Edsall sometimes does good reporting on the far right. But has also been positioning himself as a liberal concern troll at least since his 1991 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, co-authored with Mary Edsall. That book is a good reflection of the general atmosphere among Clintonesque Democrats of that time. The kind of thing you hear in those clips of Joe Biden in the 1990s talking about "predators" to justify draconian federal crime laws that put huge numbers of young black men in prison for minor drug offenses.
In this column, at a time when far-right violence in the US is common and left-wing versions virtually non-existent, and with Trump playing Viktor Orbán in the White House, Edsall blames partisanship and inclination to violence on, yes, Both Sides Do It!
He cites a study called "Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies" by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason. Some other time, I may post more about that paper itself. But how Edsall uses it in his column should immediately raise questions about how well the survey material correlates with his argument.
Unless you're a FOX News junkie or a TV pundit, it's painfully easy to see right now how radical right political violence is a serious problem with no far left parallel on the "other side" in the US. So Edsall's citations like this need to be absorbed with some very critical judgment:
We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.”Edsall is just being a brat in that interpretation. The question he cites is near meaningless unless supplemented by others, most notably a differentiation between whether the responsdents are talking about legal, official violence, e.g., the police arresting someone planning a mass murder, or extralegal violence.
Kalmoe and Mason analyzed the data to see what kind of voter was likely to adopt extremely critical views of the opposition party:
Strongly identifying with one political side is associated with increased political hostility toward opponents in terms of moral disengagement, partisan schadenfreude, and partisan violence.... Contrary to the expectation that the losers of elections might be more inclined to violence, the two authors determined that winning increases support for violence against the opposition.
There was “significantly more support for partisan violence among strong partisans when told their party was more likely than not to win in 2020.”
Overall, the authors wrote, “our evidence suggests that winning more than losing prompts strong partisans to feel less opposed to partisan violence.”
There is an obvious possibility on why people might more inclined to violence if their side wins. The Republicans think the Democrats would try a violent uprising against Trump because that's the kind of thing old Republican white people are being fed on a daily basis by Republican-leaning media figures. That's divorced from reality, of course. On the Republican side, however, Trump himself is threatening extralegal violence if a Democratic President is elected in 2020. And there is plenty of hardcore rightwing political violence actually happening now.
There's nothing surprising in itself sinister that people would think that if their party's candidate wins, the other side would start engaging in violence, and therefore legal, official, governmental force would need to be used to counter it. And since Trump is actually threatening and encouraging violence, and since far right violence is happening right now, it's pretty obvious why Democrats would think official force might be need in response to extralegal violence by people sympathizing with the loser of the election.
Tom Edsall's interpretation of statistics, and of politics, need to be read with particular care.
No comments:
Post a Comment