For most people, politics is about fitting in

On student protests, negative polarization, and the politics of identity.

How do people formulate their political beliefs? By which I mean: how do they decide what politically-salient facts they believe to be true and which causes they identify with?

This seems like an incredibly important question if you’re trying to understand and project the course of public opinion (and even more important if you’re seeking to shape public opinion). And yet, I rarely see these sort of epistemological questions discussed among people who cover politics for a living. When I do, I think their theories are often naive, overstating the degree to which people consider political events literally on the merits — as opposed to evaluating them through a variety of psychological, social and strategic lenses.

So let me outline my theory. I think political beliefs are primarily formulated by two major forces:

• Politics as self-interest. Some issues have legible, material stakes. Rich people have an interest in lower taxes. Sexually active women (and men!) who don’t want to bear children have an interest in easier access to abortion. Members of historically disadvantaged groups have an interest in laws that protect their rights

• Politics as personal identity — whose team are you on. But other issues have primarily symbolic stakes. These serve as vehicles for individual and group expression — not so much “identity politics” but politics as identity. People are trying to figure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both directions: people can be attracted to a group or negatively polarized by it. People have different reasons for arguing about politics, and can derive value from a sense of social belonging and receiving reinforcement that their choices are honorable and righteous.¹

There’s arguably a third category here — politics as group solidarity and grievance abatement. When a group has experienced a past traumatic event and sees politics as a way to protect its interests or extract revenge, that can obviously be a powerful motivating force. But let’s set that aside for now, since it’s sort of a combination of the other two motivations.

Notice what’s missing from my list? The notion of politics as a battle of ideas. This is not to suggest that people don’t hold reasonable moral intuitions about political affairs. But when it comes to mass popular opinion, the number of people who are interested in ideas for ideas sake is vanishingly small. As of this writing, for instance, the three best-selling books in political philosophy at Amazon.com are ranked only #1632, #2841 and #4261 among all books.

Among public intellectuals — you know, the sorts of people who write Substack newsletters — ideas are debated more seriously. And elite opinion can influence mass opinion, certainly. But I think political elites considerably overstate the extent to which they can persuade the public by marshaling the right arguments or presenting them with the “right” facts. For instance, the whole field of “misinformation studies” is lacking in empirical support or a solid theory of psychology. Presenting information in a way that seems partisan will often persuade people that you’re not on their side and backfire — even if you’re correct on the merits.

I also think the relative importance of these categories is changing as American politics moves into a more post-material phase — politics is becoming more about self-expression and less about material self-interest. That may be partly because of the rise of what is sometimes termed “political hobbyism” — people who follow politics like they do sports. There aren’t actually all that many political hobbyists — at a typical moment in a typical day, for instance, only about 1 percent of Americans are tuned into Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. But they make up a lot of the audience for political content, and a large share of the people that make political donations. And these are generally strong partisans, looking for daily affirmation that they’re on the virtuous side and the other team are the bad guys.

Student protests and counter-reaction as signaling

The pro-Palestine/anti-Israel student protests that started at mostly high-end private colleges — but have now spread to a large number of colleges and universities — have been compared to Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s. But there is one difference: most students don’t have a direct personal stake in the Middle East in the way they did in Vietnam because of the draft.

And that might be a reason to take the students less literally. Indeed, if you do take them literally, the demands of the protest organizers are often radical and extreme. For instance, one of the main groups organizing the protests, Students for Justice in Palestine, issued a celebratory statement following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, and has endorsed violence against the “Zionist entity”. There is sometimes too much equivocation of this, and calls for violence and incidents of antisemitism, in press coverage of the protests.

My question is more what’s happening around the periphery of the protests: among students who are participating in the protests but not organizing them. Or even among college students generally. I’m inclined toward Phillipe Lemoine’s view that these students’ views are socially conditioned and don’t necessarily reveal a lot of deep reflection about the Middle East.

One piece of evidence for this is that the protests initially weren’t very large, involving relatively small numbers of students in extremely selective environments — until there were police efforts to shut them down. Again, that’s classic negative polarization — college students don’t want to be on the same team as the police, and they may rally to support other students’ rights to free expression even if they don’t agree with the content of it.

Another sign that the most extreme protestors don’t reflect broader sentiment is that in polls, most young people treat Israel-Palestine as an issue of low importance:

I can guarantee you that there are lots of students at Columbia and other institutions who are directionally sympathetic to the Palestinians but annoyed that the climax to their academic years has been ceded to political protest. A student referendum at Cornell found that that 70 percent of students agreed that Cornell should “call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza” and 69 percent agreed that Cornell should divest from weapons manufacturers active in Gaza. Those are majorities, obviously. But also that’s almost a third of the student body dissenting — even though these are not particularly radical proposals. (Weapons manufacturers have never been popular with college students or anyone else. And the vague notion of a “ceasefire” tends to be popular in polls — in the same sense that if you ask people if they want world peace, most will say yes — until you start to attach terms and conditions to it.)

The protests are also happening against a background of what are often extremely left-leaning environments on college campuses. The 2023 College Pulse survey asked students at hundreds of undergraduate institutions about their political views on a liberal-conservative scale. At the Ivy and “Ivy Plus” schools that were home to some of the first protests, liberals outnumber conservatives by a ratio of approximately 5:1, including by as high as 11:1 at Brown at 9:1 at Penn:

The rest of American society just isn’t anything like this. Among American women aged 18-29, liberals outnumber conservatives, but only by about 2:1. Among young American men, there are actually more conservatives than liberals.

And as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, if you shift the median over, the tails of the graph are going to be very extreme indeed. The median view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in my social circles is something like: sympathy for both the Israeli and Palestinian people, unambiguous condemnation of Hamas, skepticism of the Netanyahu government’s response to the attacks, and probably support for some sort of two-state solution. Relative to the US public as a whole, that position qualifies as center-left. Relative to the Columbia campus, it might seem right-wing or even “Zionist”. Most people are very bad at placing their own political views in the context of broader public opinion as opposed to their immediate social environment. A student looking to establish that she’s a good lefty at one of these campuses might anchor herself relative to the rest of the student body and not recognize the radicalism of a chant like “from the river to the sea”.

And sometimes the desire for social signaling can lead people to confused positions. Here, for instance, was a statement made by a protester at a “Queers for Palestine” rally in January.

“Palestine could be the most homophobic place in the world—which it’s not, it’s literally better than here—but it could be, and does that mean all these people need to be killed?” Yaffa asked. “A third of those are children. The children are the homophobes?”

Emphasis mine. The protestor was claiming that Palestine — where same-sex sexual activity is illegal and has sometimes been subject to execution — was literally less homophobic than the place where the rally was held. The punchline is that the rally took place in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is sometimes considered the lesbian capital of the world. You have to be engaged in an extraordinary degree of motivated reasoning to think that Northampton is literally more homophobic than Gaza. The sort of motivated reasoning that comes when there are social rewards both for being pro-Palestine and for being pro-LGBTQ+, enough that nobody in your bubble is really pressing you on the details.

And adults do this too, obviously. Partisan motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. And so is negative polarization, which is why these protests are probably not going to help the students’ cause. As during the protests of the 1960s and 70s, a lot of people are going to look at the protesters and decide they want to be on the other team. Mask-wearing, Palestinian-flag waving students² at expensive college campuses are not going to come across sympathetically. (The protestors also haven’t helped themselves with their public statements, which often reflect a lack of self-awareness.) I’d like to see more polling, but there is already some initial evidence that the gradual trend toward greater skepticism toward Israel’s war efforts since Oct. 7 is reversing itself in the wake of the protests.

Nor are the protests likely to help Joe Biden — I’m skeptical they’ll have that large an effect, but at the margin they probably help Trump, who is considerably to Biden’s right on Israel. Now, I’m not particularly sure that’s the students’ responsibility — instinctually, I strongly dislike the implication that everyone just has to suppress their political expression in an election year for the sake of a reelection effort that they may or may not have been fully bought into in the first place. But it is one further sign that the protests serve more of a signaling function and less that there’s some concrete theory for how to affect change.

And that’s often the case for when Americans discuss the Middle East. In picking sides in the conflict, we’re really picking sides among ourselves.

1. But, political groups and parties can seek to manipulate someone’s sense of belonging even when it doesn’t serve their narrow self-interest. Increasingly, for instance, there is an inversion where many poorer people vote Republican and many richer ones vote Democrat for “cultural” reasons, even though Democrats usually advocate for more wealth redistribution.

2. Remember, most Americans are not very sympathetic to Palestine.