In a commencement address at the Naval Academy last month, President Trump revisited a familiar theme. He remarked to the graduates: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning — you got to win.” He later repeated the idea: “Victory, winning, beautiful words, but that is what it is all about.”
This focus on victory is not new for Mr. Trump. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised that under his leadership the audience would “get bored with winning.” He predicted that his fans would grow “so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore,’” and “I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning.’”
The focus on winning is not incidental. It caters to a very primal need among humans to feel that we’re part of a group whose status is high and protected. This winning “we” is often a divisive concept, turning Americans against their fellow citizens. The story of how American politics has grown ever more focused on partisan victory instead of the greater good of the nation has two major components.
First, it is fundamental human nature to want our groups to win. Social psychological research pioneered by the Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel (who survived six years in a Nazi prison camp) worked to determine why groups of people try to destroy each other. Through a series of experiments called the “minimal group paradigm,” Mr. Tajfel tried to locate the weakest level of group identification, the point at which people would not discriminate against an opposing group.
To his surprise, he couldn’t find it. No matter how he divided up the subjects in his study (overestimators versus underestimators, Klee-lovers versus Kandinsky-lovers), they had a bias for the group they were in and a bias against the group they weren’t members of. In a money allocation task, participants were given a choice between both groups receiving the maximum amount of money, or the subjects’ in-group receiving less than the maximum, but more than the out-group. People reliably chose group victory.
Mr. Tajfel explained this by linking our group status to our individual status. When our group wins, we feel like winners. When our group loses, we feel like losers. And we’re willing to sacrifice real resources for that sense of victory.
Mr. Tajfel’s subjects, however, had relatively weak attachments to their groups. Partisans have much stronger attachments.
This desire for winning exists in all social group members, most fiercely among those who feel that their group status is threatened or fragile. When it comes to Democrats and Republicans, status threats — that is, elections — are frequent and highly visible. They are also increasingly part of the discussion of legislation, with the news media reporting on which side “won” a vote on a particular bill.
This partisan competition is not new. What is new is the second part of the story. As individuals, we hold multiple identities (being white is an identity, as is being a farmer, a man or a runner). Some are more important than others, and the most important are the ones whose status is threatened. In recent decades, our most salient identities have moved into alignment with our parties.
Racial and religious animosity has been on display throughout American history, but it has rarely lined up so neatly along partisan lines. Gradually, the Republican Party has come to be associated with white, Christian, conservative, rural and male identity. Conversely, the Democratic Party is now more clearly the party of nonwhite, non-Christian, liberal, urban and female (or feminist) identity. I call this “social sorting,” or the development of “mega-partisan” identities.
Now, in each election, we are no longer fighting only for party victory. We are also fighting for the victory of the racial, religious, geographical and gender-based groups that win or lose with the party. Every election is a fight for larger portions of our self-concept — leading to an ever more desperate need for victory. Not only are victories more exciting, but losses are much more painful. It’s as if the outcome of the Super Bowl also determined the fate of our favorite basketball, hockey and baseball teams.
In sports, we want our team to win for the excitement of winning, not for what the teams do after the game is over. As mega-partisan identities intensify, we treat political victories like sports victories. We grow angry when we’re challenged, we dislike our opponents to an exaggerated degree, and we take political action on behalf of often-uninformed partisan team spirit. Even those who call themselves liberals and conservatives often hold policy opinions that do not match their ideological labels. Winning can be more important than policy, because it is rooted in our sense of personal status. And also as in sports, the teams that are accustomed to winning are the angriest when they lose.
All humans are equally vulnerable to this type of thinking, but there is more evidence of it now among Republicans than Democrats. Social psychology explains why. Democrats are associated with a wider range of social groups than are Republicans. This means that Democrats, who have a larger number of crosscutting identities within the party, are generally more accustomed to working with racial and religious out-group members under the larger party umbrella. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t often find such out-group members within the party. For Republicans, then, party victory is more tightly bound with racial and religious victory.
For white, Christian America, Trump clarified an “us” and a “them.” And he emphasized the necessity of these particular people winning. An obsession with “winning” can dampen desire for compromise, sabotage successful governing and allow corruption and insurrection in the name of party victory. Winning draws our attention away from what happens after the election, and focuses us only on whether our team gets the trophy.
Of course the word “winning” itself is not the problem, and if the president never again uttered the word, we would still have no solution. What would provide one is a more difficult question.
Demographic change will almost certainly cause a party of mainly white Christians to lose electoral power. But this will take decades and could provoke an enduring backlash among those with strong ties to white ethnic identity.
Alternatively, elected officials could model civil and bipartisan behavior, focused on fruitful policy outcomes, but this will likely endanger them in primaries. It also raises the question of whether there is any policy success that both parties would consider beneficial.
Ultimately, a politics motivated by cultural, ethnic and religious victory is dangerous. These types of political divides have caused violent conflicts in other nations. But I’m optimistic about the social diversity and policy interests of the younger generations now moving into politics. Once “winning” comes to mean policy victory rather than partisan victory, we’ll know we are on the right track.