Negative Partisanship: When Hating the Enemy Replaces Having Principles

Negative partisanship is the psychological solvent that makes the rest of the convergence possible. When political identity becomes primarily anti-identity—defined by who you despise rather than what you believe—norm violations stop registering as violations. They register as victory.

This article uses the Alex Pretti case to illustrate the mechanism: a factual scenario that should activate “small government” and “civil liberties” instincts instead produces a reflexive inversion—because the person harmed is coded as them and the state agent is coded as ours.

Where this sits in the convergence map

In the convergence thesis, negative partisanship is not just a background attitude. It is a permission structure that makes otherwise disqualifying behavior politically survivable:

Executive aggrandizement becomes tolerable because the target is “the enemy” (Bermeo’s incremental dismantling proceeds with mass acquiescence).
The propaganda ecosystem becomes effective because tribal epistemology converts evidence into loyalty tests: information is accepted or rejected based on group identity, not accuracy.
Institutional capture becomes defensible because courts, agencies, and watchdogs are rebranded as “enemy-controlled” obstacles rather than neutral constraints.
Selective enforcement and coercion become popular because rights are no longer understood as universal—only as privileges for in-group members.

The Research: Negative Partisanship as a Measurable Phenomenon

Political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster describe the modern party system as increasingly driven by negative identification: Americans align against one party rather than affiliating with the other. Using American National Election Studies data, they found average ratings of the opposing party dropped from 45 degrees (1980) to 30 degrees (2012) on feeling thermometers—while own-party ratings remained stable.

The result is not "people love their party more." The result is: people hate the other party enough that they will tolerate almost anything from their side so long as it hurts the out-group.

The behavioral data is striking. Implicit Association Test research shows partisan bias is now more widespread than racial bias: approximately 70% of partisans show implicit bias favoring their party, with D-scores averaging 0.50 for partisan bias versus 0.18 for racial bias. Americans increasingly report being averse to their child marrying someone from the opposing party—rising from 4-5% in 1960 to one-third of Democrats and one-half of Republicans by 2010.

This helps explain why democratic guardrails—mutual toleration and institutional forbearance in Levitsky & Ziblatt's framework—fail so catastrophically once polarization hardens. Mutual toleration requires seeing opponents as legitimate rivals, not existential enemies. Negative partisanship makes that impossible.

The Behavioral Proof: Iyengar & Westwood's Scholarship Experiment

Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood demonstrated the behavioral logic in a controlled setting. They asked participants to award a scholarship between two applicants with different GPAs and different party affiliations.

The finding is one of the most unsettling in the modern polarization literature: party identity overwhelms objective merit. When evaluating candidates, 79.2% of Democrats picked the Democratic applicant and 80% of Republicans picked the Republican—even when the out-party candidate had a significantly higher GPA (4.0 vs 3.5). The probability of selecting a more qualified out-party candidate never exceeded 30%.

This is the microscopic version of a macroscopic democratic problem. If party label can override "better candidate" in a scholarship context, it can override "rule of law," "constitutional constraints," and "civil liberties" in a crisis context.

Identity-Protective Cognition: Why Intelligence Doesn't Help

Dan Kahan's Cultural Cognition Project at Yale reveals a disturbing paradox: higher cognitive ability produces more polarization, not less. His central finding: "The members of the public most adept at avoiding misconceptions of science are nevertheless the most culturally polarized."

The mechanism is what Kahan terms "identity-protective cognition"—the tendency to selectively credit evidence that confirms group beliefs and dismiss evidence that contradicts them. This isn't irrationality but rather rational protection of social identity: the psychological costs of holding beliefs that conflict with one's cultural community outweigh abstract benefits of accuracy.

Geoffrey Cohen's landmark 2003 study demonstrated this starkly: "Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party." Liberals supported stringent welfare policies when told Democrats endorsed them; conservatives supported generous policies when told Republicans backed them. Most tellingly, participants denied having been influenced while believing their ideological adversaries would be.

The implication is devastating: the "smartest" people in the room are often the most adept at maintaining ideological incoherence. Enhanced cognitive tools enable more sophisticated rationalization, not more accurate perception.

The Psychology of Principle Abandonment

How does someone arrive at positions their past self would find abhorrent? Research reveals a multi-stage pathway:

Stage 1 - Initial small commitments: The foot-in-the-door effect establishes disposition toward "helpfulness" to one's group. Freedman and Fraser's classic 1966 study found homeowners who agreed to display a small "Be a Safe Driver" sign showed 76% compliance with a later request for a large, ugly sign, versus only 17% when asked directly. Self-perception shifts: "I am the kind of person who supports this cause."

Stage 2 - Public advocacy creates dissonance pressure: Having publicly defended positions, individuals experience cognitive dissonance when confronted with contradictory evidence. The path of least resistance is attitude change to match behavior.

Stage 3 - Sunk cost investment: As public advocacy accumulates, abandoning defended positions becomes increasingly psychologically costly. Prior mistakes increase rather than decrease future commitment.

Stage 4 - Identity-protective cognition prevents honest evaluation: High-arousal content and tribal signaling activate identity-protective mechanisms. Evidence is processed not for accuracy but for group implications.

Stage 5 - Negative partisanship reframes abandonment as enemy defeat: When identity is defined by opposition rather than positive values, abandoning previously held principles can be rationalized as necessary to defeat the out-group.

Stage 6 - Audience capture completes the transformation: For those with public platforms, followers' expectations create external reinforcement for increasingly extreme positions—what writer Gurwinder Bhogal describes as "the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience."

The Alex Pretti Case: A Principle Stress-Test

On January 24, 2026, Alex Jeffrey Pretti—a registered nurse and legally armed gun owner—was shot and killed by federal agents (ICE) during a protest in Minneapolis. He was reportedly filming agents while openly carrying a holstered pistol.

Set aside politics and look only at the values many communities claim to hold:

Second Amendment rights: a licensed citizen carrying a holstered firearm.
Limited government: protest against perceived federal overreach and coercive enforcement.
Civil liberties: state use of lethal force in a public protest context.
Accountability norms: the citizen recording the state, not the state recording itself.

By the stated logic of many “liberty” and “gun rights” communities, this should be an archetypal outrage case.

The Inversion: Tribe Eats Principle

Instead, the reaction pattern revealed negative partisanship in its most operational form.

Because the protest was coded as "anti-ICE" (and therefore, in tribal sorting terms, associated with the out-group), the victim was treated as an enemy rather than a rights-bearing citizen. The state actor, coded as "our side's enforcement arm," was treated as presumptively justified.

The rhetoric shifted seamlessly to a "Law and Order" frame: Pretti was blamed for "provoking" agents, for bringing a gun to a volatile situation, or for being associated with "rioters." Some defenses leaned on "he was armed" as a justification for lethal force—a logic that implies de facto restrictions on armed protest and a widened tolerance of state violence. These positions clash directly with libertarian or small-government self-conceptions.

The incident precipitated a schism within the Libertarian Party itself. The Georgia chapter adhered to principle, condemning the shooting as authoritarian overreach. However, the silence or apologetics from other factions highlighted the "enemy-of-my-enemy" logic. For those whose primary political motivation is opposition to the "Left," any force that suppresses the Left—even the federal government—becomes an ally.

This is the essential inversion negative partisanship enables:

Rights become conditional on tribal membership.
State violence becomes acceptable when directed at the out-group.
"Limited government" turns into "use the government against them."
The "Back the Blue" identity overrides the "Second Amendment" identity once the victim is coded as enemy.

It is not that principles disappeared; it is that they were never universal. They were group-bound.

Tribal Epistemology and the Collapse of Shared Reality

David Roberts codified the phenomenon as tribal epistemology: an epistemic framework where the truth value of a statement is determined not by evidence, but by its utility to the tribe.

"True" = That which supports Us.
"False" = That which supports Them.

This shift creates a "rally around the flag" effect for partisan leaders. If a leader shifts positions—on trade, foreign policy, or public health—the tribe follows, rewriting their own ideological history in real-time. To dissent is to risk excommunication.

The convergence framework emphasizes that the information environment is not merely polarized; it is structured to reward this dynamic. Research shows content expressing out-group animosity generates disproportionately high engagement: each out-group term increases sharing odds by 67%, making out-group hostility 4.8 times stronger than negative affect and 6.7 times stronger than moral-emotional language as predictors of engagement. The attention economy monetizes tribal epistemology.

In that environment, evidence about coercion and abuse does not produce accountability because it is processed through the tribal filter: "Is this good for my side?" rather than "Is this true?"

This is how the same coalition can demand maximal police power in one context and minimal police power in another, without experiencing cognitive dissonance. The dissonance is dissolved by identity: if the target is "them," the action becomes righteous.

The Anti-Identity Dynamic

Negative partisanship produces what can be called "anti-identity" politics. When identity is defined primarily by opposition to the "other," the motivation to defeat the opposing party becomes stronger than attachment to one's own party's platform.

This creates a politics of pure negation: if the opposition supports "X," the negative partisan must support "Anti-X," regardless of whether "Anti-X" aligns with their previous values. The only consistent principle is that the enemy is wrong.

This reactionary positioning explains the rapid position reversals that characterize contemporary politics. Policy positions become instrumental to tribal victory rather than expressions of principle. Voters follow party cues even when they contradict initial vote intentions and stated policy preferences—because the goal is not to advance a coherent worldview but to defeat the despised out-group.

Why This Enables Executive Power Grabs

Bermeo's executive aggrandizement is typically described institutionally—leaders hollowing out checks via "legal" means. But the institutional story requires a public psychology story. Leaders can break norms only when voters, media ecosystems, and elites supply permission.

Negative partisanship supplies permission in three ways:

Normalization: what would be scandalous becomes routine if it harms the enemy.
Moral licensing: violations are justified as necessary to defeat an existential threat.
Asymmetric accountability: only out-group violations count as violations.

There is a fourth mechanism: weaponized victimhood. For a significant portion of the electorate, the cruelty of the regime is viewed as a "feature, not a bug." This allows individuals to rationalize repressive policies by fostering an identity based on the false perception that they are being treated unfairly by historically marginalized groups. In this framework, nativist policies are seen as necessary defense against an "invasion," and the dismantling of democratic norms is viewed as "winning" the culture war.

Psychological research suggests that humans possess "foundational beliefs"—narratives about themselves and the social order—that they cannot violate without calling into question their own self-worth. When facts conflict with these "sacred values," individuals almost always find a way to reject the evidence. This creates a permission structure where elites and ordinary citizens alike treat authoritarianism as a legitimate form of debate.

In the convergence dynamic, this interacts with propaganda volume and attention fatigue: as violations become constant, citizens stop tracking them, and partisans stop caring about them. The phrase "he's hurting the right people" captures the psychology precisely: the harm itself becomes the point.

The Core Contribution

Negative partisanship explains why “half the population” can accept what earlier articles document: court defiance, watchdog purges, the reshaping of security forces, and the normalization of political violence. It explains why the same people who claim to oppose state tyranny can celebrate state coercion when it is aimed at enemies.

This is not a marginal psychological quirk. It is the civic substrate on which institutional erosion becomes politically stable.

This is the sixteenth article in a series examining democratic decline. The next article examines democracy indices—V-Dem, Freedom House, Polity, and the Century Foundation—and why independent measurement systems converge once erosion becomes systemic rather than episodic.