There has been a remarkable erosion in public tolerance of “offensive expression about race, gender and religion,” according to Dennis Chong and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California, and Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley.
“Tolerance has declined overall,” they add, particularly “for a category of speech that is considered unworthy of First Amendment protection because it violates the goal of equality.”
The three authors cite the 2018 promulgation of new guidelines by the American Civil Liberties Union — which was formerly unequivocal in its defense of free speech — as a reflection of the changing views within a large segment of the liberal community. Under the 2018 guidelines, the A.C.L.U. would now consider several factors that might warrant a refusal to take on certain cases:
“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed” depending on
the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.
Chong, Citrin and Levy write:
Arguments for censoring hate speech have gained ground alongside the strengthening of the principle of equality in American society. The expansion of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, L.G.B.T.Q., and other groups that have suffered discrimination has caused a re-evaluation of the harms of slurs and other derogatory expressions in professional and social life. The transformation of social attitudes regarding race, gender, and sexuality has fundamentally changed the tenor of debate over speech controversies.
Traditionally, they point out,
the main counterargument against free speech has been a concern for maintaining social order in the face of threatening movements and ideas, a classic divide between liberal and conservative values. Now, arguments against allowing hate speech in order to promote equality have changed the considerations underlying political tolerance and divided liberals amongst themselves. The repercussions of this value conflict between the respective norms of equality and free expression have rippled far beyond its epicenter in the universities to the forefront of American politics.
In an email, Chong wrote that “the tolerance of white liberals has declined significantly since 1980, and tolerance levels are lowest among the youngest age cohorts.” If, he continued, “we add education to the mix, we find that the most pronounced declines over time have occurred among white, college educated liberals, with the youngest age cohorts again having the lowest tolerance levels.”
The Chong-Citrin-Levy paper focuses on the concept of harm in shaping public policy and in the growing determination of large swaths of progressives that a paramount goal of public discourse is to avoid inflicting injury, including verbal injury, on marginalized groups. In this context, harm can be understood as injury to physical and mental health occurring “when stress levels are perpetually elevated by living in a constant state of hyper-vigilance.”
Proponents of what is known as moral foundations theory — formulated in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph — argue that across all cultures “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics.’” The five foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.
One of the central claims of this theory, as described in “Mapping the Moral Domain” — a 2011 paper by Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva and Peter H. Ditto — is that
Liberal morality would prioritize harm and fairness over the other three foundations because the “individualizing foundations” of harm and fairness are all that are needed to support the individual-focused contractual approaches to society often used in enlightenment ethics, whereas conservative morality would also incorporate in-group, authority, and purity to a substantial degree (because these ‘binding foundations’ are about binding people together into larger groups and institutions).
I asked Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, about the role of concerns over ideology and gender in the changing character of liberalism.
“I think we need to move beyond a simple ‘gender gap’ story to better understand how conceptualizations of womanhood impact politics,” she replied. “The first way is to think about the gender gap as a ‘feminist gap.’”
From this perspective, Wronski continued, men can hold feminist values and women can be anti-feminist, noting that “the attitudes people have about gender roles in society have a bigger impact on political outcomes than simple male/female identification.”
Wronski cited a paper, “Partisan Sorting and the Feminist Gap in American Politics” by Leonie Huddy and Johanna Willmann, which argues that feminism “can be distinguished from political ideology when construed as support for women’s political advancement, the equalization of male and female power, the removal of barriers that impede women’s success, and a strengthening of women’s autonomy.” Huddy and Willmann noted that in a “2015 national survey, 60 percent of women and 33 percent of men considered themselves a feminist.”
There are substantial differences, however, in how feminist women and men align politically, according to their analysis:
We expect women’s feminist loyalty and antipathy to play a greater role in shaping their partisanship than feminist affinity among men because feminist and anti-feminist identities have greater personal relevance for women than men, elicit stronger emotions, and will be more central to women’s political outlook.
The authors created a feminism scale based on the respondent’s identification with feminism, their support for female politicians, perception of sex discrimination and gender resentment. Based on survey data from the 2012 and 2016 elections, they found that
Men scored significantly lower than women in both years (men: .55 in 2012, .46 in 2016; women: .60 in 2012, .54 in 2016). Nonetheless, men and women also overlap considerably in their support and opposition to feminism.
Personality characteristics play a key role, they found: “Openness to experience consistently boosts feminism.” A predilection for authoritarianism, in contrast, “consistently lowers support for feminism” while “agreeableness promotes feminism,” although its effects are strongest “among white respondents.”
So too do demographic differences: “Religiously observant men and women are less supportive of feminism than their nonobservant counterparts. Well-educated respondents, especially well-educated women, are more supportive of feminism.” Single white women are “more supportive of feminism than women living with a partner.”
Feminism, in addition, is strongly correlated with opposition to “traditional morality” — defined by disagreement with such statements as “we should be more tolerant of people who live according to their own moral standards” and agreement with such assertions as “the newer lifestyles are contributing to a breakdown in our society.” The correlation grew from minus .41 in 2012 to minus .53 in 2016.
During this century, the power of feminism to signal partisanship has steadily increased for men and even more so for women, Huddy and Willman found: “In 2004, a strong feminist woman had a .32 chance of being a strong Democrat. This increased slightly to .35 in 2008 and then increased more substantially to .45 in 2012 and .56 in 2016.” In 2004 and 2008, “there was a .21 chance that a strong feminist male was also a strong Democrat. That increased slightly to .25 in 2012 and more dramatically to .42 in 2016.”
In an email, Huddy elaborated on the partisan significance of feminist commitments:
It is important to remember that women can be Democrats or Republicans, but feminists are concentrated in the Democratic Party. Appealing to an ethic of care may not attract Republican women if it conflicts with their religious views concerning the family or opposition to expanded government spending. Sending a signal to feminists that the Democratic Party is behind them shores up one of their major constituencies.
In a 2018 paper, “Effect of Ideological Identification on the Endorsement of Moral Values Depends on the Target Group,” Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and Mark J. Brandt, a professor of psychology at Michigan State, argue that moral foundations theory that places liberals and conservatives in separate camps needs to be modified.
Voelkel and Brandt maintain that “ideological differences in moral foundations” are not necessarily the result of differences in moral values per se, but can also be driven by “ingroup-versus-outgroup categorizations.” The authors call this second process “political group conflict hypothesis.”
This hypothesis, Voelkel and Brandt contend,
has its roots in research that emphasizes that people’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors are strongly influenced by the ideological groups they identify with and is consistent with work suggesting that people’s ideological identifications function like a group identification. According to this view, liberals and conservatives may selectively and flexibly endorse moral values depending on the target group of the moral act.
Voelkel and Brandt cite as an example the moral foundation of fairness:
The strong version of the moral divide account predicts that liberals should be more likely to endorse the fairness foundation no matter the target group. The political group conflict account makes a different prediction: Liberals will condemn unfair treatment of liberal groups and groups stereotyped as liberal more than conservatives. However, conservatives will condemn unfair treatment of conservative groups and groups stereotyped as conservative more than liberals. Such a finding would suggest that the fairness foundation is not unique to liberals, as both groups care about fairness for their own political in-groups.
The surveys the authors conducted show that
Consistent with the political group conflict hypothesis, we found that the effect of ideological identification depended on whether moral acts involved liberal or conservative groups. Consistent with the moral divide hypothesis, we found the pattern identified by MFT (liberals score higher on the individualizing foundations and conservatives score higher on the binding foundations) in the moderate target condition.
Put another way:
We find evidence that both processes may play a part. On one hand, we provide strong evidence that conservatives endorse the binding foundations more than liberals. On the other hand, we have shown that political group conflicts substantively contribute to the relationship between ideological identification and the endorsement of moral values.
The debate over moral values and political conflict has engaged new contributors.
Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a former research fellow at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, argues that
Women are having more of a role to play in intellectual life, so we’re moving toward female norms regarding things like tradeoffs between feelings and the search for truth. If these trends started to reverse, we could call it a “masculinization” of the culture I suppose. The male/female divide is not synonymous with right/left, as a previous generation’s leftism was much more masculine, think gender relations in communist countries or the organized labor movement in the U.S. at its peak.
The role of gender in politics has been further complicated by a controversial and counterintuitive finding set forth in “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education” by Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary, professors of psychology at Essex University and the University of Missouri.
The authors propose that:
paradoxically, countries with lower levels of gender equality had relatively more women among STEM graduates than did more gender equal countries. This is a paradox, because gender-equal countries are those that give girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities, and generally promote girls’ and women’s engagement in STEM fields.
Assuming for the moment that this gender equality paradox is real, how does it affect politics and polarization in the United States?
In an email, Mohammad Atari, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Southern California and lead author of “Sex differences in moral judgments across 67 countries,” noted that “some would argue that in more gender-egalitarian societies men and women are more free to express their values regardless of external pressures to fit a predefined gender role,” suggesting an easing of tensions.
Pivoting from gender to race, however, the nonpartisan Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group this month issued “Racing Apart: Partisan Shifts on Racial Attitudes Over the Last Decade.” The study showed that
Democrats’ and independents’ attitudes on identity-related topics diverged significantly from Republicans’ between 2011 and 2020 — including their attitudes on racial inequality, police, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, and Muslims. Most of this divergence derives from shifts among Democrats, who have grown much more liberal over this period.
The murder of George Floyd produced a burst of racial empathy, Robert Griffin, Mayesha Quasem, John Sides and Michael Tesler wrote, but they note that poll data suggests “this shift in attitudes was largely temporary. Weekly surveys from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project show that any aggregate changes had mostly evaporated by January 2021.”
Additional evidence suggests that partisan hostility between Democrats and Republicans is steadily worsening. In their August 2021 paper, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization,” Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, both economists at Stanford University, and Jesse M. Shapiro, a professor of political economy at Brown, wrote:
In 1978, according to our calculations, the average partisan rated in-party members 27.4 points higher than out-party members on a “feeling thermometer” ranging from 0 to 100. In 2020 the difference was 56.3, implying an increase of 1.08 standard deviations.
Their conclusion is that over the past four decades, “the United States experienced the most rapid growth in affective polarization among the 12 O.E.C.D. countries we consider” — the other 11 are France, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland.
In other words, whether we evaluate the current conflict-ridden political climate in terms of moral foundations theory, feminism or the political group conflict hypothesis, the trends are not favorable, especially if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is close.
If the continuing anger, resentment and denial among Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest is a precursor of the next election, current trends, in combination with the politicization of election administration by Republican state legislatures, suggest that the loser in 2024, Republican or Democrat, will not take defeat lying down.
The forces fracturing the political system are clearly stronger than the forces pushing for consensus.
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