According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, "Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades." In the six years since the results of the study were published, the nation has indeed become more divided. A simple survey of attitudes and events since 2014 seem to demonstrate this trend manifests in every say life during heated political discussions at Thanksgiving dinner that ignite into Facebook wars that last for months. They also manifest as national events like protests, riots, and attacks.
Americans have begun to recognize that political polarization is a problem, but finding a solution also seems to lend itself to divisiveness. The problem is multifaceted, but the root of this divide is certainly related to our de-facto two-party system -- where additional parties are not explicitly forbidden, but remain at an extreme disadvantage and are often accused of spoiling elections. While this bipartisan system seems normal to us, this system is an outlier among other democratic nations that often have many parties competing for the vote.
Social media is often accused of providing an incubator for groups of extremists that are interested in sewing division. Critics of these platforms allege that the companies have a responsibility to police content to prevent extremists from organizing online to perpetrate acts of violence. This argument between people, politicians, and tech giants if, when, and how we should censor speech online have in their own way created a radical new set of constitutional issues the seem to encourage the divide. Let's face it -- it's unlikely that any of the founding fathers could have anticipated that we would have virtual public spaces where we would have to manage the limits of freedoms of speech and assembly. There is a tradition in America of protecting speech that the majority of Americans would find heinous at worst or distasteful at best. Defending what offends us is actually our first line of defense against the powerful that would seek to censor us. While protection of free speech is paramount, there are limits, and as a nation we have not yet reached an agreement on if having a potentially flammable online presence is the same as yelling "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater.
While the role of legislation versus the role tech giants in policing speech online is certainly exciting to explore, there is a more insidious silent contributor this problem, and both sides -- the tech giants and the government have an interest in keeping it out of the public discussion. That contributor is that goals of social media and the goals of democracy do not always align and the combining them is a bad idea. The business model of social media is driven by advertisements, so social media platforms can provide the public with a free product. At the same time, they provide advertisers with a product that they have to pay for. To make it worth it, the platforms develop algorithms that grab your attention and keep you autopilot so that you are more likely to purchase the products that have been selected especially for you and fit your needs with alarming accuracy. While there is a separate issue of how and if we should regulate advertisements on social media, there is a difference between buying into an unimpressive electric toothbrush that takes six months to arrive and buying into a candidate or a party that benefits when your views become more extreme and you become more intolerant of the views of others.
Once I started identifying some factors that were contributing to the political divide, I wanted to find out a little bit more the mechanics of extremism. Since 2016, many of us have seen our own views and/or the views of others in our lives become more extreme. This led me to wonder: what are the ingredients needed to whip up extremism?
When I was working on my degree in linguistics, I became interested in frame semantics and construction grammar, and eventually began to explore the work of George Lakoff. While researching Lakoff's work, I became acquainted with Moral Politics Theory, which asserts that political views are informed by our moral views, which are in turn informed by basic conceptual metaphors.
In MPT, the metaphor of 'The Nation as Family' is used to explain how a person becomes either liberal or conservative. The first group that we belong to is our family, and as a result we use the metaphor of the family as our template of how to interact within other groups. There are two version of the metaphor that are based on research from a sociological study about family roles. The Strict Father model informs conservative views, while the Nurturant Parent model informs liberal views. Differences in these models are what lead liberals and conservatives to view those with different opinions as immoral.
Lakoff emphasizes that these groups are generalizations and most people are biconceptual. This means that their inner model of the family has some features of both. Politicians that understand that they can persuade voters that are on the fence to vote for them if they are able to evoke the correct moral framework. Language is the vehicle that they use to evoke these metaphors and sway voters.