How everything became left or right “coded”

In America today, there are conservative and liberal jeans (Levi Strauss versus Wrangler), liquor (Heineken versus Coors), and footwear (Birkenstocks versus cowboy boots). The MAGA movement itself is seen as tied to Kid Rock and eating steak.

In an era when partisan division is so febrile that acceptance of political violence has grown and violent political attacks are on the rise — the Charlie Kirk assassination being the latest of great note — it is hard to remember that it wasn’t always so.

As recently as the 1950s, Americans were politically calm — so calm that a committee of the American Political Science Association urged the two parties to accentuate their differences, to provide a “true choice.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater campaigned for president as the Republican who would provide “a choice, not an echo” and was badly defeated for his pains. Some political scientists applauded the political apathy of the era as both a sign of popular satisfaction and a shock absorber for the system. Four generations on, there seems to be too much party difference and too little political apathy.

Why have we gotten to a place where even open-toed sandals are left-wing?

Simple answers might point to combative politicians, President Donald Trump above all, to aggressive social movements like the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter, or to changes in the media such as the rise of cable television and then online feeds like Facebook and TikTok. But the key dynamic, many researchers have found, is the increasing proportion of Americans for whom political affiliation is central to their identities — to what they think, to what they feel, to who they feel they are.

I need to stop right here: This assertion does not directly apply to most Americans. In 2024, only 30 percent of Americans described themselves as “strong” Democrats or Republicans (only about half even claimed a political party). The largest chunk of Americans are not partisans. About politics, they care little, talk little, consume little, and know little — and they vote little (although when they vote they determine who holds power, the partisans being evenly divided).

Still, the politicization of so many Americans matters even for the apolitical. The latter are the audience for the political theater — which Americans find “exhausting” — and when they do vote, usually only every four years, they are presented with polarized options. For the nation as a whole, it means less constructive cooperation and more animosity and anger.

There is a story of political polarization that has often been told. Differences between the national parties were narrow in the first half of the 20th century. A higher percentage of Republican than Democratic senators voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act; 13 Republican senators voted in 1965 to establish Medicare.

Then the division between the politicians widened greatly and quickly, first probably driven by racial issues and then by others. When Obamacare passed in 2010, it did so with zero Republican votes; only one Democrat voted for the Supreme Court appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The widening chasm spread to other areas of government, for example, to state legislatures and judicial decisions, and on to the politically engaged public.

But politicization entails much more than the parties dividing on policies. Politicization has now gone beyond shaping many Americans’ stances on issues or even their cultural tastes, to shaping who they are — whom they date (and marry and befriend), what communities they join, what religious faiths they profess, what life-and-death choices they make.

In the last several decades or so, more Americans have sorted or changed their views on many disparate policies — for instance, on immigration, abortion, war, climate, gender, and crime — to better fit with their identities as Democrats or Republicans. Views on abortion, so deeply tied to one’s moral intuitions, provide a dramatic example. In the early 1970s, Republicans were about as likely as Democrats to agree in the NORC/University of Chicago General Social Survey that it should be possible for “a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if she is married and does not want any more children.” Fifty years later, overall American opinion had not changed, but Republican support for such abortions had dropped by about 20 percentage points and Democratic support had increased by about 15 points; abortion had become a defining party issue. Similarly, in 1997 members of the two parties had, as recorded by a Gallup poll, the same level of concern about whether the effects of global warming had begun; by 2021, there was a 53-point gap between increasingly worried Democrats and increasingly sanguine Republicans.

One way this polarization could happen is that people switched parties to fit their evolving views on subjects such as abortion or the climate. Some of that surely happened. But much research shows that people as or more often switched their views to fit their political identity. This shows up in studies that follow people over several years and find that people often change their positions on a substantive topic after they first change their political affiliation, having adopted the new affiliation perhaps because of political events unrelated to that topic or because of new personal circumstances such as a marriage, a new job, or a new neighborhood. In other words, to follow the abortion example, many became Republicans (perhaps because of racial beliefs or new friends) and then became pro-life.

Increasingly, even survey respondents’ reports of what is real, such as whether the economy is getting better or worse or whether inequality is growing, vary by party. Party has become so important that opinions on how much racial discrimination exists now differ more between Democrats and Republicans than between Black people and white people; views of income inequality differ more by party than by individuals’ incomes.

Political position has come, for more Americans, to connect with all sorts of tastes far beyond government policy— e.g., listening to Kid Rock or Beyoncé, going to museums or playing golf, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or Antiques Roadshow. Consumption as political signaling — for example, coffee branded by political affiliation — has been vividly demonstrated in (my own) Berkeley, California: First, high rates of Tesla ownership displaying climate liberalism (as well as displaying a healthy bank account), and then high rates of protests against Tesla, displaying DOGE-fighting liberalism.

Some of this politicization might be dismissed as simply posturing, owning the libs, or what pollsters call “expressive responding.” But the politicization goes deeper than that.

Party affiliation seems to increasingly determine, and not just reflect, Americans’ important personal decisions. Much of the discussion about “affective polarization” — that more Democrats and Republicans nowadays actually hate the other side — started with a study reporting that more Americans were displeased in 2010 than were in 1960 with the prospect of gaining a son- or daughter-in-law of a different party. Years later, many single Americans rule out dating someone with differing political views.

A 2020 survey found that about half of both Democrats and Republicans have intimate social networks made up exclusively of people who share their politics. Survey respondents often see more agreement with the people in their lives than actually exists, but nonetheless, this homogeneity is substantial and has increased. (Social homogeneity, in turn, encourages partisanship and hostility.)

Such political homogeneity results in part from who individuals choose to spend time with and who they choose to avoid. Strong partisans prefer to be with the like-minded and to avoid conversations with the unlike-minded. And they tend to drop friends (not so much family) who disagree with them politically. By one estimate, 15 percent of Americans “have ended a friendship over politics.” Political homogeneity also results in part from the influence of family, friends, and neighbors to conform to their views.

Political identity affects people in less explicit ways, too. Americans have increasingly segregated themselves geographically — not primarily because they are seeking neighbors who are fellow party members, although some of that is going on, but because the reasons people move — or decide not to move — increasingly connect with party. Those, for example, who like large houses and big yards tend to end up in red neighborhoods, while those who like to walk to local amenities tend to end up in blue neighborhoods. Both ways, party and neighborhood have become more linked. A 2021 study concluded that many “voters live with virtually no [local] exposure to voters from the other party.”

Yet more striking, Americans have increasingly lined up what they profess religiously to fit what they profess politically. Religion and politics have long been entangled in the United States — in 19th-century fights over alcohol prohibition, Sunday postal service, and which version of the Bible should be read in public schools, for instance; this was Americans’ faith driving their politics. For about 30 years now, politics have been joining with religion and, importantly, political identity is driving expressions of faith.

It first became clear in the 2000s that those identifying as Democrats, liberals, and moderates were leaving organized religion and describing themselves as having no religion (as “nones”) in great part as a reaction against what they saw as the conservative politicization of the church, especially on lifestyle issues.

Then, evidence in the last decade or so accumulated that more conservatives were starting to profess faith, especially evangelical faith, probably for mirror-image reasons: to reject the secularism associated with liberal positions such as supporting gender transition. Ryan Burge, the dynamo researcher of Graphs about Religion, suggested to me that the recent leveling off of the growth of “nones” might be explained by conservatives’ view that non-affiliation had “become so linked to left-wing politics.” These conservatives “are functionally non-religious… but they still can’t bear to not ID as Christian on a survey.” That political affiliation has come to alter a significant number of Americans’ religious identities is profound testimony to the politicization of many Americans’ lives.

And then there is politics’ connection to life-and-death decisions. As might be expected, left and right differ on many health-related matters — childhood vaccines, cancer preventatives, and the dangers of tackle football, for example. But left and right also differ in health behavior, from diet, such as how much meat people eat, to exercise. One result is that residents of red counties more often tend to be obese than residents of blue counties, even taking into account race, poverty, and education.

The most tragic example was the Covid-19 pandemic. People in red states, where the vaccines were most resisted, died at higher rates than those in blue states; individual Republicans died at higher rates than individual Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of deaths can likely be attributed to political identity.

Seventy years ago, gender, race, and region determined Americans’ lifestyles, fortunes, and identities more than they do now; educational attainment and, increasingly, politics have become the key answer for many people to who they are.

What has happened to get so many of us here? Researchers have debated how much of today’s red-blue divide and hostility are matters of ideological and policy differences, or of “social identity” and emotion.

On the first side, the argument is that more Americans have aligned themselves more consistently around a set of political positions. In the mid-20th century, voters with any opinions tended to hold mixed bags of them; it was an era of conservative and liberal Democrats, conservative and liberal Republicans, but mainly of the apathetic, as the political science commission complained. Party membership could be tied to issues — say, the way union workers were to Democrats — but was more often a matter of family and community tradition going back generations.

Change started in the 1950s and then accelerated in the 1960s and ’70s, first around race. Conservative white Southerners fled the Black-friendly Democratic Party into the arms of what had become, with its “Southern strategy,” a more white-sympathetic Republican Party. Since then, goes one argument, parties adopted positions on other issues favored by their constituents. The GOP, increasingly the home of white Southerners, adopted their evangelical views on abortion; the Democratic Party then, by reaction, became the party of legal abortions. (This is one reason Catholic identification with the Democratic Party dropped in the late 20th century and early 21st century.) Thus, it is policy differences, particularly about a set of well-known, “branded” party issues, such as government spending, race relations, immigration, and abortion, that drove politicization.

The other story is that the political animus, the motivated reasoning, and the fealty to the tribe exhibited in contemporary politics is best understood as resulting not from profound policy preferences, but from so many Americans rooting their personal identities in politics. The party’s “failures and victories become personal,” writes one proponent of this view.

In practice, the two — policy ideology and partisan identity — are intertwined and drive one another. The right-to-life believer comes to identify as Republican and the deep-red Republican comes to have right-to-life views. But most scholars seem to recognize that, either way, there is a profound psychological element to this politicization. Given partisanship’s depth and breadth across even personal realms of life, how much party seems to influence other identities like religion, the unreasoning emotion often involved, and the frequent arbitrariness of the party packages (e.g., combining lower estate taxes with closed-door immigration policy), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that identity has driven politicization.

Bolstered both ways, living in a politically homogenous social world has consequences, among them more hostile and uninformed views about the partisans of the other party (such as overestimating how many Democrats are LGBTQ+ and how many Republicans are rich) and exaggerating the positions they hold. There are many ongoing efforts to overcome the polarizing effects of partisan homogeneity by bringing partisans together or exposing them to new information, some with success and some not. But the point is that politically defined relationships underline the extent to which so many — although, again, not most — Americans have been politicized. Who they are is intimately bound to who their people are, and those affiliated people are increasingly political.

If we see the politicization of everything as a problem, can we roll it back to the 1950s? Doubtful; the consensual ’50s were also an anomalous era. Perhaps the 1990s level of political engagement, partway between the mild 1950s and the manic 2020s, is attainable. But not soon. It will probably require a hangover from the politicization of the Trump era — which has supercharged politicization, as displayed in the Charlie Kirk memorial when Trump, following the widow’s plea for compassion, said, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. Sorry, Erika” — or cataclysmic social change like an economic collapse that elevates other affiliations over that of party to imagine that partisan identities, so strong that they affect everything from shoe brands to religious belonging, will weaken any time soon.