I had never realised how vast the qualities used to define your identity could be until we talked about positionality in class. How certain experiences, family legacies, and interests are stacked upon one another and used to position ourselves in the world. Now though, when I reflect on that class, our differences and outlooks weren’t intensely criticised or scrutinised by one another. Nobody seemed to fear being confronted or dramatically shunned because of opposing views.
The next day, I talked to my brother about American politics, and it was a whole other story.
When we all introduced ourselves and our views in class, it was inevitable politics stumbled its way into the mix, but more so as a passing titbit than an identifying feature. Of course, politics is important in New Zealand, but at least in my experience, supporting a specific party has never been an absolute friendship breaker and homewrecker. Here, not everybody sees politics as polarizing and world ending.
Yet, when we look at America, politics is exactly that – polarizing. My brother has been living in the U.S. since 2015 and witnessed the gradual escalation of political party tensions. He watched roommates end friendships when they discovered their politics didn’t perfectly align, or noticed that in many Tinder bios, ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ were frequently featured.
When I visited him, I got merely a small taste of it all. I had his friends come up to me and eagerly state that they were part of the ‘good’ Americans. I witnessed first-hand a sense of comradery between people voting the same, as if they were battling through trenches together. It was rather bizarre.
You don’t have to visit America to know political stances mean a whole lot more over there than here. The news and tweets are more than enough to get the idea. In America, political affiliations are ride or die, and a large part of that is because this election does feel like the end to a crescendo.
However, the polarisation of politics doesn’t just rely on which party you support, but the candidate as well. I’ll never forget how shocked my brother was to find many of his friends no longer wanted to vote because Bernie Sanders was out of the race. To them, it felt like they’d lost all ready, and it took them awhile to see the bigger picture again.
The positionality of people determines their alliance with political parties. However, the direness of a two-party system with polar opposite policies gives little leeway to those who fit somewhere in between. As we discovered during class, our positionalities are made up of so many different experiences and lessons, so it feels rather impossible to categorize people into two parties.
This polarisation in American politics doesn’t just pit a nation against each other, it forces people to position themselves in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. As the tensions grow, a person’s positionality feels less personal and more strategic. I wonder if that will ever change.
Hey Emily, a really interesting and intensely relevant topic you’ve picked! As I’ve progressed through uni and talked to a wider range of people about politics, it’s easy to see how polarisation occurs. Around the campus, everyone seems steadfast in their beliefs and unwilling to discuss the very possibility that they might change their view. Add in classic misinformation and an inbuilt confidence that we somehow know better than the experts, and polarisation is ripe to fester, even in a supposedly diverse location like Auckland. I like the point that you raised about the difference between party and person polarisation – I feel like the latter is much more evident in New Zealand, seen in the personality battles between Jacinda and the National Leader, or Winston Peters and literally everyone else. It bemuses me how, given the ‘different experiences and lessons that make up our personalities’, that we could ever settle for being represented by only two parties. In this, we’re truly lucky to live in an MMP system that allows and encourages more political representation. Who knows what could happen in the future!
People like to pick teams. It’s the ‘red versus blue’, ‘candidate A versus candidate B’. If the question is how to stop that, it probably involves muddying the waters. No more figureheads to latch onto would be a good start; countries are too big to be adequately represented by any single person anyway. The next to go would be the parties themselves. People like people, and people can inadvertently treat organisations as if they are people. As long as there are parties, there will be party membership. If you get more abstract than that, well, you’d end up with people attaching their sense of identity to individual policies. Call me an anarchist, but that sounds a lot healthier for debate, so perhaps it’s a two step process to saving America.
Now I’m wishing I’d written a blog post entitled “Why Preferential Voting Would Fix Everything”, or maybe “Everything Wrong with Society, Namely Its Members”.
Honestly, American politics is so exhausting. I grew up in a very weird place in America because on the one hand, Massachusetts is a very liberal state—it always has been—but on the other hand, the specific town I grew up in had a lot of wealthy people in it. It’s still Massachusetts so the majority is very left leaning, however, I remember there were always a couple of proud Republicans at my high school who would decorate their laptops with stickers like “raised right” and all that fun stuff. I was easy for me not to associate with them because there were plenty of other people to be friends with where ethical views and morals wouldn’t get in the way of a friendship.
Also as a side note to what you said, I think the aggression of the Republicans and the Democrats each fuels the other side to be more aggressive as well, and it’s all gone too far to come back to a civilized discussion at this point.
I hope it changes too. For me, the saddest part of this polarisation is how similar the two sides are in reality. Biden and Trump are very different people and people are voting for them for different reasons, but if we were to look at just their views, not their character, we would find that Democrats and Republicans aren’t that different after all. Sure, they may disagree on thing like abortion, gun control, etc. but I think remembering in the end who they, we, truly are will help end this conflict. We are the champions of democracy, all of us. Not just Americans, not just Kiwis, but every person living on this Earth that believes in the power of the people. We should unite under the flag of freedom, liberty and democracy, not divide ourselves on who should get to shoot guns and who shouldn’t.