When the national college championship game began Monday, there was a statistical certainty that the vast majority of you who watched had no ties of loyalty to either Alabama or Clemson.
Even so, the question of who to root for was easy. You identified the team that had given you the most grief — and chose the other one.
It’s often been said that college football, especially in the South, is an affair of clean, old-fashioned hate. More and more, this has also become a description of how we settle contests for the White House and Congress. Races for governor and other down-ticket offices, too.
We see the world through steam-covered glasses.
This week's poll of Georgia voters by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows the depth of rancor within the state electorate. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic party. Eighty-three percent of Democrats have an unfavorable view of the Republican party.
That’s normal, you say. But it didn’t used to be that way.
Anger is bending what we see, just as a black hole will bend light. Consider that 75 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the way Georgia is moving. Fifty-five percent of GOP voters think the state economy is rocking along.
Half of Democratic voters polled say Georgia is headed in the wrong direction. Fifty-two percent of Democrats rate the state’s economy as poor or “not so good.”
Then the same voters were asked about the United States as a whole. Sixty-five percent of Democrats say the country is on the right track. Ninety-two percent of Republicans say it’s bound for hell in a handbasket.
Eighty-five percent of Democrats approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling the economy. Eighty-five percent of Republicans disapprove.
Here’s the thing: There’s an element of trickery in these survey questions. When you look out a window, you don’t open one eye and see a seascape, then open the other and observe a mountain range. It’s all one view, one economy.
The national unemployment rate stands at 5 percent. When last measured, Georgia’s was 5.6 percent. A difference, but not one great enough to justify the partisan whiplash.
Driving each disparate point of view is whether voters like or dislike Obama and his crew, who are Democrats, and whether they like or dislike Gov. Nathan Deal and his crew, who are Republicans.
“There’s always been a partisan bias in those kinds of perceptions, but I think it’s a lot stronger now,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “If you ask them about unemployment under Obama, a plurality of Republicans will say it’s gone up.”
In fact, unemployment has been cut in half since 2008. “It’s what’s sometime called ‘motivated reasoning.’ The idea that people perceive reality in line with their partisan predisposition now. Again, it’s not totally new.”
But two years of research by Abramowitz and his Emory colleague Steven Webster have proven that the phenomenon is gaining strength. The American political climate is being driven not by a belief in one’s own party, but antipathy for the other.
“There’s a much larger proportion now of voters who dislike the other party more than they like their own party. Which used to be pretty rare,” Abramowitz said. The dynamic is called “negative partisanship,” though it demands something catchier. You can’t simply call it the “Obama syndrome,” because Abramowitz & Co. found that Democrats came down with this same bugbear virus during the final years of the George W. Bush administration.
However, the virus does explain why billionaire Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the two candidates who generate the hottest rhetoric, sit atop the GOP presidential pack. Despite fears that the two could be doing long-term damage to a Republican party that is already demographically challenged.
In fact, Abramowitz said, the bugbear virus is why the GOP shouldn’t fear catastrophe in November. Yes, a Cruz or Trump at the top of the ticket might invite Democrats to take control of the U.S. Senate. But the bugbear virus will probably protect Republicans in the U.S. House.
“Republicans right now, clearly are rather unhappy with their party’s congressional leaders. But they dislike the Democrats so much that no matter what the results of the Republican nomination are, even if it’s Trump or Cruz, I don’t think you’re going to see massive defections,” Abramowitz said.
It is not a happy thing, this virus. Obama took note of it in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. “Democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens,” he said. “It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America.”
In Georgia, many Republicans and not a few Democrats will gather at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta at 10 a.m. Thursday to remember Mike Egan, a longtime state legislator and pioneering member of the Georgia Republican party. He died last week.
The memorial service will also be an occasion to remember the days when membership in one political party didn’t make you a traitor in the eyes of the other.
Egan was elected to the state House in 1966. As a rare Republican. His first vote was to seat Julian Bond, an Atlanta Democrat and African-American who had angered the powers of the Capitol with his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Egan would go on to be a top U.S. Justice Department official under President Jimmy Carter. And then would return to the state Legislature in 1989 as a Republican senator. It is a career arc that would be impossible today.
Eagan, his friends will attest, never succumbed to the bugbear virus.
“Mike told me that the key to political success was to keep my opponents temporary and friends permanent,” wrote former state lawmaker Ed Lindsey, a Republican from Atlanta, after Egan’s death. “A lot of folks would do well to follow that advice today.”
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