POLITICS: Are Republicans Ready for Political War? – USSA News

A study of political beliefs that was published in 2023 in the British Journal of Social Psychology has caught on recently in social media, where the conclusions are framed like this: “There is more diversity of thought on the political Right than on the political Left.”

And that is what the study says, noting that ideological clustering drives the Democratic Party steadily leftward: “Not only does the presented data suggest that Democrats embrace more extreme viewpoints on the selected issues compared with Republicans, but also that the Republican cluster includes some surprising issue positions that (under interval assumptions) might be assumed to fall into the Democrat cluster.” Beliefs among people who identify as Democrats cluster densely — this is what we all believe — while beliefs among people who identify as Republicans sprawl across a wider range. Republicans are much more likely to sustain an alliance with someone who agrees with them on a lot of things rather than everything.

But the whole study is more interesting than that, and the implications are bigger.

The paper is titled, “Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts.” You can read it here. The first thing it suggests is that there isn’t much politics in our politics, especially among the cohort we identify as “left.” Political views correlate to expressed and desired social identities.

The affluent white female liberal in Ann Arbor doesn’t say she proudly supports trans kids because she’s given careful thought to the castration of teenagers and the surgical creation of artificial vaginas that allow boys to identify as girls. She signs on for trans rights because declining that position marks her as a right-wing person, which she perceives as a low-status identity. And her friends agree — or, if she expresses doubt, her former friends agree. 

Political views are both expressions of social status and the means by which that status is secured. What you believe is who your friends are, where you work comfortably without biting your tongue, which family members are glad to see you. “What do you think about the rights of transgender children?” means “Are you one of us, or are you from the outgroup that we hate?”

From the study: “Our first set of findings suggests that attitudes, emotions, and symbolic self-descriptions are inter-connected elements which together define the meaning and the experience of partisan-based group identity.” Politics is how you feel about yourself.

The implication is that political views increasingly aren’t bought a la carte, but in a package, especially on the Left: Once you’re pro-abortion, you’re also pro-gun control. If you think Donald Trump is being mean to immigrants for no reason, you’re also very angry at the troglodytes who didn’t obey Dr. Fauci. The Left’s politics cluster and bundle: We believe all the things that people like us believe.

If political views primarily become status markers and identity signals, the study suggests, “such dynamics would increase bipartisan polarization due to a gradually disappearing centre.” A good liberal can’t believe most of the liberal stuff but come around on the transgender thing. That’s not what your status group believes. (Just ask J.K. Rowling.) The problem isn’t evidence; the problem is compliance.

The result is totalizing. In March 2025, 82% of Americans said Republican and Democratic voters cannot agree on basic facts; a mere 18% thought they could. 

The researchers struggled to understand the meaning behind their findings, so they came up with their best guess: “Research suggests that social category membership (e.g., being White, Christian) is more important for the construction of Republican identity than it is for Democrat identity.” Democrats are a rainbow, but MAGA is white people.

Finding an unknown in their data, the researchers turn away from it, offering a guess about what it means on the basis of other studies — and making exactly the kind of totalizing assumption about ideology and social identity that their own study describes. It’s a revealing moment in an otherwise careful piece of work. 

But the vote doesn’t support this conclusion at all. Donald Trump so sharply improved the Republican share of the Latino vote that he crept within three points of winning it. Among black voters, support for Trump nearly doubled, rising from 8% in 2020 to 15% in 2024, per Pew Research numbers. 

But the gap in party uniformity is also a gap in political strength. Consistently, the Democratic Party achieves unbroken party discipline, while the GOP is defined by the count of the number of legislators who peel off. Democrats will vote the same; Republicans wander around the room, and Thomas Massie would like a word.

In 2024, Senate Democrats demonstrated far greater ideological unity than Republicans, prevailing on a record 94.5% of party unity votes, compared to the House GOP’s 76.6% — itself only a modest rebound from a historic low in 2023, according to Roll Call. The narrow margins in both chambers left little room for dissent, but Democrats proved far more cohesive.

Locally, the same patterns persist. In Texas, the Democratic state legislator Shawn Thierry was an orthodox liberal who voted with her party – until she disagreed on a handful of gender politics issues, which this left-facing news story explained in these terms:

“Thierry began facing public ire from her party last year when she broke with Democrats to support three GOP priorities targeting the LGBTQ community: the ban on gender-transitioning care for minors, a bill to remove sexually explicit books from school libraries and a requirement that transgender college athletes play on teams that align their sex assigned at birth.”

You can see, in that framing, the way identity-derived beliefs cluster without regard to facts or logic: Thierry targeted the LQBTQ community; for example, she doesn’t want schools to give sexually explicit books to young children.  

Today, Thierry still serves in the Texas legislature. But she serves there as a Republican, after being successfully primaried by Democrats.

In California, Republican legislators passionately supported a bill by a Democratic colleague, Maggy Krell, that proposed to make it a felony to solicit sex for pay from a minor. Democrats, enraged by the sight of a colleague working with Republicans on a bill they regarded as socially conservative, stripped Krell’s sponsorship of the bill, assigned it to a more compliant legislator, and tried to kill it in committee. (After a great deal of publicity made opposition to the bill embarrassing, Democrats grudgingly allowed it to pass.)

In practical terms, the greatest strength of the parties are their greatest weaknesses. Democrats, ideologically brittle and inclined to purge dissenters, spiral lockstep into illogic and march uniformly behind failed policy. Republicans, tolerating a wide range of views and feeling inclined by temperament to nurture a big tent, struggle to pass bills and enact policy as Lisa Murkowski proudly declares yet again that she’ll vote against her party’s agenda.

Famously, the Republican Party’s post-2012 election autopsy called for expansion: “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities. But it is not just tone that counts. Policy always matters.” Donald Trump was the unexpected answer to that call. He expanded the Republican base with an identity-transcending message about the need to counter American decline from decades of failed policy — and he did so without falling in line with the autopsy’s approved positions on key issues like immigration. The progress of that expansion pushes against the limits of a politics defined by identity clustering, and it needs to.

But the tent can only become so big before it loses all meaningful boundaries. Argument is important, and the Democratic Party’s purge-focused groupthink model isn’t one to copy. I’m inclined to regard policy objections from Thomas Massie and Rand Paul as principled and thoughtful, and to regard Lisa Murkowski as a quisling and a windsock, but still. It’s important that we have room to argue, but arguments become meaningless if they don’t lead to disciplined action against an opponent that always marches in good order. There’s too much at stake to treat the Republican Party as a debate club. In an environment in which any political effort struggles against the social pressures, identity clustering, and status anxiety that define and drive totalitarian regimes, it’s going to become harder to do anything without focus and discipline.

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