Most Americans have no political ideology. So what are they fighting about?

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Keith Payne is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His latest book is Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide.

As the U.S. presidential campaign nears its conclusion, it seems obvious that the country’s ideological divisions are as searing and exhausting as ever. Conflict over political ideology by now seems to be old news. Except this familiar story is almost entirely wrong.

There is something social scientists have known for decades that never seems to make it into the mainstream coverage of political news: The vast majority of Americans have no political ideology. That includes people who call themselves liberals or conservatives, and those who get into heated arguments with each other over politics. How can that be possible? And if that’s true, what are they fighting over anyway?

An ideology is a coherent set of related principles. But when Americans are surveyed about political issues and principles, their opinions about one topic are almost entirely unrelated to their opinions on other logically related issues. People who take the “conservative” position on one issue, such as lower taxes, often take the “liberal” position on other issues, such as higher spending on Medicare. On issue after issue, opinions do not form any internally coherent cluster of beliefs. Even worse, when the same respondents are surveyed repeatedly, their opinions are astonishingly inconsistent over time. People may sincerely mean what they say on a survey today, but in a few months they might have a completely different set of ideas. They will still be on the same political team, but the reasons they offer keep changing.

The late political scientist Philip Converse, an early pioneer of this research, estimated that 85 per cent of Americans have no ideology at all. The remaining 15 per cent who have genuine ideologies are “elites,” such as journalists and academics, and news junkies who read and write about politics every day. Following news and reading essays such as this one create an illusion of ideology because elites talk mostly to each other. It is hard for people in the chattering class to believe that the rest of the population has little idea what we are chattering about.

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What really organizes American politics – and drives such furious divisions – is social identity, combined with geography and history. If all I know about a person is that they are Black, then I know that almost 90 per cent of such voters will vote for the Democratic nominee. If I know only that they are white, I can predict that 60 per cent will vote Republican. But that figure rises to 90 per cent if they believe that the main reason for racial inequalities is that Black Americans don’t work hard enough. There’s no need to know their opinions on taxes, free trade or climate change.

Pundits and pollsters give a lot of weight to the opinions and explanations people express in surveys. If voters say they prefer Donald Trump because the economy was better under his administration, analysts accept those reasons as the real causes of voters’ choices. But reasons are more often stories told after the fact than they are true causes of people’s decisions. When Democrats are in power, Republicans think the economy is poor. When Republicans are in power, Democrats think the same. It seems suspicious that it is mainly white Americans without a college degree who believe that Mr. Trump is better for the economy, while Black, Hispanic, Asian and white college-educated Americans disagree. If we really want to understand what drives political divisions, we have to look at the deeper causes, not simply the explanations people give.

The real causes are buried deep. Since the 1960s, the United States has seen a gradual realignment of political parties around race. Democrats became the party seen as expanding civil rights and tearing down racial inequalities. Republicans positioned themselves as resisting those changes. But it is not simply a white/Black issue. History and place matter, too.

My research has found that people’s attitudes about race can be predicted by whether they live in a county that depended heavily on slavery in 1860. The areas that were more dependent on slavery on the eve of the Civil War are still more segregated, with more racial inequality in incomes today. Those areas still have more prejudiced attitudes among white residents. And research by political scientists finds that the same historical patterns of slavery predict voting for Republicans among white residents today.

My discipline of social psychology has known for decades that people use all kinds of mental gymnastics to assure themselves that they are good, reasonable people and that the groups they belong to are, too. Consider the perspective of a voter in a town that has been full of racial disparities ever since slavery ended. How do they understand the world they were born into? A Black resident might interpret the disparities as a result of generations of discrimination and unequal opportunity. Research shows that’s exactly what the vast majority of Black Americans believe, and it is strongly correlated with voting for Democrats.

For a white resident, that interpretation may feel threatening, since it impugns their own racial group. White Americans, especially those who have not gone to university, tend to believe that the racial inequality they see around them results from Black people not working hard enough. That belief is strongly correlated with voting for Republicans in general, and especially for Donald Trump.

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It is no surprise to readers who follow U.S. politics that race, and views about racial inequality, powerfully influence voting. But when voters are asked why they make the choices they make, nobody says that they are voting based on race, or identity, or the stories that make them feel like good, reasonable members of their social groups. They talk about the economy, or crime, or the border, or anything that’s been in the news lately that seems like a reasonable explanation. Then, too often, we take them at their word and mistake the stories they spin for the real roots of their political views.

Conversations about politics keep overlooking the well-established lack of ideology among most ordinary people. But ignoring the real sources driving our divisions and papering over them with ideology talk is not only mistaken, it is also dangerous. It distracts us from having honest conversations about race and identity, the issues that are truly threatening to tear the country apart.