The Perils of Oppositional Politics – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

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Anthropologists call it schismogenesis — the process by which one group’s behavior elicits a contrasting response from the other, producing a feedback loop of social differentiation. Left unchecked, schismogenesis will eventually result in discrete cultural antitypes, the likes of which regularly appear in the historical record. The Peloponnesian War provides a paradigmatic example, with the cosmopolitan, pleasure-seeking, democratic, mercantile, seafaring Athenians defining themselves in opposition to the parochial, austere, oligarchic, agrarian, landlubbing Spartans and vice versa. The cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in Apologies to Thucydides (2004), described an eerily similar dynamic that developed during the 19th-century conflicts between the Fijian kingdoms of Bau and Rewa, while the Cold War, with its oppositional logic and mutually-escalating arms race, provides a more recent and relevant example. And we might add the case of democratic, westward-oriented Ukraine, which has increasingly defined itself in opposition to its despotic Russian neighbor.
Closer to home, we see this playing out in the context of American oppositional politics. Domestic politics has become a matter of mutual aggravation and repellence. If the right is pro-life, the left will gravitate towards unrestricted access to abortion. If the left has fallen prey to woke ideology, then someone like Andrew Tate (of all people) can become an icon for many on the right. First Thing’s Jonathon von Maren has called this “reactive gullibility and fact-free contrarianism,” which is true as far as it goes, but this is really just a function of hyperpolarization. You do not need to agree with every claim made in Joshua Strayhorn’s recent American Journal of Political Science article “Making the other side mad: How out-group distaste benefits less competent candidates” to accept the basic premise that an “environment of polarization and negative partisanship” tends to lead voters to make d…