[This book explores how social identities of various kinds have
spurred the divisiveness of our politics, and how politics has itself
become a kind of social identity.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

UNCIVIL AGREEMENT: HOW POLITICS BECAME OUR IDENTITY  
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Todd Nicholas Fuist
June 25, 2019
Mobilizing Ideas
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_ This book explores how social identities of various kinds have
spurred the divisiveness of our politics, and how politics has itself
become a kind of social identity. _

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_Uncivil Agreement
How Politics Became Our Identity_
Lilliana Mason
University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226524542

Scholars of social movements have long known that identity is a key
factor in mobilization. Taylor and Whittier’s classic 1992 piece and
Melucci’s 1989 and 1996 books highlighted the value of the concept
for understanding movement action, and it has been theoretically
central to the subfield ever since. A number of recent books, however,
have demonstrated the usefulness of identity for thinking about
politics more broadly. This includes the recent wave of ethnographies
focusing on conservatives, such as Hochchild’s _Strangers in Their
Own Land, _Gest’s _The New Minority_, Braunstein’s _Prophets and
Patriots_, and Burke’s _Race, Class, and Gender in the Tea Party_,
as well as work on voting behavior, like Achen and Bartels’
_Democracy for Realists_. These books demonstrate the degree to which
identity underpins the entirety of our political behavior.

Liliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our
Identity_, is a new and compelling entry in our ever-unfolding
understanding of identity and politics.  …Drawing on voluminous
statistical data, Mason’s key argument is that our democracy is
threatened by the “stacking” of identities. By this, she means
that our identities are increasingly “socially sorted.”
Historically, people used to have a variety of “cross-cutting”
identities. The average person belonged to many different social
groups that may have divergent material and ideological interests. For
example, region, class, and ideology did not map neatly onto
partisanship at mid-century. Upper-class southerners tended to be
Democrats, while upper-class Northerners were Republican.

Similarly, both parties had internal wings that were liberal and
conservative. Ultimately, this led to people whose partisanship was
mediated by the nuance of their connections to others both inside and
outside of their party. A rich Southerner might feel socially
connected to other Democrats from the South, while sharing economic
interests with Republicans from the North. Put simply, sharing a pew
or a street or a board room with people who belonged to a different
political party than you mitigated any temptation to venture into the
extremes of partisanship.

For a variety of reasons, though, most of which are well documented,
the parties “sorted.” The socio-political realignment of the
parties after the civil rights movement, increasing geographic
segregation of ideologically polarized people, and changes in the
religious landscape have all contributed to what Mason calls
“mega-identities.” Rather than identities that cut across
partisanship, contemporary individuals are more likely to have their
identities stacked vertically. Evangelical Christians, rural folk,
Southerners, conservatives, and people in the business world are
increasingly Republican. Nonwhites, the secular, urbanites, and
liberals are increasingly Democrats. This ultimately deepens the
ideological, social, and cultural differences between the political
parties.

Drawing on Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory, as well as a
bevy of statistical data, Mason shows that this isn’t as simple as
people preferring the policies of one party over the other and acting
accordingly. Rather, even partisans whose stated policy preferences
_should_ align them with the other party _still_ report consistently
“warmer” feelings towards their own party by large margins.
Additionally, Mason demonstrates people who deeply identify with a
party, rather than people who feel particularly strongly about issues,
are more likely to engage in partisan activism. Social identity
theory, she notes, predicts this. When one identifies strongly with a
particular group, an insult to that group is deeply personal. And, as
Mason suggests, when one identifies with a number of groups stacked
into a “mega-identity,” winning at all costs and humiliating your
opponent become profoundly important to one’s sense of self.

In a way, _Uncivil Agreement_, along with other recent work such as
the aforementioned _Democracy for Realists _and Sides, Vavreck, and
Tessler’s _Identity Crisis_, are the quantitative companion pieces
both to the great number of ethnographies on conservatives discussed
earlier, as well as to recent books lamenting the disintegration of
our political norms, including Mounk’s _The People vs. Democracy
_and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s _How Democracies Die._ If we take this
cluster of work together, we have three key questions that they circle
around. First, why has partisanship so dramatically increased in
recent decades? Second, what does this look like at the level of lived
experience? Third, what are the possible outcomes of these changes for
our political system?

_Uncivil Agreement_ can’t answer question two, at least not like the
recent ethnographies discussed above can, but it has a great deal to
say about questions one and three. Mason deftly shows that social
sorting has created a U.S. politics in which partisan victory is
preferable to policy enactment, ultimately resulting in the ascendency
of a candidate like Donald Trump. She also provides a hard look at the
potential negative consequences of a society with partisans so
thoroughly sorted. The norms of our democracy, she suggests, require
people who are willing to view their opponents as human beings rather
than enemies or obstacles. And yet our stacked mega-identities make
this increasingly difficult.

Personally, I am often skeptical of the suggestion that cross-partisan
cooperation is necessarily good. As Lee’s recent book _Insecure
Majorities_ suggests, an era of close competition between parties
suggests that refusing to reach across the aisle is wise for people
with strong policy preferences, given that they can expect to have
control of the engines of government in a few short years. As someone
who, personally, has strong policy preferences, I’m not inherently
sold on the idea that we should be meeting in the middle. Nonetheless,
Mason’s wide-ranging analysis, showing the exhausting preference for
victory over policy, the growing extremism of partisans, and the
importance of stacked identities for understanding contemporary
politics, is one of the most compelling and sobering books I have
recently read. If you care about the state of our political system,
Mason’s book should absolutely be on your summer reading list.

 

 

* U.S. Politics
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* partisanship
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* Political Science
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