Angry in America
This election is rubbing some folks raw...but maybe that's not all bad for democracy
"So what did you think?" asked Thompson, 31.
"I don't really know, I fell asleep," responded Prywes, 28, who had promised himself before the movie that he wouldn't get into an argument.
Thompson was appalled that anyone could doze off in the face of such incendiary content. "I looked at him and thought, 'How can I have a conversation with this guy if he won't even look at the facts?' " says Thompson, who hasn't spoken to Prywes since. "Fundamentally, he's a good guy and stuff. But it's just not worth the aggravation."
Prywes says he, too, has grown frustrated. "When I try to present contrary evidence for why I support Bush, rather than engaging in an intelligent discussion about the issues, I instead have to defend my own moral character," complains Prywes, "as if there was something defective about me." Of their fractured four-year friendship, he says, "It's no loss on my part. I actually felt like I was getting dumber every time I had to listen to him."
Throwback. Such contemptuous partisanship represents a stark contrast to Americans' long-running inclination toward political apathy and post-Watergate cynicism, which has fed a steady decline in voter turnout (51.3 percent in the 2000 election), as well as a marked decrease in party affiliation.
Indeed, today's sharpening partisanship represents a throwback to the raucous political days of the late 19th century, when voters wore their party allegiances on their lapels and party bosses assured healthy turnout by promising goodies like jobs and Christmas turkeys. "Your party defined who you were and who your family and friends were," says political historian Michael McGerr, author of The Decline of Popular Politics. "You lived together and worked together. You read the partisan newspaper that was loyal to your party, and you accused the other one of lying."
Yet for all their intense partisanship, our political predecessors didn't take things nearly as personally as we do today. While there were clashes with political opponents, they rarely involved personal animosity between rank-and-file partisans. Instead, "the opposing sides would make these absurd bets. 'If your candidate wins, I'll push a penny across the town green with my nose or shave off one side of my goatee.' It was a way of taking something deeply partisan and making it possible to deal with amicably," McGerr says of such rituals. But with political allegiances so intensely intertwined with identity today, "people just don't know how to be partisan without getting personal," adds Colorado State's Chaloupka.
That's what happened when Al Salmon, 69, recently emerged from his house in Moorestown, N.J., wearing a hat bearing the logo "USS Abraham Lincoln," the aircraft carrier where President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq last year.
"Oh, the 'Mission Accomplished' ship?" his next-door neighbor Kevin Aberant, 34, said sarcastically when he saw the ex-marine's hat. "Isn't that the hundreds-more-are-going-to-die ship?"
"Would you rather that Saddam was still there?" Salmon shot back.
The two had traded barbs in the past, and Aberant had posted a Kerry-Edwards sign in his front yard to compete with Salmon's IM4W sign and a bumper sticker reading, "Ten Reasons I Don't Vote For Liberals: The Ten Commandments." But when Salmon donned the hat, Aberant says he "just lost it." Realizing things could turn nasty, "I had to walk away so we would stay friends."
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