The New Republic

In the days before the election, there has been a boomlet of stories
about politically mixed marriages. According to The New York Times
Sunday Styles section, "In towns big and small across the country,
couples and family members on opposite sides of the political fence
are struggling to maintain amicable relationships as a highly
polarized political season reaches its apex. " My wife and I were
pleased to learn that we are part of an amusing social trend--she's
a Republican and I'm a Democrat. But, thankfully, our experience
throughout the presidential campaign has not vindicated the Times'
thesis.When Democratic friends ask me about our mixed marriage, they tend
to raise two questions: Do you fight all the time about politics?
And, has she made you more conservative? (By contrast, Republican
friends ask whether she has succeeded in converting me, which may
confirm Democratic conspiracy theories.) But the answer to all
three questions is no. We don't talk constantly about politics,
but, when we do, our conversations often (although not always) have
a moderating effect. This is consistent with studies of group
polarization, which suggest that, when politically mixed groups
deliberate, they move toward the middle, whereas, when like-minded
people deliberate, they become more extreme.

Less significant than our partisan differences is the fact that we
grew up on different planets: She went to fundamentalist Christian
schools in Florida; I'm a private school kid from Manhattan. As a
result, she's instinctively suspicious of Kerry's aristocratic
hauteur, while I recoil from Bush's Texas swagger. But these are
emotional reactions, not political arguments, and they end up
concealing far more than they reveal.

There are some topics we've stopped discussing: Arguments about tax
policy quickly go off the rails, even when she points out that we
would pay a higher rate under Kerry's plan than Kerry would. But
she has helped me to understand the difference between evangelical
and fundamentalist Christians and to see why Bush, an evangelical,
sometimes sounds like a therapeutic squish to his socially
conservative base, which he has disappointed on issues ranging from
stem cells to abortion. Having heard her unexpected and entirely
human stories about growing up among Christian fundamentalists, I
now understand that religion may be the most important aspect of
Bush's private life, but it's hardly a reliable guide to his
decisions as president: He follows the polls more closely than
scripture.

This effort to see Bush in context hasn't made me like his tax
policies any better, but it has prevented me from indulging in the
over-the-top Bush hatred that my beloved parents and many esteemed
friends and colleagues enjoy. Last year, with admirable candor, The
New Republic's Jonathan Chait described how he hated everything
about Bush--the way he walks, the way he talks, the fact that he
reminded him of entitled classmates from high school ("Mad about
You," September 29, 2003). Chait is one of the most analytically
rigorous and convincing critics of Bush's tax policies--but might
not his decision to wallow in his hatred of Bush run the risk of
distorting his judgment?

Bush hatred is, of course, the mirror image of the Clinton hatred
that drove otherwise intelligent people off the deep end during the
1990s. During this election, some of our Republican friends have
tried to distinguish between these two forms of political
pathology. Clinton hatred, they claim, was a rational response to
Clinton's lies and abuse of power, while Bush hatred is an
irrational response to who the president is rather than what he
does. But this distinction is transparently unconvincing.
Republicans hated Clinton for who he was--the way he walked, the
way he talked, the fact that he reminded them of entitled
classmates from high school--and they impeached him for his private
misdeeds, which they unsuccessfully attempted to recast as high
crimes.

In fact, Clinton, Bush, and Kerry hatred are all reflections of
precisely the same phenomenon, which results from the
transformation of politics into theater. In The Fall of Public Man,
Richard Sennett argues that, as the old boundaries between public
and private began to collapse in the nineteenth century and
personality became the measure of trustworthiness, politicians
began to relate to citizens in psychological terms. Sennett writes,
"The modern charismatic leader destroys any distance between his
own sentiments and impulses and those of his audience, and so,
focusing his followers on his motivations, deflects them from
measuring him in terms of his acts." Television has exponentially
increased the personalization of politics, encouraging citizens to
indulge the narcissistic conceit that their illusion of emotional
connection with a politician is more important than his or her
actions.

There has been a lively debate during this election about whether or
not our politics are becoming more polarized. But, even if
substantive disagreements are in fact real, our addiction to
emotions and images makes them appear worse by encouraging voters
to evaluate politicians in personal terms. This leads people to
exaggerate their hatred for any candidate to whom they don't feel
personally connected.

In a mixed marriage, it's less easy to approach the presidential
race as a form of identity politics. My wife doesn't care whether
Kerry reminds me of people with whom I went to high school, because
she went to a very different high school. And vice versa. Because
we can't appeal to shared prejudices, we have to try to persuade
one another with less personal arguments. There are limits to how
much of anyone's politics are open to persuasion, and, as a result,
political arguments are seldom as interesting as arguments about
history, culture, manners and mores, music, or what have you. But,
after listening to an intelligent person you love try to make a
rational case for the other guy, it's harder to worry that the
world will end if your guy loses.

Still, there's nothing like a counterintuitive wager to soothe
political disappointments. Long before the election (actually
before September 11), my wife bet that Bush would be a one-termer,
and I bet that he'd be reelected. The winner had to buy the loser a
nice bottle of champagne. On election night, we toasted
bipartisanship.

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