Moderation, polarization, and the age of unhappiness

As a follow up on Scott’s post about the politics of trying to peel off a certain percentage of weakly committed Trump voters (don’t kid yourself: there were non-trivial percentages of Trump-Biden-Trump voters, just as there were significant numbers of Obama-Trump-Biden voters, because that’s just how dumb we are as a nation and a culture. Karen might have some thoughts on what the crucial independent variable is here, although as always everything is very complicated) here’s an interesting post from Andrew Gelman on how much pursuing moderate candidates/voters makes sense as an electoral and ideological strategy.

Guess what, this also turns out to be complicated. I said the other day that the basic divide in politics is hierarchy versus egalitarianism. Well another super basic split is between the it’s complicated people and the every problem has a simple answer people aka the Smart Party v. the Stupid Party, a split which roughly tracks the equality v. hierarchy division, although only roughly of course, because that’s complicated too. Gelman’s bottom line:

In that paper we estimated the average benefit of moderation to be about 2% of the vote (averaging over the two parties), but with the rise of political polarization it makes sense that the electoral effect of any factor would be in decline, so something more like a 1% effect seems plausible. There’s evidence that, during the past two decades, the effect of the economy on presidential elections and the incumbency advantage in congressional elections have both declined. The one factor that we’d expect to increase in importance is party balancing. Right now the Republican party controls all three branches of government (Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court), so party balancing would imply a big swing to the Democrats in any case. Whether this will be enough to overcome geography, that’s another story.

Note here the anti-Schoolhouse Rock insight here that in contemporary American politics the real electoral trifecta isn’t presidency, House and Senate, but rather presidency, Congress, and the SCOTUS, which is true and more than a little sobering, given how incredibly dysfunctional elections to the Supreme Court have become.

Anyway, a related point about the relationship between political moderation and political polarization is that Donald Trump is by far the most unpopular president in history, measured both by average approval rating and highest approval rating, while the only other president who has been nearly as unpopular by these two metrics in the 80 years that such ratings have existed is . . . Joe Biden.

This obviously speaks to the power of polarization in the age of Fox News & it’s many minions throughout the right wing propaganda apparatus, but it also reflects something else I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is what I would call the age of unhappiness, which is the age we’re living in now.

I haven’t looked at this systematically yet, but impressionistically I get a strong sense that a general mood of unhappiness has descended on our society and culture and politics, which is no doubt a product of several inter-related powerful factors (Once again, it’s probably very complicated, except to the one theory to explain everything maniacs, who will blame video games or the designated hitter rule, or the decline in quality of anime and manga. Confession: I don’t know what those last two things even are, but it sounded plausible when I wrote it out).

Maybe this will even be another book, I don’t know, but I need to get the stupidity book out there first, or maybe it’s just Volume II in a trilogy — Stupidity, Unhappiness, and [???}