Polarization Frays Relationships, Politics in Wisconsin

The rift in Wisconsin politics sometimes feels like the space between life and death for UW-Milwaukee student Wylan Boyle.

“One of the sides only kind of wants to kill me, versus the other side that really wants to kill me,” says Boyle. “If I’m voting, I’m voting for the side that is probably going to win that wants me dead less, but might preserve my rights.”

This is a common theme in sentiments felt by people all around the swing state of Wisconsin in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections: the feeling of being repelled from people on the opposite of the political compass. The rift that separates the left from the right is more apparent than it has ever been.

“I don’t talk to a lot of my family anymore because they are very politically active for the conservative side,” says Boyle, “and I don’t want that in my life.”

Boyle says he doesn’t feel like maintaining relationships in which the other person will not respect his transgender identity– an issue he says has been politicized throughout time.

Alex Kleinke, a member of the right-wing Turning Point USA at UW-Milwaukee, says he has always tried to reach out to understand people who think differently than he does.

Kleinke considers politics to be part of his identity, and said he thinks being in Turning Point as being pro-American than being about politics itself. He says although people might associate them with “the white, pointy hat kind of guys, or the ones that served underneath a certain party back in Germany,” they reject those ideologies and want to be open to new people and ideas.

“Through Turning Point, we’ve tried our best to hear each side,” Kleinke says. “Thankfully when you do that it kind of disarms other people because you’re not trying to attack each other, you’re just trying to be peaceful and understanding of each conversation.”

He says divisive media, not the rhetoric of his own organization, is responsible for greater intolerance.

“It seems like the more views you get from showing more violent content or more content that attacks the other side, I think that’s just kind of polarizing everybody,” says Kleinke. “It’s kind of scary.”

Back on the left side of the compass, UW-Milwaukee student Gage Brisbois echoes Kleinke’s thoughts about mass media being responsible for political polarization around the state, particularly in online spaces.

Brisbois grew up in divorced households that were on the opposite ends of the political spectrum and is familiar with the tension felt by those who are caught in the crossfire.

“People can express their views behind a screen with no real repercussions,” says Brisbois. “There’s logistics and reasons for certain policies, but we don’t have to get pissed at each other.”

Political Media in Wisconsin

Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Mirer, of the UW-Milwaukee Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies department, says that rage farming is a primary mode of political communication on social media.

Mirer describes how some right-wing Twitter profiles have gone viral through highlighting “what they view as the excess of liberal thought.” He says that some of the content, like that from the Twitter feed Libs of TikTok, has even ended up on mainstream news.

“I’m going to guess that a lot of the stuff that people end up talking about on local conservative talk radio may in fact be originating through these rage farmers,” says Mirer.

Local talk radio has populated Wisconsin airways for decades. Mirer estimates its long history started 30 to 40 years ago, and the majority of political opinion talk radio has been conservative. Mirer attributed the rise of conservative talk radio to Scott Walker’s takeover of the state in 2010.

Mirer says that although similar phenomena have happened on the left, they have not been as sophisticated as the instances on the right. He thinks it’s because they believe that the mainstream media is biased against them; Consequently, the past 15 years they’ve spent developing alternative ways of communicating amongst each other.

According to Mirer, there have been attempts to create liberal talk radio networks, but they have not been successful without stars like the conservative Rush Limbaugh.

“[Some conservatives] don’t believe they’re getting the real story from the normal broadcasters — from your traditional news,” Mirer says.

Mirer compared the dispersal of divisive news in right-wing media to an ecosystem where rage farmers share it, it gets on local talk radio, then filters up on a national level where it ends up in talking points of elected officials.

But Mirer also thinks a lot of people on the left are looking for one cause as to why more people don’t agree with them, and it’s easier to point to an external cause than to explore the sociological reasons why people support the political parties they do.

“You can’t just blame the media,” says Mirer, “because the media is not quite that powerful.”

A Growing Rift

Kathleen Dolan, a political science professor at UW-Milwaukee, agrees that elected officials have driven the public further into polarization with the tone that they set. She says that it’s been happening at a mass level.

A 2022 study published by Pew Research Center showed that the conservative ideology of Republican members of the U.S. Congress shifted more right-leaning by 26% in the past two years compared to the early 1970s, but Democratic members have only shown a 6% shift further toward leftward ideologically.

Dolan explains that the Pew Center examined roll call voting — a process where representatives or senators vote “yea” or “nay” on a sponsored bill once their name is called — and determined the positions members of Congress took on the bills as well as their progressive or conservative content.

Dolan attributes the beginning of the gulf between liberals and conservatives to Ronald Raegan’s presidential nomination in 1980 and Newt Gingrich’s role as House Speaker in the 1990s. She says that the Republican Party had a number of policy positions that were relatively moderate and no different from some of the Democratic positions before Reagan and Gingrich came into leadership.

“One of the things we see with Reagan’s presidency is a literal shift of policy position,” says Dolan. “He also starts sort of tying the Republican Party more closely to what we used to call the Christian Conservatives.”

Cameron Swallow, a coordinator for Braver Angels, an organization that aims to combat political polarization across the United States through grassroots efforts, also attributes Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America agenda to the current political climate in the United States.

Swallow also says that an effort to keep politicians more accountable to their efforts for their home districts was happening during that time.

“While accountability is not a bad thing in itself, the idea that you would make connections in Washington with other people in your own country’s government… [making] that suspect is very troubling and has had a polarizing effect ever since the early nineties,” says Swallow.

She says that politicians, then and now, can’t afford to be seen with somebody on “the other side” because it could hurt their chances for reelection back home. Loyal voters in their home districts might think that they’re being untrue to the values of those who elected them “if they dare to make a connection with somebody who thinks differently in Washington.”

Dolan says it’s wrong to accept the “both sides-ism” of the situation, given that a widely accepted argument for what caused the current political polarization in the United States points to Newt Gingrich.

Both sides-ism means giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even if one side is demonstrably false.

She says that Newt Gingrich cultivated an “us versus them” approach towards politics that pushed people’s party identification into the realm of personal identity.

Identity and Aggressive Rhetoric

Dolan describes the process of personal identity and political identity becoming entwined in American politics as being a process that’s happened over the past 25 or 30 years. She says that Reagan had taken the Republican Party in a more socially conservative direction, then Gingrich continued that direction into the territory of extreme opposition.

“Newt Gingrich… came to power in a very confrontational way in terms of a relationship with the Democrats and with President Clinton,” says Dolan. “As you identify someone as an enemy, and you make them the ‘other,’ it becomes very important to you to be on your side.”

Dolan says that the language a series of Republican leaders have used to “create an enemy” has become increasingly confrontational, antagonistic, and even violent over time.

UW-Milwaukee student Wylan Boyle says a lot of people, including politicians, use more ad hominem than sound arguments.

“That’s not to say there wasn’t any [aggressive rhetoric] in earlier politics, but it’s definitely gotten a lot more intense,” says Boyle. “There’s no real space being created for active discourse.”

Intersection of Media and Identity

There are many people who have come to the notion that the media we consume has a direct influence on our acceptance of attitudes, tastes, preferences, and beliefs, but that theory — coined as the “hypodermic needle theory” — has been debunked.

Mirer says that there is a concept called “social identity theory” that holds the weight of what has been happening in American politics. He said that the theory is that once an individual identifies as part of a community, they tend to filter everything through the lens of that community membership.

Because hosts are often appealing to the audience, people become receptive to their ideas and develop what media theorists call a “parasocial relationship.” A common phenomenon that happens when a media consumer develops a personal, one-sided connection to a persona they regularly watch or listen to. It can be seen anywhere from teenage girls swooning over a heartthrob celebrity to elderly men who regularly listen and ascribe to the views of their favorite talk radio hosts.

Mirer said that once people are in the throes of a parasocial relationship and caught up in their social identity, another concept begins called the “hostile media effect.” It’s the scenario that happens when an individual sees a piece of media that suggests that a position has flaws then they automatically perceive that media as biased against their position on an issue even when the media might be completely objective. He said that effect can also leak into the behaviors of people who don’t consider themselves partisan.

Narrowing the Divide

Cameron Swallow says American citizens used to mean the same thing when they spoke about patriotism before the early 90s.

“Now, half the country says patriotism is ‘my country right or wrong,’” says Swallow. “The other half of the country says, ‘Dissent is patriotic, let’s make our country better than it was.’”

Braver Angels uses the term “patriotic empathy” to describe the kind of pride that they want to bring into American politics, a compassion for the wellbeing of fellow citizens despite political leanings. Swallow describes it as a term designed to draw divided people together using words that are key to each party’s mission: “patriotic” for the right and “empathy” for the left.

“As human beings, there’s so much more that we have in common than the things that are dividing us so bitterly,” says Swallow.

Wylan Boyle, although estranged from his family, also believes that there is potential for Wisconsin and the United States to come out of the divide.

“I think it is probably going to get worse before it gets better, as with most things,” says Boyle. “If anything, I think something very big has to happen for there to be a very significant change.”