Over the last couple of months, a neighbor of ours has been upping her sign game. In addition to the usual stuff—“Law and Order,” “Not My President,” “No Legal Rights for Illegal Immigrants,” and so on—she’s added “Democrats Are Communists and Terrorists—ARE YOU?” and “The Democratic Party HATES AMERICA—DO YOU?” Since I’m a Democrat, these signs make me mad. But, as a fellow-resident, they inspire a different feeling. We’re not friends, but I’ve had nothing but the most pleasant interactions with my neighbor over the years; I doubt that, if she knew anything about my politics, she’d treat me or my family all that differently. I just can’t square the extremity of the signs with the normalcy of the person.
That sort of dissonance is commonplace now. In parts of the country where everyone is of the same political persuasion, it’s possible to think of those on the other side as entirely evil, stupid, or deranged. But in places like the one where I live, where voters are roughly split, there’s no avoiding the fact that many ordinary, likable, and reliable people hold opinions that you find not just disagreeable but disturbing. Where do those opinions come from, and how deep do they go? Should they cause us to reconsider the character of those who hold them? These worrisome questions have been at the center of American life for years.
In theory, we should be able to answer them through conversation; by interrogating our zany uncles, we might find out what they really believe. But talking it through doesn’t always help. A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way. In “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” Payne recounts arguing with his brother, who supported Trump, about whether the 2020 election was stolen. “I didn’t know how I could relate to him if he embraced Trump’s lie,” Payne recalls. To Payne’s great relief, his brother rejected Trump’s denialism, writing, on Facebook, that “by the letter of the law, yes, Biden won.” Yet his brother went on to say, “I think there was some malfeasance there in areas, I do. But it can’t be proven.” Like many people, Payne concludes, his brother had arrived at a kind of semi-belief, which allowed him both to acknowledge reality and “to hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s victory was, deep down, illegitimate.”
It’s tempting to assume that only one’s political opponents are this slippery. But flexible reasoning, in Payne’s view, is “a bipartisan affair.” He recalls hearing, in the spring of 2020, that Tara Reade, a former Senate aide, had accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. His first thought was entirely partisan: “Would this mean four more years of Trump?” His second thought was that Reade had no evidence. Then he remembered how, during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, he himself had argued that claims of sexual assault should be taken seriously even when evidence couldn’t be produced. Eventually, he reasoned that “the worst-case scenario would be that we have two men, both accused of sexual assault, running for president.” This whole thought process, Payne recalls, “unfolded over about ten seconds while I rinsed the coffee pot.” What, exactly, did he think about the allegations? Who knows. The main thing “was that I was once again comfortable that I didn’t need to change my preference or my vote.”
We expect people to perform mental gymnastics in the political sphere. We call it spin, and regard it as normal. Yet sometimes we sense that people are spinning out of control, or we realize, queasily, that we’re spinning quite a lot ourselves. This adds another turn of the screw to the problem of appalling opinions. We can ask what those opinions suggest about the people who hold them. Or we can wonder how much they—or we—hold rational opinions in the first place.
According to Payne, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, flexible reasoning is a fundamental part of our mental tool kit. We reason flexibly in all sorts of nonpolitical situations. A young scholar might dread being denied tenure; a girlfriend might fear being dumped. But, when disaster strikes, they find ways of reasoning themselves back to happiness—as do we all. “Being denied tenure has a way of suddenly illuminating how much better paying and less stressful a nonacademic job might be,” Payne writes. Getting dumped helps us think, Good riddance! We have “psychological immune systems,” Payne concludes, and they keep us feeling good. Really, they do more than that—they help us maintain a stable sense of who we are.
So, who are we? Payne argues that, although our identities are infinitely variable, we share a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.” It’s not necessarily true, of course. We treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and repeatedly discover that we’ve been mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Yet, despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent, and decades of work in psychology have affirmed that we freely rewrite history to maintain this view. When psychologists convince people that they’re wrong about an issue, for instance, those people often later misremember their prior stance, forgetting that they ever thought differently.
Our tendency to rewrite the past can annoy our friends and significant others. But its political consequences are far graver. For one thing, our determination to see ourselves as good, reasonable people extends to our tribes: we pledge our strongest loyalties to those groups that can “create and sustain our sense of identity as a good and valuable person.” Meanwhile, studies have shown that most people are pretty disorganized in their political thinking: very few of us hold a suite of positions that’s intellectually coherent or consistent over time. Payne describes an eye-opening series of experiments conducted in Sweden, Argentina, and the United States, in which researchers surveyed people about a wide range of political topics (asking, for example, about whether a wealth tax was a good idea, or if counterterrorism agencies should be able to monitor citizens’ phones). After taking the surveys away, the researchers secretly altered some of the answers that the respondents had given, then handed the surveys back and asked people to explain their views. Those surveyed only noticed that the answers had been changed twenty-two per cent of the time. “Astonishingly, on the majority of switched questions, participants then proceeded to explain why they chose an answer that they had in fact rejected,” Payne writes. “And the explanations they gave were every bit as sincere and compelling as the explanations they gave to answers that they actually had chosen.”
We desperately want a stable sense of ourselves, yet our views are profoundly unstable. What this adds up to, Payne argues, is the near-total subordination of political discourse to group identities. He writes that most people are “winging it,” saying and thinking what they need to do in order to “preserve the bottom line that they are good and reasonable people and their group is good and reasonable.” What if a group does things that aren’t good and reasonable? What if—say—its leader encourages people to invade the United States Capitol and overturn an election? And what if that group’s opponents say, loud and clear, that what happened was bad and crazy? In that case, winging it goes into overdrive. The insurrectionist group may even find it necessary to “say that the other side are fascists or socialists bent on destroying America,” Payne suggests. This is extreme behavior—but it’s in keeping with perfectly ordinary mental habits. In fact, Payne insists, it reflects a genuine desire to be good, giving one’s zany improvisations the feeling of moral force.
In an old comedy sketch by the British duo Mitchell and Webb, two S.S. officers are standing in a trench, waiting for Russian troops to attack. “Hans,” one of them says to the other. “Have you looked at our caps recently? . . . They’ve got skulls on them!” The other officer shakes his head—he doesn’t get it. The first officer persists. “Are we the baddies?” he asks. The two men look around, notice even more skull stuff—a scarf, a mug—and flee.
The skit is funny, of course, because it never works that way. In Payne’s account, we’re far more likely to try seeing ourselves as the good guys; we might accomplish this most efficiently by further dehumanizing those who have accused us of being bad. Also, it’s not so easy to walk away from your identity. The group affiliations that necessitate our ad-hoc beliefs are often “thrust upon us by accidents of history,” Payne writes. He points to the experience of Southern whites during and after slavery: having been born into a group that was perpetrating a heinous crime, many found it almost impossible not to believe that racism was in some sense justifiable.
Much of “Good Reasonable People” is devoted to America’s historical and socioeconomic divisions. How Americans vote can be easily predicted depending on whether they are rural or urban, religious or secular, educated or uneducated, white or nonwhite; to a degree, it’s even possible to predict how you’ll vote based on how prevalent slavery was in the county where you live. For Payne, the divisions in our society are baked in, and we don’t really choose to belong to one tribe or another. Moreover, whether we are actually good and reasonable people depends on much more than our political opinions. Our lives are wider and deeper than our votes.
Still, politics is powerfully magnetic; it’s easy (and perhaps convenient) to experience it as the central moral arena of our lives, and so to invest extraordinary energy on the tending of our political identities. Payne wants to be clear: he isn’t saying that politics is an illusion, nor that Democratic and Republican policies are indistinguishable. But the uncomfortable reality we face, he argues, is that psychological drama is of national importance. Journalists and policy experts focus on the issues, and our changing views of them. But “the reasoning loops we go through are less like the linear thinking of a computer and more like painting,” he writes. “If something doesn’t feel right, you can always go back and change it. News channels and social media are constantly serving up an assortment of arguments to fill your palette. If one combination doesn’t work you can keep mixing and shading, until everything feels right.” Our pictures alter from day to day, but a troubling status quo is preserved.
Some of what Payne describes is familiar. Of course we’re partisan; obviously, we have blind spots. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used an old public-health regulation called Title 42 to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants. Democrats criticized the action vociferously—yet, when the Biden Administration used the same regulation to expel even more people, many overlooked it. Republicans say they want the government out of our lives, but support developments, in reproductive health and elsewhere, that increase government interference. These inconsistencies are just part of politics.
Yet Payne’s analysis points to a different, more troubling level of irrationality. In his version of our political life, our deepest and most ineradicable habits of mind push some of us to indulge in radical fantasies about the rest of us. Irrespective of the underlying reality, these fantasies shape our collective life. “We need more humanizing, because people in our country have been dehumanizing one another a lot,” he writes. “Democrats call Trump supporters MAGAts. Republicans call Democrats demon rats.” And “decades of research have found that dehumanizing words and images are a strong predictor that political violence is around the corner.” It’s possible to blame the intensification of partisanship mainly on external factors, such as the Internet, which can, at least in theory, be addressed. But Payne points to internal factors that are even more tenacious.
If Payne is correct, then a certain kind of future scenario seems likely. Democrats dream of a time when Republicans turn their backs on Donald Trump, and when all of America views him as a baddie. But is this really possible? If there’s a path out of our current political hellscape, it may very well involve the cultivation of a vast, exculpatory fiction in which the extremities of Trumpism are either forgotten or framed as understandable. Maybe, looking back, it will all be seen as part of some larger and largely innocent semi-mistake—a good-faith effort, undertaken for decent reasons, by people who were ultimately good and reasonable. This fiction will be galling to some people, but deeply reassuring to others. It could be that living with it will be the price we’ll have to pay to live with each other. ♦
