How Americans came to hate each other

With just days until the 2024 election, it can feel like Americans are more divided than ever. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have attacked opponents in increasingly vicious terms. There have already been incidents of political violence — including multiple alleged arsons targeting ballot boxes and a terrorism arrest in Arizona after the windows were repeatedly shot out of a Democratic Party office — and polling suggests voters are worried about more post-election violence.

There are serious stakes to the election, including democracy issues and abortion rights — but the intense, vitriolic polarization we’re experiencing now is largely based on our perceptions about each other, according to research from Johns Hopkins University professor Lilliana Mason. 

Mason, a professor of political science at the university’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Agora Institute, says this type of division, which she calls affective polarization, doesn’t require us to have wildly different policy disagreements to hate each other. Instead, she told Vox, “it’s based on feelings,” as well as misunderstandings about which groups, and what kind of people, are on the other side.

Through a series of surveys and experiments over four years, Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, a political communication professor at Louisiana State University, studied the origins of extreme partisanship among ordinary Americans for the 2022 book, Radical American Partisanship. Mason and Kalmoe found that around 40 percent of Americans surveyed were willing to use dehumanizing language about the other party — a metric she says can be a precursor to even more serious political violence.

Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Mason to understand how the American electorate got to this point and how we can get back to a more civil politics.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Noel King

You’ve written two books that seem relevant here. Tell me the names of your books. 

Lilliana Mason

The first book is Uncivil Agreement How Politics Became Our Identity. And the second book is Radical American Partisanship.

Noel King

Two main parties in the United States, Democrats and Republicans; as a researcher, what do you know about what we think about the other group that is incorrect?

Lilliana Mason

Everything! We all overestimate the extent to which people in the other party are extreme in terms of the policies. We also overestimate the degree to which the party is made up of groups that we kind of think of as like the stereotypical groups associated with the party. So, Republicans think that the Democratic Party is majority Black. It’s not. Democrats think that the Republican Party is majority wealthy people who make over $250,000 a year. It’s actually like 2 percent. And so we tend to assume that the stereotypical group that we think of when we think of that party, we tend to assume that that makes up the whole party and we’re all wrong. 

And in fact, political scientists and sociologists have done experiments where we correct people’s misperceptions and it actually makes them hate the other party less because they hadn’t realized that the party wasn’t made up of maybe people they didn’t like or wasn’t made up of people who are really extreme in their policy preferences. We are overestimating the extent to which the other party is made up of people that we assume we would really dislike. 

Noel King

How do you define partisanship? 

Lilliana Mason

The classic understanding of partisanship is just which party you vote for based on your assessments of politics. But more recently, we’re starting to think of partisanship as a social identity, meaning it’s a psychological connection to the other people that are in the party and feeling like what happens to our party impacts our own sense of self-esteem and self-worth. The traditional view is thinking of choosing who to vote for like a banker chooses an investment. And really what we’re doing today is more like sports fans cheering on our team.

Noel King

That’s partisanship. What is polarization? 

Lilliana Mason

So polarization can also be two things. It can be more than that, actually. But the classic understanding of polarization was that we are disagreeing about issues. So Democrats are really liberal and Republicans are really conservative on all of these different issues. But increasingly, what we’re finding now is that our polarization is partly about that, but it’s also about how we feel about each other. So Democrats and Republicans really don’t like one another, and we call that affective polarization. So it’s based on feelings.

And really the important thing about understanding the effect of polarization is that it doesn’t require us to disagree in order to hate each other. We use theories from social psychology about why any groups don’t like each other to explain why Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other, and it doesn’t necessarily require that they disagree on, you know, marginal tax rates.

Noel King

Does the data really say that people of different parties dislike or even hate each other? 

Lilliana Mason

Yeah. In fact, in my first book, I asked people how would they feel if their child married somebody from the other party or how would they feel if someone from the other party moved in next door to them. And those types of questions — people really don’t like the idea of their child marrying somebody from the other party. They don’t really want to have social contact with people from the other party. And that type of feeling isn’t entirely rooted in disagreement. So people who have really moderate policy preferences can still really dislike people from the other party.

In the second book, we started to ask more extreme questions. So we asked, “Do you think people on the other party are not just wrong for politics, they’re downright evil?” Or even, “Do they deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals?” So a dehumanization question, which is kind of the most extreme of the questions, and we are finding that about 50 percent of partisans are willing to say that their partisan opponents are evil, and between 20 to 40 percent are even willing to dehumanize people in the other party. 

We started asking this question in 2017. The reason we asked the question is because this is the type of thing that we measure in other countries, if there’s a mass violence event. This type of attitude exists beforehand. It doesn’t always lead to violence, but whenever there is mass violence, you have to have these dehumanizing and vilifying attitudes present beforehand, because otherwise it’s really hard to harm another human being and still feel like a morally good person. And really, the only way to do that is to think that they are a threat to you, that they’re evil and that they’re subhuman. And so when we see genocide in other places, for example, these attitudes exist before before the violence occurs. And what we wanted to know was, did these attitudes exist in the American electorate? And no one had really asked that question before. 

Noel King

Tell me about what kind of polarization we’re seeing these days. 

Lilliana Mason

So what we’re seeing is mostly affective polarization. So it’s basically the type of polarization that means that we don’t like one another. And if you think about human groups throughout all of human history, there are plenty of reasons that two human groups don’t like one another. Humans hate one another for all kinds of reasons. And it’s very much that type of visceral dislike and distrust that any two social groups can have against each other that we’re observing in the Democratic and Republican parties right now.

Noel King

Disagreeing on policy seems to me quite normal; thinking that a person in the other party is evil seems a bit less normal to me. What is this rooted in, this affective polarization? Where did this come from? 

Lilliana Mason

A lot of this animosity between Democrats and Republicans has come out of a trend over the last many decades of not only our partisan identities being the thing that we fight over during elections, but also all of these other identities. And since the 1960s, our racial identities, our religious identities, all other cultural, even geographic identities have moved into alignment with our party identities. So what happens is that when we’re thinking about politics and who wins and who loses, we’re not just thinking my party wins or my party loses. We’re thinking, “If my party wins, then my racial group wins and my religious group wins.” And all of these other parts of my identity are winners and it feels really good and vice versa. “If my party loses, all these different parts of my identity are also losing,” and that feels really, really terrible. So the stakes get a lot higher when we think about our electoral choices and who is in control of our government as reflective of who we are as a human being. 

Noel King

I would like to not live in this version of America. There’s an election to cover. How do we, in all seriousness, fix this problem? 

Lilliana Mason

We’ve tried a number of interventions in our surveys, so we’ll embed an experiment in the survey to try to see if we can make people less violent or less approving of violence. And one thing that we found that basically always works is to have them read a quote from a leader. So in our experiments, we use Biden or Trump, a quote that just says something like, “violence is never acceptable. That’s just not how we do things here.” And people who read that quote are less likely to approve of political violence than those who’ve read nothing in a control condition. So simply reading a sentence from a leader can get people to kind of step back from this aggressive stance. We need to get something back. 

One of the things I think that the last few years have done — and I think Trump as a candidate in particular — is really break the norms of what’s acceptable behavior in American politics and in American society. The idea that we can use racist and misogynistic language against our fellow citizens, the idea that we can tell lies and not be punished for it; you know, a lot of the things that our politics is characterized by right now are things that 20 years ago would not have ever been allowed on the political stage. And there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans that just remember a different time. And what worries me is that young people don’t. So we’re increasingly in this world where young people don’t know that it was nicer, more diplomatic, and so I hope that we can pay attention to the norms that have been broken because the only way to enforce a norm is for people around you, when you break the norm, to tell you to stop it. Laws are enforced with law enforcement. Norms are enforced with us, with people. 

And the reason that shame is such a powerful emotion, is because it’s the way that we enforce norms. To the extent that together as a community, if we see somebody behaving in a way that we think of as unacceptable, that we as a community can say to them, “That’s beyond the pale, that’s that you just crossed the line. I’m not accepting that kind of behavior.” And we haven’t been doing that to each other in many years, I think. But to the extent that we can kind of remember what it’s like to be normal people and treat each other like we’re part of a community together and that we’re part of the same society, that’s something that we all can do on our own.