or she thinks happened in he said, she said news stories, what he or she thinks the value of a university degree is, and so on.
And that’s not all. Political beliefs are highly correlated these days with things that aren’t beliefs at all, such as where you live, what sort of car you drive, where you buy your coffee, and what television shows you watch. Politics is in everything now, a phenomenon Vanderbilt University philosopher Robert Talisse calls “political saturation.”
How did we get politically saturated? One kind of explanation has it that our political beliefs come from a felt sense of identity, belonging, or purpose in some social group. We take on beliefs because they fit with who we take ourselves to be — whether we are red, blue, or something different; radical, moderate, or in between; and so on. If this is right, that sense of who we are is probably also the source of our other pseudo-political activities — choosing a car or cafe, for instance.
This explanation fits well with a sophisticated understanding of the most important phenomenon in American political beliefs: polarization. Rightly understood, polarization is most of all an increase in this clustering of different beliefs and activities. The more clustering there is, the easier it is to “kick out” people whose beliefs and activities don’t match the identity of their group. Clustering also makes it easy to moralize our political beliefs. At a certain point, it starts to look as though there really are only two types of people in the world: us and them.
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But when we reflect on our political beliefs from the perspective of rationality, these clusters start to break down. Many of these political issues really have little to do with one another. What sort of coincidence would be required for the other “side” to get them all wrong? If I reflect on my beliefs and find that they’re exactly the ones an outside observer would expect someone like me to have, maybe I ought to reconsider them.
Still, there remains a lot to be said and asked about political beliefs after this part of the story is told. Why did politics come to play a central role in our identities so recently? What did it replace? What might replace politics in the future? Is it bad for politics to feature this way in our lives? Does it lead to greater civic involvement or merely to greater interpersonal conflict? Can this sort of engagement with politics be shifted toward rational investigations, or do these sorts of underpinnings doom us to political irrationality? Regardless of our answers to these questions, I hope thinking hard about our political beliefs can help us to think about just what we get from politics — and just what politics gets from us. Our political processes and institutions are important, so we should be careful not to treat them like beanbag.
Oliver Traldi is a John and Daria Barry postdoctoral research fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
