Why Do Republicans and Democrats Hate Each Other?

One of the intriguing stories of our time is the hostility, often hatred, between the political left and the right. The two have seemingly grown ever farther apart. Few politicians can manage to be moderates anymore. In the 1960s USA, there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, but those have mostly gone. Eli Finkel’s recent and excellent paper shows that over the past half-century, people’s love for their own political party has remained about the same–while their hatred for the other political party has steadily increased. Unlike in the past, out-party hate is now a stronger political motive than in-party love. Republicans are more united in their hatred for Democrats than in their love for each other, and vice versa.

Brad Bushman and I decided to try to understand why things are going badly. Brad is a liberal, and Roy is apolitical and indeed has not voted in any election this century. We started by facing that American elections are generally pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Instead of thinking that one is always right and the other always wrong, perhaps the optimal outcome for a modern democracy is an ongoing alternation in power between the left and the right. Nearly all the most successful countries in the world see frequent alternation in power between center-left and center-right parties.[1] Could it be that societal success requires a contribution from both, so alternating or sharing power produces the best results?

Let’s look for a broader context in which to consider this issue. In recent years, the foundation of my thinking has been that the human mind was created by nature for culture (Baumeister, 2005). Every species has to solve the problems of how to continue life—or else go extinct. That includes surviving longer and reproducing more. Humankind solves this in a very unusual way, namely by using culture to organize social life. It has been extraordinarily successful, given that the worldwide human population continues to increase even while most other mammals are seeing their populations decline.

How exactly does culture improve survival and reproduction? Culture is a giant system of cooperation in which people work together to produce more resources. To be successful and continue to increase population, a particular society must do two basic things: It must amass resources and distribute them through the group.

Now leap ahead from prehistory to the modern world. Cultural societies continue to accomplish both of those jobs, but they grow apart. The political right focuses on amassing resources. The left focuses on redistributing them. As societies evolve, those two jobs start to find conflicting implications.

Think about who votes conservative (Republican, in the U.S.). Farmers have always leaned toward conservatism. Businesspersons, especially managers, and executives. Merchants. Bankers. The military.

These people’s lives are all about amassing resources: creating them and storing them. The American military is about protecting them. And in world history, military forces were also important ways of acquiring resources (by conquering one’s neighbors and extracting their wealth). (Also called looting, tribute, etc.)

In contrast, the modern left focuses on redistribution. It began with the labor movement, which pushed to redistribute profits from owners to workers. The supreme achievement of the political left is the welfare state, which redistributes resources as needed to take care of people from cradle to grave. Affirmative action redistributes opportunities. Taxing the rich to help the poor has been an enduring theme of the political left. The left also gets votes from people who rely on redistributing resources produced by others, such as schoolteachers and universities, single mothers, poor people, minorities, and government workers. Without the political left, a few people can hog all the resources while others live in misery and penury. The population might actually decrease, a biological sign of failure. But the political left pushes to spread the wealth and let more people live happy, fecund lives.

In short, the left focuses on redistributing and sharing resources. The right focuses on producing and conserving them. A thriving society needs both of these jobs to get done. And I think that’s one reason that, again, most of the world’s most successful societies have seen ongoing alternation of power between center-left and center-right. That alternation ensures that both jobs get done.

Why can’t they just appreciate each other? In the modern world, the two jobs have gradually become at odds. The ideal for the left is equal sharing: Society’s resources should be equally available to everyone. The ideal for the right is more complicated. In recent human history, the best system for amassing maximal resources seems to rely on a competitive economic marketplace that works by incentives. But incentives create inequality–by definition! Inequality is the very purpose of incentives.

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To amass more resources, rightists advocate a system that rewards innovations and improvements and thereby increases inequality, which clashes with the leftists’ pursuit of equality. This is pretty much how things go. When far-leftist governments take power, at first, happiness is widespread because the society’s wealth is redistributed to the lower quintiles, making their lives better. But wealth is no longer amassed, given that the left’s specialty is redistribution. The recent history of Venezuela is sad but compelling example of this. Zimbabwe too.

But letting the political rightists run things soon creates problems too. Unregulated marketplaces give rise to environmental degradation, exploitation, and other problems.

If the left and right could begin to see that the other side also serves an essential function in society, they could agree to disagree—but perhaps respectfully. Hatred and demonization may be well suited to short-term vote-getting and also well suited to social media, but in the long run, I think they do considerable damage to the social fabric.

To thrive, a society needs both to amass and to redistribute resources.