American Anger: It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Other Party.
Data on the nation’s economic recovery, people’s reactions to current economic conditions and their overall sense of satisfaction with life doesn’t suggest Americans are angry.
.. The increasing alignment between party and racial attitudes goes back to the early 1990s. The Pew Values Survey asks people whether they agree that “we should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.
.. Democrats are now much more supportive (52 percent) of efforts to improve racial equality than they were a few decades ago, while the views of Republicans have been largely unchanged (12 percent agree).
.. But recent work by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his co-authors shows something else has been brewing in the electorate: a growing hostilitytoward members of the opposite party. This enmity, they argue, percolates into opinions about everyday life.
.. Partisans, for example, are now more concerned that their son or daughter might marry someone of the opposite party (compared with Britain today and the United States in 1960). They also found that partisans are surprisingly willing to discriminate against people who are not members of their political party.
.. Disagreements between people about nominations for the Academy Awards, for example, may now become emotional as well as political if they involve racial attitudes because of the sorting of these attitudes by party and the contempt people feel for the other side.