Analysis of the new evidence in the investigation of the assault on the Capitol 1:36
Washington (CNN) --
Following the first public hearing investigating the Jan. 6 assault on Thursday, an important question has resurfaced: How close is the United States to conflict?
In a way, the attack should have been a wake-up call, and an opportunity for Republican voters and their leaders to distance themselves from Donald Trump.
After all, a sitting president had urged his supporters to lay siege to the US Capitol and nullify the results of an election.
Yet more than a year after the insurrection, the potential for violent political struggle has barely receded, and that's due, at least in part, to the state of partisanship in the United States.
Supporters of then-President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Some GOP voters continue to falsely believe that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump, and too many GOP lawmakers have used the so-called “Big Lie” to support his efforts to conduct aggressive gerrymandering and pass ban laws. restrictive votes, to keep their Democratic rivals out of power.
Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that the country's two major political parties are increasingly organized "into quasi-warring factions with radically opposing visions for America," political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason write in their compelling new book, "Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy."
While the Democratic Party is "a pluralistic multiracial party," Kalmoe and Mason continue, the Republican Party "has been overtaken by those who yearn for the stricter racial hierarchies of the old white South, who envision a Christian theocracy, and who run the profits of the government towards the rich".
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It is not surprising, therefore, that so many experts warn that the possibility of renewed political violence should not be downplayed.
To delve into the debate about current partisanship and its effects, I spoke with Mason, an associate professor of political science at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
In the book, Nathan P. Kalmoe and you argue that it was easy for Donald Trump to incite an insurrection because of how divided the bases of the two main political parties in the country are. Could you describe these divisions a little more?
Part of the reason the partisan hostility between Democrats and Republicans is so terrible right now is because what the parties are fighting are really issues of racial and gender equality, the traditional social hierarchy, and whether we're going to go back to being a country where white Christian men were always at the top of that hierarchy or we became a more egalitarian, multi-ethnic democracy.
What we found in our data was that, particularly on the right, Republicans who hated Democrats the most were also the highest in racial resentment and sexism.
And those who hated the Democrats the least were the ones with the least racial resentment and sexism.
In fact, in our data, racial resentment is one of the strongest predictors of Republicans hating Democrats.
The reason why I think this is important is that, in general, as a country, we have not been very good at talking about racism or sexism in a non-violent and calm way.
Have Americans abandoned patriotism for partisanship?
How do people become radical partisans?
We think about it in two different ways.
The first is what we call "moral disengagement," which is basically denigrating and dehumanizing people from the other party.
And we look at that because in other places and in other contexts, these demeaning and dehumanizing beliefs tend to precede mass violence.
Whenever there is a massive violent event between groups of people, it usually happens after the people have decided that the people in the other group are evil and subhuman.
That is a set of attitudes that we consider an alarm signal.
We also just explicitly asked, "To what extent do you think it is acceptable to use violence to achieve political goals?"
That's less of a warning sign and more of a reality.
And what we're seeing is that a growing number of American supporters believe that violence is sometimes acceptable when it comes to achieving political results.
Not all of those people are going to participate in the violence.
They just approve.
But what that approval does is create a social environment around them where if they know someone who might
be more unstable and engage in violence, they're hearing fewer people say that's not acceptable.
In the run-up to public hearings investigating the Jan. 6 assault, Trump insisted his allies prepare to defend themselves. Their machinations reminded me of the way Barbara Walter describes the current Republican Party in her new book, "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them": "(The Republican Party) has a largely ethnic and religious base. It has supported a populist who pursued white nationalist policies at the expense of other citizens, and has elevated character above principle." What role do political leaders play in fueling or extinguishing conflicts?
The rhetoric of political leaders is very, very important.
And what we've repeatedly found across multiple studies is that the very fact that people read a statement by Joe Biden or Trump that says, "Violence is never acceptable" or something like that, reduces the approval of violence by from the people.
And all they have to do is read a sentence from Biden or Trump.
Republicans are more receptive to Trump, but in reality they are also more receptive to Biden.
What we need, in particular, are more leaders who remind people that violence is not part of a functioning democracy.
It does not fit with the peaceful transition of power, one of the necessary elements of democracy.
How do we deal with these threats to democracy?
One of the things that happened during the Trump presidency, and even during the 2016 campaign, was that we saw the norms change.
Whereas politicians used to not generally say explicitly racist or sexist things in public, Trump decided to start doing so, thereby breaking the rules on how to talk about our fellow Americans.
He also changed the norms around the questions of: what does it mean to be a responsible member of a democracy?
How do we relate to others?
What kind of respect do we owe each other?
All those standards went out the window.
When leaders undermine the norms, they can have a really big effect, because the norms are not institutionalized.
There is no law on them.
The only way to enforce the rules is through social pressure.
If you break the rules, you know it because the people around you tell you that you shouldn't.
You get sanctioned by the people you trust to direct you in your social life.
Therefore, if the leader stops enforcing those rules, the followers stop enforcing them, and then the rules can disappear.
Once we see leaders model behavior that is no longer respectful or considerate or responsible, we end up with a large number of Americans who no longer believe it is their responsibility to be respectful or considerate or responsible when dealing with their fellow Americans.
In fact, one of the things that came out of MAGA supporters is this division over who can be an American: Certain people deserve your respect, while other Americans, particularly people who tend to come from marginalized groups, don't.
They do not count as Americans.
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What should we keep in mind while public hearings are taking place?
It is abundantly clear that Trump is trying to dissuade his supporters from paying attention to the hearings at all.
That's likely because there will be relatively compelling information coming out of them.
One of the things that happened after January 6 was that the GOP tried to downplay it in every possible way: they weren't supporters of Trump;
it was Antifa;
or say that he was not really violent.
Or that they were just tourists strolling.
There were multiple approaches to try to minimize it.
But the Republicans did it because they knew it was extremely damaging to them, as a party, for a mob of party regulars to violently attack the seat of government in the United States.
That is why they have been pressuring his supporters not to pay attention to him.
January 6 panel focuses on Trump's guilt as hearings begin
What we know from our data is that the faction of Americans who really like Trump and are really intolerant of other Americans is about 30% of the country.
Even if they watch the hearings, the people in that group probably won't change their minds.
But maybe bringing up what happened on January 6 will remind everyone else, 70% of America, that this was a really dangerous event.
And it was not inevitable that Biden would take office.
It was very, very uncertain.
Reminding Americans of that is an important thing, because if we fail to remember what is at stake, we take politics less seriously, and we are at a precarious moment in terms of the persistence of a democratic system of government.
Capitol Republican Party