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It is no mystery that the American political scene has become highly polarized in the past ten years. Research by the Pew Research Center has shown substantial increases over that time in the cynicism, distrust, and even disdain that members of each political party have for the other. One might say that the problem of political polarization has become something of a pandemic as of late. Yet, the vectors of transmission have been less well understood.
In what follows, I show how linguistic anthropology or more specifically the approach of interactional sociolinguistics can help us understand how political polarization is reproduced through everyday interactional practices. As a matter of praxis, when applied to our everyday interactions this approach and understanding can help slow the proliferation of political polarization.
Two key aspects of this approach are 1) a focus on the back-and-forth of talk in actual interactions and 2) a focus on understanding how talk is heard by participants on either side. Here I consider a politically polarizing interaction, including both the consequences for the interactants themselves and how this instance of talk is taken up by others. The polarization of perspectives can be seen in how interactants and observers hear the interaction in entirely different, even polar opposite, ways, much like the auditory illusion in which the same sound is heard either as “yanny” or “laurel” (click here to try). Whereas with yanny/laurel, it is things like one’s age that will affect which you hear, with these politically polarized interactions, it is one’s political perspective that determines what one hears. Additionally, these politically polarized interactions have a further effect of producing nasty consequences for participants.
An Example
The interaction considered here is from a White House Press Secretary briefing in which then White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court Justice. As soon as she finished making the announcement, she opened the floor to questions and called on Fox News reporter John Roberts. Perhaps pointing to a scripted quality of the encounter, before Roberts indicated the substance of his question, McEnany had already flipped to the page of her three ring binder that she would read from when answering his question.
Roberts asked McEnany for a “definitive and declarative statement, without ambiguity or deflection” that Trump denounces White supremacism and “groups that espouse it in all their forms.” This was likely in response to Trump’s statement two days prior when, in his debate with Biden, Trump addressed a purportedly White supremacist group with, “Stand by and stand down.” Looking down at the page to which she had already turned, McEnany said, “This has been answered,” and proceeded to resolutely list or quote previous times that President Trump had denounced White supremacy.
Apparently unsatisfied with her response, Roberts interrupted her with, “But just to clear it up this morning can you, naming it, make a declarative statement that you—that the President denounces it?” In a sharper tone, McEnany insisted that she just did that, at which point Roberts interrupted saying, “You read a bunch of quotes from the past.” McEnany replied, “You’re contriving a storyline and a narrative.” At this point Roberts restated his question once again: “Can you, right now, denounce White supremacy and the groups that espouse it?”
In response, McEnany detailed some of Trump’s actions that she said directly addressed the issue, including Trump declaring lynching to be a hate crime subject to the death penalty, Trump’s desire to see the KKK prosecuted as domestic terrorists, and Trump’s arguing for the death penalty for White supremacist and murderer Dylann Roof. McEnany then firmly stated: “His [Trump’s] record on this is unmistakable and it is shameful that the media refuses to cover it.” She then moved on to the next question.
The New York Times nicely captured the liberal hearing of this interaction in the tagline for an article they ran the following day which read: “The White House press secretary declines to explicitly denounce White supremacy, saying the president has already done so.” From this perspective, McEnany failed to explicitly denounce Trump’s White supremacy. In Roberts’ words, McEnany never denounced White supremacy in the “right now” of the press conference.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Fox News offered a very different hearing. Their headline ran: “McEnany: Trump has ‘condemned’ White supremacy, but ‘shameful’ media won’t cover it.” Further fleshing out the nature of this hearing, separately an Instagram post entitled “JOURNALIST REFUSES TO ACCEPT TRUMP’S REJECTION OF RACISM” included comments characterizing Roberts as: “rude,” “pompous,” “hateful,” “biased and pathetic,” “perhaps he’s hard of hearing or has a brain injury?,” and “an idiot.” There posters referred to the media as “demonic,” “hate monger[s],” and “liars.” One comment read, “John Roberts may be Fox News [a conservative media outlet] but he and Chris Wallace are more like MSNBC [a liberal media outlet].” In contrast, comments characterized McEnany as “patient,” “generous,” “a powerhouse,” and “Boss. Lady.”
Apparently providing further evidence for McEnany’s claim, a video soon circulated on social media entitled “38 Times President Trump has Condemned Racism and White Supremacy.” In addition to including clips of 38 times Trump denounced White supremacy or racism, this video also includes clips of mainstream media pundits saying that Trump has never denounced White supremacy.
Different Interpretations, Dysrecognition, and Mutual Monster-Making
The Yanny/Laurel quality of this interaction is itself both dependent upon and productive of political polarization. Past exposure to discourses—about the supposed liberal bias (or not) of the media or the supposed racist history (or not) of Trump’s behavior—will predispose participants to either hear this as an example of a biased and badgering liberal media or as an example of a press secretary covering for her racist boss.
The result is a process of mutual monster-making in which each side leaves the conversation more resolute in their perspective and their understanding of their opponent, having confirmed their opponents’ nastiness while also, somewhat tragically, having confirmed their own nastiness in the eyes (and ears) of their opponents. I call these acts of mutually nasty evaluations dysrecognition. Dysrecognition can happen by proxy when observing other interactions, such as the one described above, or it can be experienced in firsthand in one’s own interactions with friends or neighbors. These interactions of mutual dysrecognition then become the basis for a strong personal identification either with the media and liberals or with Trump.
For the media and liberals, these interactions (re)produce the idea that the media are the epistemically authorized truth tellers or that liberals are the only ethical ones in the room. The media further benefit from the fact that these interactions of mutual dysrecognition contain a strong affective charge that makes them good clickbait, capturing readers’ attention.
In the case of Trump, this identification can be seen in the words of a Colorado man interviewed for a New Yorker article: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life […] The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.” These public politically polarizing interactions contribute to Trump’s populist charisma by producing interactions that are structurally similar to the interactions that Trump supporters experience with their neighbors—interactions of mutual dysrecognition. These small-scale encounters serve as infra-political energies that animate the metonymy at the heart of the charismatic relation: “He is us.” This relation then provides motivation to engage in political action on Trump’s behalf, including producing more of these very same kinds of interactions, perpetuating a vicious cycle of mutual monster-making.
Towards Praxis: Disrupting Polarizing Interactions
One key to understanding these nasty interactions of mutual dysrecognition is the scripted quality of these interactions, hinted at by McEnany’s prescient page-turning. The script goes a little like this: the Trump side says something that could be construed as offensive to the liberal; the liberal calls them out for it; the Trump supporter calls the liberal out for offending them; the liberal doubles down on their point; both parties leave the interaction convinced that the other is a monster.
As a matter of praxis, armed with this understanding we can now ask: how might one disrupt these nasty and divisive but also apparently strategically desirable interactions of mutual dysrecognition?
First, it might be enough to simply learn that this is an interactional form that is frequently reproduced because it accomplishes work for powerful players, including those on the opposing side from you. Second, learning how to hear the interaction as the opposing side hears it can also potentially help participants locate common ground (e.g., most liberals oppose media bias and most Trump supporters oppose racism). Third, participants need to find ways to avoid the moments of dysrecognition that lead to monster-making. Finally, simply recognizing the multiple possible hearings of a given interaction can help us see that, far from being an auto-factual taken-for-granted act of passive reception, hearings are realized by and through perspectives that are sociopolitical and ideological in nature. This knowledge could embolden us to explore the constitution of these perspectives for hearing, not just our interlocutor’s, but also our own.
In short, I am proposing that we would do well to undertake the classic ethnographic task of learning how to hear from the perspective of those who seem strange to us. Doing so could help address political polarization and the seemingly ever accelerating process of mutual monster-making in American politics today.
Sarah Muir and Michael Wroblewski are the section contributing editors for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.