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Jayne: Simplistic labels muddle, complicate partisan divide

By Greg Jayne, Columbian Opinion Page Editor
Published: March 4, 2018, 6:02am

When it comes to politics, people like labels. We enjoy lumping together groups of people and labeling them, as if the complexity of human beings can be distilled to a single qualifier. We like to think it makes the world a little more manageable.

So, we throw out “liberal” or “conservative,” happily reveling in the implication that people who agree on one issue therefore must agree on all of them. That is simpler than admitting that opinions have nuance and that only the most blockheaded among us can be defined by a single issue.

Because of this oversimplification, it is with a whole handful of salt that we digest the latest results from a Gallup Poll: Washington has more liberals than conservatives.

Shocking, this is not. Washingtonians have not elected a Republican governor since 1980, or a Republican U.S. senator since 1994. And we have not jumped on a Republican presidential bandwagon since Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984. On a statewide level, Washington is a deep, deep shade of blue.

And yet, there is something noteworthy about the Gallup finding. It marks the first time in the annual poll that self-identified liberals have outnumbered self-identified conservatives in our state. Admittedly, the survey dates only to 2008, so there is no telling how the state’s 357,232 residents would have described their political leanings in 1890. For the record, we voted for Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison in 1892; he lost.

Now, before we start referring to the modern version of the Evergreen State as the People’s Republic of Washington, it is worth noting that the latest results fall well short of a mandate. People who said their views are liberal or very liberal accounted for 30 percent of residents last year, while those who are conservative or very conservative made up 29 percent. Meanwhile, 36 percent embraced the “moderate” classification.

All of which brings us to the crux of the issue: Labels can be misleading when it comes to political identity. Consider the complexity that is President Trump’s political beliefs — assuming he has any. Conservatives like that he promised to dismantle the regulatory state and that he is effectively keeping that promise. But the fact that his tax cuts and his proposed budget would be expected to add $7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years is enough to give true conservatives an aneurism.

Then there is the fact that how people identify themselves does not always translate to the ballot box. In 2008, 34 percent of Washingtonians said they were conservative, compared with 27 percent who claimed to be liberal. Yet Barack Obama won the state by 17 points over John McCain in the presidential election.

Divide between ideologies

Admittedly, none of this explains the difference between liberals and conservatives. We’ll leave that to a study from Northwestern University. “Political conservatives operate out of a fear of chaos and absence of order, while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness,” summarized Phys.org., which is fodder for a discussion with their therapists rather than a newspaper column.

As we ponder the divide between American ideologies, refusing to recognize that they really are not far apart on the political spectrum, it seems that a more pressing issue is ideological silos. As a study by Pew Research Center found in 2014, “In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies ‘are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.’ ”

And this was before the Age of Trump.

So, as the partisan cavern grows, we continue to label the other side. We throw out phrases such as “leftists” or “dotards”; we insist that they are threatening the nation’s well-being; we retreat to silos which only echo our preexisting views. And in the process we misguidedly complicate the political landscape rather than simplify it.

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