As the US midterms loom, animus between the Democrats and Republicans is plumbing new depths, with polls showing the country is split 50-50. The size of the divide is depressing. But if you want to get a wider — more cheering — perspective on US politics, a new report, Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape, published this week by a group of social scientists, provides some fascinating insights.
The research, based on the polling of 8,000 people and 30 one-hour interviews with individuals across the political spectrum, argues that it is wrong to talk about America’s political landscape in a binary way or to categorise people with demographic data (such as race or age). Instead, the authors argue, analysis of the core world views of Americans reveals that most people do not sit in a box marked either Republican or Democrat, nor do they define themselves based on whether they believe in free-market policies or not. Rather, it is more helpful to think of Americans as belonging to one of seven “tribes”, who coalesce around a set of underlying core values about identity, authority and community.
Some of the tribes are familiar: about 8 per cent of Americans are “progressive activists”, who are “younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry”. “[Group members] have an outsized role in political discourse, even though they comprise a small proportion of the total population,” the report notes, adding that they “are highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity”. They believe immigration is beneficial, feminism is good, the police are brutal and that Donald Trump is bad.