The Politics of Demonization

Why do Democrats hate Karl Rove so much?  And why do Republicans hate Senator Clinton, asks political scientist Jay Cost? 

He quotes from the e-mail of a partisan, who believes that Karl Rove has “a serious lack of ethics.”  Rove is “capable, vindictive and mean-spirited... and he has run dirty campaigns...”

Leaving aside the obvious code words from the Democratic side of the divide, Cost reminds us what this is all about. 

It’s all because of the necessities of politics. 

Both political parties offer us a ready-made worldview, a lens through which we can look at our political environment and make sense of it... These partisan worldviews... are explicitly crafted to induce us to political action. One way that we can be induced to political action... is if we believe that our political universe contains heroes and, of course, villains. The demonization of Karl Rove (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) is therefore part and parcel of a partisan worldview.

The easiest way to summon people to action is through hate and rage.  That’s why politicians do it.

But if you try to think about the other side using a “good faith assumption,” writes Cost, then you begin to perceive politics not as a battle between good and evil but a “conflict between competing interests.”

Then we can look at the Democratic Party as a coalition of the single, the secular, and the government employee.  And we can look at the Republican Party as the coalition of the religious, married with children who work in the private sector.

And we can see that each party’s goals and interests are sensibly aligned with the interests of its partisan supporters.

And obviously the actions of the other party’s political actors in blocking our own party’s agenda is unethical and mean-spirited.  Or worse.