How identity fuels political divides

Chris Beam (0:05)

From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beam.

Cyan Loyle (0:10)

And I'm Cyan Loyle.

Janice Fanelli (0:11)

I'm Janice Fanelli, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with our Penn State colleague, Mitchell Smith, who is the Director of the School of International Affairs at Penn State and Professor of International Affairs. He has a new book out called The Great Perceptual Divide, Identity and Democracy in the US and Britain. A lot of what Mitchell writes about will be familiar to you if you've been listening to this show for a while, issues about political divides and polarization and the ramifications of that in the US. But I think bringing in the UK angle is unique, so we'll spend some time talking about that. But this idea of identity really is core to Mitchell's argument. It's in the title of his book, and I thought that would be a good place to start, just refreshing our memories about the role that identity plays in some of these issues that we're seeing with regard to political divides and everything that comes with them.

Chris Beam (1:12)

Yeah, speaking of reminding us, I actually wrote a book about neuroscience and politics, oh gosh, a long time ago.

And so this book is really kind of bringing it back. He's absolutely right, Mitchell's absolutely right, that identity is central to our individual politics and how we understand the world. It all kind of fits together. And our sense of identity, who we are, what matters to us, what we value, what we think is good and true, all of these things are fundamental to how we get through the day and how we understand ourselves. And anything that our brains perceive to go against that, to undermine it, is understood by our brains to be a threat. And this threat is perceived even before we're consciously aware of what we're hearing. So we come up with a reason to make this threat go away. And when we do that, again, unconsciously, our brain releases chemicals to make us feel better.

So, this is the power of identity in our politics, and why it makes it so hard for us to transcend identity when we're talking about politics, because it's just so deep. And it's, you know, it's not exclusive to any one party, it's not exclusive to any one country. It is human. And all we can do is just learn how to recognize it and mitigate it. So, that's my, what was that, like my Ted Talk on political identity.

Cyan Loyle (2:56)

Well, and Chris, I agree with you about the kind of central role that identity plays and kind of the way in which our brains protect ourselves from kind of new information and changing environments that we perceive to be threatening. And it's one of the things that I think is so powerful about the main point of Mitchell's book, which is that as we're receiving more information, new information that could potentially challenge our viewpoints, rather than shifting our perspective, what we're doing is using that new information to justify our positions, right, to harden our positions and justify them in different ways. And I found that super impactful because I think a lot of the narrative recently has been that people are ignoring information, right, or are not able to take in new things. And Mitchell is pretty convincing in both the book and in his interview, that people are taking in new information, right? They're hearing new inputs. They're just using that information rather than to shift their perspective, to double down on and kind of re-justify and harden their positions. And I think we've seen this during COVID, we've seen this, yeah, I mean, during the recent January 6th insurrection and other times in US political history, as well as in Brexit. So I'm looking forward to hearing Mitchell tell us more about it.

And just a reminder that Brexit is the referendum in the United Kingdom about whether or not to remain within the European Union or to leave the European Union. And ultimately, the referendum comes down in favor of the United Kingdom removing itself from the European Union, both economically and socially.

Chris Beam (4:30)

And the other thing I think is worth mentioning is that the phrase that oriented the Brexit, the pro-Brexit campaign was take back control. And think about that in terms of identity and what it was at stake in the minds of so many of the people who voted for leaving.

Cyan Loyle (4:51)

And while this is a comparative case, one of the things that I find so interesting, to your point, Chris, about the timing of Brexit is how interwoven a lot of these politics and strategies are. So this is not just the UK and the US. This is politics in Hungary, this is politics in other parts of Europe.