Asymmetric Partisan Warfare

Interesting piece here from Christopher Ingraham on the differences in how liberals view conservatives and how conservatives view liberals.  Here’s the headline quotation:

The super-sized Pew Research Center poll out today has a lot of fascinating things to say about our polarized politics. But it’s also chock-full of goodies on a related but less-talked about driver of our political troubles: partisan animosity.

Writing over at Monkeycage earlier this year, Sean Theriault called the phenomenon “partisan warfare” and defined it as such:

The warfare dimension taps into the strategies that go beyond defeating your opponents to humiliating them, go beyond questioning your opponents’ judgment to questioning their motives, and go beyond fighting the good legislative fight to destroying the institution and the legislative process. Partisan warfare serves electoral goals, not legislative goals.

When Democrats and Republicans can’t reach consensus on the proper role of government in healthcare, that’s partisan polarization. But when Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) says that “Obamacare is going to destroy everything we know as a nation,” that’s partisan warfare.

As it turns out, partisan warfare, like polarization, is highly asymmetric. Animosity and ill will are significantly more concentrated at the conservative end of the ideological spectrum. Here are some charts from Pew breaking that down.

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The entire piece, charts and all, is here.