Political Polarization

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt treats political polarization as a structural and moral-psychological problem, not merely an ideological one. The highlights locate a turning point in the 1990s: new rules and behaviors in Congress discouraged cross-party friendships and social contact, and “once the human connections were weakened, it became easier to treat members of the other party as the permanent enemy rather than as fellow members of an elite club.” Candidates poured more time and money into “oppo” (opposition research) — staff or paid consultants digging up dirt to “shovel to the media.” Haidt quotes an elder congressman: “This is not a collegial body any more. It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.”

The deeper claim is that moral matrices act as tribal blinders: groups bind themselves together around shared moral foundations and become blind to the moral worlds of others. Haidt frames his own project, alongside four colleagues, as motivated by “a deep concern about the polarization and incivility of American political life” and a wish to use moral psychology to help partisans “understand and respect each other” — including a self-critique that liberal political psychology too often set out to explain “what was wrong with conservatives,” a motivated stance that mirrors the polarization it studies. This connects to the book’s account of human “groupishness”: the hive switch and tribal instincts that make us rally around in-group leaders and treat rival groups as threats.

Where this appears

• The Righteous Mind — 1990s Congress as the inflection point, the rise of opposition research, moral matrices as tribal blinders, and Haidt’s stated aim to use moral psychology to reduce incivility.