Class 34. Is God Really Republican?
It turns out that your political identity can drive your beliefs and behavior, rather than the other way around. That's a problem for democracy.
If you are just joining The Freedom Academy, welcome! As a reminder, this post is a standalone “lesson” and you do not need to be caught up to follow along! I’ll reference any previous posts that offer relevant background, and you can always visit the syllabus and catch up at your own leisure. All class posts have an audio recording if you prefer to multitask while listening to me lecture!
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If you clicked on this post because of its provocative title, there’s a good reason: it’s clickbait. You either fell for something that was identity confirming, or identity threatening — two things that have a strong psychological pull on your behavior. Next month, I’ll be segueing into the psychology of disinformation, where we’ll explore this further. But before closing out our module on political polarization and group identity, I wanted to tie together the themes we’ve discussed in the last few lessons by looking at ways in which our partisan divide is overlapping with a cultural divide — which might explain why it feels like we are truly in a political war over two starkly different visions of America.
To recap the last few lessons, in Class 31 we looked at the social dynamics of group identity, and why feeling too closely bonded with a group or “tribe” fosters conformity, engenders mistrust and lack of empathy for non-group members, and provides fertile ground for leaders to manipulate members of the group. In Class 32, I explained how political affiliation has come to be the dominant “tribe” most Americans identify with. And in Class 33, we discussed with Professor Jacob Hacker why political polarization in America has been asymmetric, with the center of gravity for Republicans moving much farther to the right than their opposition has to the left. (If you want critical context for what has happened at the Supreme Court in recent years and especially this term, these last two lessons are worth a visit.)
All of the above raises a chicken-and-egg question about our polarization, and how it affects our views, and in turn, our behavior: Are we drawn to one party or the other because they align with our beliefs, or does our a priori partisan identification as a Democrat or Republican shape our values and viewpoints? It’s an important question, because if the former is true, it means that as one party gets more extreme and morally corrupt, it should lose adherents. But if it’s the latter, then people who are already in the “tribe” can be radicalized to accept, believe, and behave in ways they previously didn’t.
In other words, it can become a cult. If you have heard about Project 2025 and trying to grasp how Republicanism has morphed into MAGAism and is now fully on board with a white, Christofascist agenda, read on.
Which Comes First, Identity or Behavior?
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