Hate and Politics

On January 23rd, Professors David Myers, Cesi Cruz, and Lynn Vavreck met to discuss the vital topic of hate and politics in the first 2025 installment of our ongoing digital series, “The State Of Hate.” This series is held in partnership with the Friends of Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

Opening the discussion, Professor Myers, founding director of the Initiative to Study Hate, laid out three key topics for discussion: the interrelation of hate in domestic and international politics, how hate shapes political rhetoric and the resulting danger to our collective wellbeing, and the role of social media in both spreading and stopping hate in politics.

In response to this prompt, Lynn Vavreck, Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, shared that the 2016, 2020, and 2022 US election results were all exceptionally close and displayed very little voter movement between parties, which suggests that we have reached a moment of “calcification,” or hardening of political stances and affiliations. She further explained that what we might identify as “New Deal issues,” such as tax rates and the size and scope of the federal government, no longer retain much influence over voters, who instead are locking into their positions on the basis of identity and a foundational concept of “America.” As Vavreck noted, “high-impact issues for people post-2016 turn on ‘who you are,’ and that makes politics very divisive, very emotional.” In other words, polarized political discourse about identity—who can use which bathroom, play on which sports team, make decisions about healthcare, or lay claim to the rights and protections of American identity—is increasingly the defining variable in our elections and makes the path to any form of compromise between parties far less clear.

Drawing on her ISH-funded research on social media and Filipino politics, Assistant Professor of Political Science Cesi Cruz noted that, in addition to the fact that social media “make[s] it really easy for things like misinformation and disinformation to spread,” it can also function as a mechanism for “reinforcing social identities.” By offering politicians and political movements an unfiltered, siloed, and fast-moving information environment, social media has become a conduit for an emotionally-charged politics in which debates over identity can devolve into debates about who should be considered human. Cruz described how former president Rodrigo Dutarte effectively dehumanized drug users and drug dealers in the Philippines, and ultimately unleashed a wave of extrajudicial violence against them, claiming the lives of an estimated 30,000 people. Cruz added that social media gives a major advantage to those “populist” politicians whose messaging is intensely emotional and who are able to cut to the heart of voters’ sense of who they are.

During the Q&A, the three speakers discussed whether the “guardrails” of democracy are still in place in the US, Cruz shared a hopeful update from the Philippines—where a policy-driven media intervention effectively countered messaging that triggered hate and fear—and, finally, the speakers considered what we can still do to prevent the spread of hate, such as sharing vetted information with friends and family and encouraging open-mindedness amongst fellow members of our identity communities.

We hope to return to these and other urgent topics in our next installment of the State of Hate, which will focus on the internet, on February 13, and our upcoming events with Adam Phillips, author of On Kindness, on February 26-27, 2025.