America’s Hyperpartisans Are the Real Elites We Should Worry About

W e Americans disdain “elites.” Our politics is consumed by diatribes against the elites who exist in our midst. Ivy League elites. CEO elites. Bureaucratic elites. The list goes on.

By elites, we typically mean groups that hold two identifying qualities. First, they exercise more power — political, economic, or social — than the average citizen. Second, elites possess a perceived attitude about this power. They seem to perceive a right to their place, a justice to their privilege.

As Americans, both of these points irk us in a particularly galling manner. To a great extent, our balking at elites stems from our deep-seated commitment to human equality. Our Declaration of Independence says that “all men are created equal.” In the 18th century, we refused to crown a king, opting to found a republic instead. Moreover, we wrote a ban on “titles of nobility” into our Constitution, making a legal elite, well, illegal.

One elite, though, seems to warp our politics more than any other group. We may call this group the “hyperpartisans.” These persons are political junkies. They consume political news and opinion, they participate in social-media and political organizations at rates much higher than the average person, and they tend to exist on the farthest extremes of either the political left or right.

With this higher participation comes higher influence. It brings with it a perception that these persons make up the mainstream of political viewpoints in the United States. We see their elite status first in the outsized power they hold in defining our political landscape. They see the country through a starkly divided lens — one monolithic half of the country against the other. The chasm is as deep as it is pervasive. We don’t share the same values. We distrust each other across differences of gender, race, and sexuality. Critically, in consuming such vastly different media, we can hardly agree on a common reality within which to debate our cosmic differences. With partisanship so acutely rooted, we live in a cold civil war with the threat potential of an actual, hot one looming on an increasingly foreboding horizon.

One need only read a typical news story or listen to a campaign speech by a party leader to see the dominance of this group’s narrative. They track the above points exactly. Since media and party follow the lead, this perception acts as our common reality.

How can we show that these hyperpartisans are, in fact, elites? In other words, how can we display that they operate above and beyond the power commensurate to their equal participation in our politics? They of course do not see themselves as elites. They are “normal” Americans who, if anything, think they hold less political, social, and economic power than the average. In part, their desperation stems from the worry that they are so close to losing this power entirely.

We see evidence of their outsized power in a noteworthy poll conducted by Ipsos and FiveThirtyEight. Among all the concerns of American voters, it found “political extremism or polarization” second in the minds of worried citizens (topped only by inflation). People complain of political extremism and polarization when the few have garnered control of the political process. Both terms describe a political landscape that has been transformed far beyond the wishes of a supermajority of exhausted Americans.

Political differences always will exist. Partisanship always will exist. But political extremism is not mere political difference. Political extremism assumes a spectrum of acceptable disagreement. Extremism then exists outside that spectrum.

Political extremists exist everywhere, in every political community. The mainstream only worries about them on two conditions. First, the mainstream worries about political extremists when their methods, too, become extreme. In particular, when these methods turn violent. We see cause for concern here based on politically based violence in our midst. Just recently, a young man in Buffalo opened fire in a grocery store, targeting black Americans. He did so in outrage at what some term “replacement theory,” in which white persons worry they are being numerically replaced by racial minorities. Just a few years ago, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to massacre Republican congressmen conducting a baseball practice. People use such violence when their desperation makes them willing to forgo the peaceful means that republics possess to express disagreement, such as speaking and voting.

Second, people worry about political extremism when they perceive it as growing among the populace. Some might think this growth merely expands the range of views expressed in our discourse. More likely, though, it only increases the minority fringe — too small to win elections and policy debates but radicalized enough to turn to extreme or even dangerous alternatives. The more people who exist outside the political mainstream, the harder it is to find consensus, and the harder it becomes to engage in the hard — even noble — work of genuine politics. We forget this point in our current reign of hyperpartisans. We treat politics more as a screaming match to score online points in the form of likes and retweets. Healthy politics, however, involves speech that leads to action. In other words, debate and discussion turn into real policy. Our partisan bickering has relegated nearly all policy to the bureaucracy, standing as it does outside the political arena.

Polarization involves a dynamic similar to but not exactly the same as extremism. Extremism pinpoints what exists outside the mainstream, fighting for relevance or just attention. Polarization takes place within the perceived mainstream. It occurs when the main competing differences in policy and perspective ossify against each other. In assessing polarization, we first must ask how far apart is the divide? Second, how intractable is that divide? These two questions must be discussed together due to their symbiotic relationship. The greater the distance — whether perceived or real — the less chance for common ground. On some of these issues, common ground is hard to come by naturally. One is hard-pressed, for example, to find the “middle ground” on the morality of the death penalty, or whether racial preferences in education admissions are just or beneficial. Still, many issues do have a perceptible middle area, and one often loudly decried by our hyperpartisan elites.

Let us assume the existence of these elites. If they do exist, we must next ask who we mean when talking about the rest of America. Who exactly is it that doesn’t receive attention, and thus, encompasses the “politically poor” to the political riches of the hyperpartisans?

If we look at the evidence, we can see evidence of an “exhausted majority,” stuck in a minority-view world. These persons find a voice in studies such as the Hidden Tribes Report and the Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll already discussed. Their size extends beyond a bare majority, making up as much as 67 percent in these surveys. These persons exist politically between the harder left and right. As they don’t engage as often, they hold less political sway than their extensive numbers would portend or, frankly, deserve.

To understand this majority, we must shed two traits that define the hyperpartisans. The first trait we must shed is rigid consistency. Perceived “moderate” Americans do not typically hold views aligned with “left” or “right” across the board. In fact, sometimes their positions lack a degree of internal consistency. Many moderates, for example, decry both hate speech and political correctness. They hold views on immigration that appear at once to partisans as more “open” and“closed.”

Data like these play into the elitism of the extremes. They see it as evidence that (unlike themselves) the Americans of the middle are foolish or simply ignorant. Consistency with the left/right divide becomes a proxy for intelligence or plain knowledge. Yet if anything, the moderates show some nuance. They see the merits of both sides.

By so seeing, they reject the second hyperpartisan trait we must shed to better understand the mainstream: the refusal to compromise. The moderate majority wishes to find a balance between legitimate arguments given by both sides. On this, immigration serves as a prime example. The middle understands the need for strong, secure borders. It also takes pride in America’s welcoming desperate refugees or stories of immigrant success in the United States. An outcome this position desires would seek both goals, seeing them as compatible.

In the willingness to compromise, these persons make policy possible again. They make it so that rhetoric can lead to action. Certainly, some persons lack principle. Few Americans can keep up with all they need to know to be informed about a given political situation. But for the most part, these people hold many commonsense views. They look to implement those views for the good of the whole. They may not be able to spout the same talking points as their partisan neighbors. But they can do more for the American people as a whole.

The real challenge is for this middle to make its voice heard and thereby change the political landscape. To some degree, it requires becoming like the hyperpartisan elites — not in views, but in participation. While not obsessing over politics, this middle must engage enough to make its voice heard. It must participate, not just by voting, but by saying why it voted as it did. The necessary change also requires greater restraint by the media and wisdom from politicians — restraint from media in refusing to play in the dopamine-inducing chase for clicks, which placates the few but exhausts the many; wisdom by politicians to see past rhetorical devices to speak to the broadest swath of the American people in terms that meet them where they are. Doing so might not be Lincoln’s new birth of freedom. But it might result in the resuscitation of a level of reasonableness required for a healthy, properly functioning pluralistic republic.