University of Massachusetts Amherst political scientist Alexander Theodoridis talks about dehumanizing language in politics, what it can lead to and what we can do about it.

Transcript

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

And it is only 16 days until the election.

PHILIP ABSTIN: I'm Philip (ph). Last name's Abstin (ph). I'm a registered Republican, but on some days I'm embarrassed to tell anyone I'm a Republican. Were I a Democrat, I would be embarrassed to tell somebody I was a Democrat every day.

JOAN MAYBURY: Joan Maybury (ph). And I am from Denver, Colo. And I'm a Democrat.

ABSTIN: We've been married for 14 years, but...

MAYBURY: We don't talk politics. We've tried. Sometimes, I want to stop him and fact check some of the things he said. It just isn't pleasant.

ABSTIN: Politics is one of those dinner table topics that you never really ever talked about because we never really needed to talk about it because it was just kind of something that, you know, the government ran. And we had our lives. And never the two shall meet. And that hasn't been the case anymore.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And it's not just Joan Maybury and Philip Abstin. In my own family, there have been pretty forceful confrontations. And now that the press has been so thoroughly demonized, I've had loved ones forward some frankly horrible screeds and memes to me. So is that just part of our contentious campaign seasons now that we've become so polarized? Or are we pushing past polarization and into new territory where we stop recognizing each other as fellow citizens or people? Alexander Theodoridis teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he joins us now. Welcome.

ALEXANDER THEODORIDIS: Great to be here.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You study dehumanizing language. Let's start with what that is. And how does it differ from just having a lower opinion of someone who has different views than you?

THEODORIDIS: Yeah. So dehumanization suggests that somebody lacks certain human qualities, right? And so often, we'll hear things like Senator Harris being called a monster or groups being referred to as animals or likened to rats or...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so that they don't deserve the same treatment.

THEODORIDIS: Yeah. And that often is where things lead - is either a justification post hoc for treating somebody differently or, in some cases, a precursor to treating a group differently.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thomas Jefferson hired James Callender to slime John Adams in the 1800 presidential campaign. So there's a long history of this in politics. But Donald Trump has been practicing it most notably in this election. And previously, you cited Kamala Harris being called a monster. It has seeped down into the body politic. And that's what I'd like to discuss here. How do you capture that in your studies?

THEODORIDIS: One of the measures we use literally shows people a ascent-of-man picture, which is basically the image where you have - where you go from sort of a stooped ape-like figure up to a standing human. And we asked them, how evolved do you think these groups are. And we ask them, Democrats and Republicans - how evolved? And what we find is around 80% of people rate their own side higher than they rate the other side. And almost 70% of people rate their own side more than 10 points higher than the other side. And the average is in the 30s, like 35-point difference. So this is a pretty substantial gap.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And the fear is, of course, that our use of language or how we talk can lead to action or, in this case, violence.

THEODORIDIS: Yeah. And in fact, you know, I don't want to be alarmist. I don't think that we're very close to widespread political violence largely because I think most people in this country are still fairly happy and are not concerned enough with politics on a day-to-day basis to take to the streets and do awful things. But we asked people to give a sentence to somebody who had attacked a senator from one party or the other, randomizing the party of the senator. And those who dehumanize more give a more lenient sentence, right? So they view it as less of an offense when you attack the other side than when you attack their own side.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, I mean, we have seen violence. Already, we've seen militias on the streets of certain American cities. One of the consequences as well of dehumanizing other side is, you have written, that it allows conspiracy theories to take hold. You say that both Democrats and Republicans can use this kind of language, but we have seen one particular party, the Republican Party, sort of in the grips of conspiracy theories like QAnon.

THEODORIDIS: Yeah. And I think I absolutely agree that this is asymmetric. I think part of that is just the composition of the parties. One feature of the sorting that has happened in terms of who is a Democrat and who is a Republican - there is this sort of diploma divide. And I think that's a factor.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Other social scientists we have spoken to wonder if the genie can actually be put back in the bottle. I will say as someone who has covered countries where there is deep polarization outside of the United States, it is hard to roll that back.

THEODORIDIS: Yeah. So my thoughts on this are actually somewhat pessimistic. You know, we longed for a period in our history in the latter part of the last century where polarization along party lines - not necessarily along other lines but along partisan lines - was not very pronounced. Your, you know, race, religion, education level didn't necessarily predict your partisanship the way that it does today. And because that - all those identities are aligned, it becomes this sort of super ordinate, super powerful identity.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So then where should we go from here? Because what I hear over and over again from voters is that they are tired of this partisanship, and yet they are part of this partisanship.

THEODORIDIS: That's right. So I really do think the focus should be first of all on just, you know, trying to lower the temperature. And I think that falls largely on elites, on elected officials. I think we should hold them to a higher standard. And the media should hold them to a higher standard in terms of not stoking these fires in ways that can be dangerous. But beyond that, I think we should really look for ways to make it so that our government can work effectively under polarization because I think this is a much more natural state of affairs than the kind of odd period historically that we have recently emerged from where the parties weren't really aligned with ideology and all sorts of characteristics.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That is Alexander Theodoridis of UMass Amherst. Thank you very much.

THEODORIDIS: Thanks a lot. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.