After two weeks of incitement, rioting, and growing worries about political violence, there is one phrase that is a go-to for politicians: “We need to turn the temperature down.” Whether from those who continue to be alarmed by the revelations of plots of violence against government institutions, egged on by those claiming the election was stolen, or from Republicans opposing impeachment on the grounds that they say it is too divisive, there is lots of talk in Washington about cooling things off.
Unfortunately, America’s thermostat may be broken.
There is a model for understanding public opinion known as “thermostatic public opinion.” First spelled out in a 1995 paper by political scientist Christopher Wleizien, the concept suggests that the public acts as a thermostat, reacting in response to the actions the government takes. Consider how a thermostat in your home works: If it is too hot, it will trigger the air conditioner to make things cooler; if it is too cold, it will turn on the heat. It suggests a sort of equilibrium where preferences will shift back and forth.
In governance, it means that the people elect a government to do a certain set of things and then turn a bit against them once those things are put into place. In moments where the government enacts policies that are more rightward leaning, the public swings to prefer policies more to the left. When the government does things that are more liberal, there is a rightward shift in public opinion.
In recent years, we saw this “thermostat” in action with major changes, including Obamacare, a policy that was not beloved after its passage but became quite popular once Republicans took control in Washington and threatened to repeal it. Perhaps this “thermostatic” behavior on the part of voters is why newly elected presidents tend to have such rocky first-term midterm elections — the public shifts to nudge governance back the other way, to keep things from getting too cold or too hot in either direction.
My worry today is that our nation’s thermostat is on the fritz. Upon President Trump’s election, there was absolutely a backlash against him that fueled a leftward lurch among many institutions. If Trump represented an extreme and abrupt shift in governance, like opening a window on a frigid winter day, the thermostat sent the furnace into overdrive to correct for that.
As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written, things such as the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo may have flourished in part as a reaction against a president like Trump. It seems less likely that Democrats would have taken positions outside the mainstream, such as decriminalizing illegal border crossings, were it not as a response to extreme actions on the part of the Trump administration, such as child separation.
But the backlash to Trump wasn’t confined to elections or those in the machinery of governance, and that’s where the broken thermostat comes in. Without Trump, for instance, we would not have seen the rise of “Resistance” celebrity journalists and a media more willing to shed neutrality. Without Trump, perhaps elite higher education institutions would not have had demands from their own students who, claiming to feel unsafe, demanded even greater quashing of conservative thought and speech on campus. Corporate America also increasingly became political in the Trump era, weighing in on cultural and political issues to further their brand.
The problem is that while Democrats moved left in response to Trump’s power in government, conservatives began running the other direction, not as a counter to government policy but as a reaction to every institution that wasn’t government. Ask a Trump voter in a focus group and they’ll tell you there’s widespread feeling on the Right that as the political Left has moved ever leftward, it has done so in the Trump era with the increasingly enthusiastic support of tech companies, the media, cultural and academic institutions, and more.
So while the Left is acting thermostatically in response to what they view as the extremes of Trump, the Right is acting thermostatically to what they view as the extremes of every other institution in America. This is only fueled by fragmented news consumption habits, where media organizations get more money from viewers, and viewers seek outrage. Therefore, whatever “the other side” is doing that is most outrageous, even if an isolated example on a small scale, gets top headlines and defines how one side sees the other.
Politicians this month have talked a lot about the need to “turn the temperature down.” They’re right that we desperately need to do so. But we also need to grapple with the fact that the thermostat might be broken. It isn’t just about governance anymore, and it will take more than a new president to repair.
