Written by Riley Hutchings
“He’s on the furniture, he weighs under 25 pounds, and he looks like he might be drunk. That is a democratic dog,” said Marc Hetherington on Monday, standing next to a projection of a fluffy white dog. This was just one example of the practices in daily life that Hetherington argued can predict a person’s political views.
Hetherington is a successful author and a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He is currently studying the polarization of political parties and how the schism has evolved into today’s wide gap. On Monday, Oct. 23, Hetherington drew an audience big enough to fill the Mohrman Theatre in Armstrong.
Many students went to the lecture for a serious explanation of the extent of polarization of political parties and how the country can overcome the division. Hetherington managed to rationalize the divide while leaving the crowd practically roaring with laughter for almost an hour.
Hetherington started by making connections between many day-to-day things that are indicative of a person’s political view. He presented studies suggesting conservatives like lighter brews of beer, they prefer meatloaf over ethnic food, they use PCs over Macs, they watch more sports and reality TV, and they favor dogs. Of course, the dog mentioned above belonged to a Democrat, and these trends come with many other similar exceptions.
On a larger scale, Hetherington used these trends to start his explanation of the “biological, physiological, and especially personality differences that those on the political left seem to have from those on the political right.”
He provided extensive evidence that conservatives and liberals are fundamentally different. After the funny indications like the tendencies mentioned above, Hetherington went on to talk about the underlying factor that makes Republicans and Democrats dissimilar: their mindsets. Conservatives tend to have fixed mindsets, whereas liberals are often more open-minded.
These different outlooks affect every aspect of life. Hetherington argued that a large difference is that conservatives tend to prefer traditions instead of change. Accordingly, over the past century conservatives have moved out to the suburbs where traditions are more prevalent, and liberals have migrated to cities. This has exacerbated not only a mental but also a physical gap between the political parties. That gap is bigger now than ever before.
Part of the reason for that, Hetherington explained, is because the topics of focus in elections have shifted. Whereas 40 years ago elections were very focused on economics, they have now moved towards more social issues, adding another layer of clashing views.
People now hate opposing political parties much more than they historically have. “We haven’t gotten any more fond of our own party, but man we’ve gotten to hate, hate, hate the other side,” Hetherington said. He even presented a study proving that Republicans hate the Democratic Party more than they hate atheists, and that Democrats hate the Republican Party more than they hate fundamentalist Christians.
Political divisions, he said, are even stronger than those created by race and sexual orientation.
The solution Hetherington presented to bridge this vast political gap is to create a dialogue between political parties. He said that though people often think things like, “Good God I can’t believe he said that,” after someone expresses a political view. “Maybe we just have to get past that,” he explained, “and see whether there are more things that we have in common than not—not shut off the conversation.”
In an interview after Hetherington’s talk, Colorado College Professor Elizabeth Coggins talked about how studying the personality differences in opposing political parties, like Hetherington does, helps explain political polarization.
When asked what she found to be the biggest problem with political polarization, Coggins said, “We tend to cluster ourselves around people just like us, and that robs us of really important dialogues and important interactions with people who don’t think like us. The world is a far less interesting place when we only interact with those who are just like us.”
Like Hetherington, Coggins has found that the way to overcome this polarization is to create a dialogue between people with diverse political views. In an effort to work towards this at CC, she has started the “Democratic Dialogues Project,” which brings CC students and Air Force Academy students together to discuss controversial issues.
Democrats and Republicans vary widely in their stances on social issues. Though liberals tend to be more open-minded and are supposedly more open to compromise, conservatives actually care more about party polarization. Maybe, Hetherington suggests, that is because republicans are more comfortable with people disagreeing with their opinions.