Academics and commentators have struggled to explain the extent of partisan division in post-2016 America. Many of them have followed a certain formula: taking their audience to be ‘liberals’, the ‘rational’ side of the divide, they attempt to explain why ‘conservative’ voters have turned towards Trump. Even those that claim to speak for the disaffected communities that have voted for Trump, like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, seem to be explaining themselves to a liberal audience. Relatively few texts in the genre turn the spotlight on America’s Left.
In Respect and Loathing in American Democracy, political philosopher Jeff Spinner-Halev and political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse present the problem of partisan division in a new light with a blend of empirical research and theoretical argument. Casting a sympathetic but refreshingly critical eye on America’s ‘liberals’, they outline what they call the liberal respect paradox. Liberals think everyone deserves respect, but they find it hard to respect conservatives, especially those who reject their view of social justice. This puts liberals in an odd predicament: while they aspire to an inclusive society of equals, they (often only implicitly) think a large proportion of their peers hold views that render them unworthy of respect.
Some of the authors’ empirical observations are discomforting, particularly where they demonstrate liberals’ intolerance. For instance, in their Equality and Respect Survey (2018), 49% of Democrats think Trump voters are unintelligent (compared to 31% vice versa). In their Pluralism and Respect Survey (2019), 34% of Clinton voters think Trump voters are immoral (compared to 27% vice versa). Crucially, Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to moralise voting behaviour: that is, to see the opposing partisans’ voting behaviour as a matter of moral conviction (and a reflection of one’s moral character). Republicans moralise politics too and have their own story to tell about how Democratic ideas of social justice are dividing and weakening the country. But—so the authors argue—Democrats moralise politics to a significantly greater extent. This illustrates the liberal respect paradox: liberals moralise politics because of an often commendable concern for social injustice, but end up treating conservative voters and their ideas as not worth engaging with at all.
How can we solve the liberal respect paradox? Is it possible to reconcile concern for social justice, on the one hand, with inclusivity and openness towards those who reject a liberal vision of social justice on the other? The prospects for solving this problem look gloomy when we recall quite how reprehensible liberals find many conservative opinions (and vice versa). Both sides of the debate have long moralised areas of policy, such as gun ownership and abortion rights. Not only must we contend with moralised policy debates, but there is not even consensus on procedural matters, as Trump’s Republicans challenge the integrity of elections.
The authors propose two concepts of respect, both essential in nursing American democracy back to health, but with different roles. The first, recognition respect, is the basic respect we owe to all human beings. This involves recognising people as worthy of all the basic rights and liberties citizens in liberal democracies are due. The second, civic respect, is an ideal we live up to in political discourse. It is an ideal, firstly, of intellectual openness: it means listening to those with different political and social views, with the goal of understanding. Shutting out opposing views from one’s life, and from one’s media consumption, is incompatible with this.
We have to operate under the general presumption that we might learn something from one another. Civic respect also means dropping our assumptions that opposing partisans vote the way they do out of ignorance, or vicious moral character. We have to assume opposing partisans hold their views in good faith and engage in politics with fundamentally good intentions.
Crucially, civic respect requires us to refrain from political stereotyping. We must hold ourselves back from scornfully defining people as ‘Trump voters’ or ‘Harris voters’, because doing this implicitly puts them in a category of people not worth listening to. The authors implore us to practice civic respect and see our opposing partisans in these terms. As they argue: ‘Few major political parties are bereft of any reasonable ideas, and few political parties have a monopoly on all reasonable ideas.’
It is not always easy for us to practice civic respect. It often requires us to look beyond our deep convictions and visceral emotional reactions. We must look past simple characterisations of opposing partisans, and this means refusing to see somebody’s view on one topic as defining their whole moral character—even when we consider this topic crucially important.
It is not all about gritting one’s teeth and listening reasonably to views one deeply disagrees with, though. Civic respect can mean setting politics aside from time to time. The tragic (and often overlooked) cost of moralising politics is the way political disagreements have separated friends and family members. The authors’ focus group data includes numerous cases of personal relationships destroyed by partisanship. For instance, a Democrat voter tells of her near-estrangement from her parents, and a Trump supporter recounts the breakup of a group of lifelong friends following the 2016 election. There is perhaps no better argument for civic respect than the misery recounted in these stories.
Who really deserves civic respect, though? This is where the authors struggle. They admit that civic respect has to be reciprocal to be functional. There is not much benefit to listening openly to those who refuse to listen to us or refusing to stereotype those who stereotype us. Nor does it make sense to assume people have good intentions where they have bad intentions, or refrain from making moral judgments where they are due. The authors argue that those who reject procedural democracy are unworthy of civic respect. Rejecting procedural democracy means denying election outcomes without evidence, making one’s voting decisions with the aim of undermining others’ basic rights, or supporting an insurrection renders one unworthy of civic respect. Crucially, we still owe such people the other form of respect, recognition respect; we must remain cognisant of their equal basic rights, even as they deny ours. We need not, though, pretend they are participating in our democracy in good faith.
The problem here is, of course, how many people fit into this category. Believing (and spreading) unsubstantiated rumours about the 2020 election result, and not taking the effort to engage in serious research, is hardly rare. Polling consistently finds that a large majority of Republican voters believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020. This raises the question: even if the theoretical argument succeeds, and civic respect could help us regain some common ground in principle, in practice the time for civic respect is past. What’s more, the idea that we still owe election deniers recognition respect is uncontroversial. As far as I am aware, the basic rights and liberties of even the most extreme Trump supporters are not under threat, as much as some liberals might express contempt (or suggest limiting their freedom of expression) in a survey response.
This means that while the authors present a highly original analysis of the problem of partisanship, and set out an attractive ideal, they are left with little to say about the problem they set out to solve. The liberal respect paradox identifies a tension in the liberal psyche and invites liberals to reconsider how they approach opposing partisans. Yet, insofar as the problem is conservative rejection of basic democratic norms—and it is hard to dispute that, to a large extent, this is the problem—we should be analysing the pathologies of the American Right, not the Left.
This raises another flaw in the book: its questionable inference of philosophical viewpoints from survey data. Their Social Justice and Solidarity Survey (2020), for instance, asked questions such as ‘I think we need to do more than tolerate [opposing partisans], we need to respect them.’ Given that each interview had a median duration of 11.4 minutes, we might ask whether off-the-cuff responses to such abstract questions give us a very robust indication of people’s moral beliefs—particularly when there are no guarantees that different respondents are using ‘tolerate’ and ‘respect’ in the same way. This perhaps reflects an inherent tension in combining a philosophical with an empirical outlook.
Overall, the book is both powerful and timely, and it demands our close attention. The authors’ theoretical argument, alongside their empirical research, asks all the right questions—even if it does not quite succeed in answering them. The book is most valuable, perhaps, in puncturing liberal conceit. It reminds us, for instance, that a gas-guzzling vehicle still emits far less than a transcontinental flight. Contempt for the drivers of such vehicles is perhaps more a matter of culture than climate change.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.