Divisiveness And Polarization As Forms Of Social Control... And Not Just In The U.S.

France has the biggest Muslim population of any Western nation— something like 5-6 million out of a total population of 67.7 million, mostly from former French colonies, like Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, with others from Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and other Sub-Saharan countries. North African men were recruited as workers because of the falling birthrate. The necessary replacement rate to keep a population from decreasing is 2.1 children per woman. France’s in 1.8— and that includes Muslim immigrants and their children, who have much higher birthrates than non-Muslim French citizens. Without the big Muslim population, France’s replacement rate would be similar to countries like Belgium, the U.K., Hungary, Netherlands, Lithuania (all at 1.6) or counties like Austria, Canada, Germany, Norway, Poland, Russia, Switzerland (all at 1.5) or Portugal, Greece, Albania, Finland, Croatia (1.4) or Italy, Japan or Spain (1.3).

On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported that that just as children are going back to school, France “will ban children from wearing the abaya— the loose-fitting, full-length robe worn by some Muslim women— in state-run schools. France, which has enforced a strict ban on religious signs in state schools since 19th-century laws removed any traditional Catholic influence from public education, has struggled to update guidelines to deal with a growing Muslim minority. French public schools do not permit the wearing of large crosses, Jewish kippas or Islamic headscarves. In 2004, the country banned headscarves in schools, and in 2010, it passed a ban on full face veils in public, angering many in its five million-strong Muslim community.”

“I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools,” Education Minister Gabriel Attal said in an interview with TV channel TF1. “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them.”

The move comes after months of debate over the wearing of abayas in French schools, where women have long been banned from wearing the hijab.

The right and far right had pushed for the ban, which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties.

Unlike headscarves, abayas occupied a grey area and faced no outright ban until now.

The French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM), a national body encompassing many Muslim associations, has said items of clothing alone were not “a religious sign.”

Defending secularism is a rallying cry in France that resonates across the political spectrum, from left-wingers upholding the liberal values of the Enlightenment to far-right voters seeking a bulwark against the growing role of Islam in French society.

On TV Sunday, Education Minister Gabriel Attal announced that “The school of the Republic was built around strong values, secularism is one of them… When you enter a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the religion of pupils. I announce that [pupils] will no longer be able to wear abaya at school.” I saw this news just as I was reading an essay by Aaron Zitner in the Wall Street Journal, Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics. That is about the U.S., not France. Zitner recounted how Trump, the most divisive individual to have ever occupied the White House, has kept telling his followers that it wasn’t just him being arrested by the Deep State. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.” (Note: There were other U.S. leaders who used divisiveness as a political weapon side from Trump: John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.)

Trump uses group identity as a way of dividing the country along partisan lines to advance his own personal agenda. “Decades of social science research,” wrote Zitner, “show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense… The differences between the parties are clearer than before. Demographic characteristics are now major indicators of party preference, with non-college white and more religious Americans increasingly identifying as Republicans, while Democrats now win most non-white voters and a majority of white people with a college degree.”

“Instead of going into the voting booth and asking, ‘What do I want my elected representatives to do for me,’ they’re thinking, ‘If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done,’ ” said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. “It’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.”

Trump, in responding to his indictment in Georgia for conspiring to overturn his 2020 loss in that state, amplified the sense of threat by telling a party gathering that they were engaged in a “final battle” that he described as “an epic struggle to rescue our country from the sinister forces within who hate it.” The criminal prosecutions, his campaign said in a fundraising email Thursday, were designed “to intimidate you out of voting to save your country.”

More than 60% of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now view the other party “very unfavorably,” about three times the shares when Pew Research Center polled on it in the early 1990s. Several polls find that more than 70% within each party think the other party’s leaders are a danger to democracy or back an agenda that would destroy the country.

…To explain why the animosity in American politics is greater today than in the past, some researchers have focused on the nation’s political “sorting”— the fact that Americans have shifted their allegiances so that the membership of each party is now far more uniform. In the past, each party had a mix of people who leaned conservative and liberal, rural residents and urbanites, the religiously devout and those less observant.

Data from the General Social Survey, a 50-year public opinion study run by NORC, a nonpartisan research group, shows that this is less the case today. Americans in the past were more likely to meet people different than themselves, which created opportunities for reducing group bias and creating conditions for compromise.

The share of Americans who view themselves as either conservative or liberal has changed little over the past five decades.

But in recent years, conservatives have become far more likely to consider themselves Republicans, while conservative Democrats have all but disappeared.

The nation’s liberals, meanwhile, now heavily identify as Democrats, and very few identify as Republicans.

A similar trend has emerged with religious adherence.

In the 1980s, members of both parties were just as likely to say that they were strongly connected to their religion. Now, those who are most religious are substantially more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats.

Americans have also sorted themselves by education. White Americans who don't have a four-year college degree used to split evenly between the two parties. Now, fewer consider themselves Democrats.

A person's level of education increasingly aligns with his or her political party among white Americans, who make up a substantial majority of the electorate.

Today, our partisan identities have come into alignment with the other facets of our identity, which heightens our intolerance of each other even beyond our actual political disagreements, Mason said. Political party has become a “mega-identity,” she said, magnifying a voter’s political allegiances and amplifying the biases that innately come from belonging to a group.

“When you go to cast a ballot, whatever part of your identity is under the most threat is going to influence your choice the most,” Mason said.

And in France, there have been similar social and political tensions between the non-Muslim and Muslim communities, which are also examples of divisiveness. The country has been struggling with issues of integration and national identity, particularly concerning its Muslim population. Debates over the integration of religious and cultural practices, such as the wearing of headscarves, have ignited tensions. France places a strong emphasis on secularism (laïcité), which sometimes leads to conflicts over the place of religious symbols in public spaces and institutions. This has often affected the Muslim community's expression of faith. Muslims in France face discrimination, socioeconomic marginalization, and limited access to educational and employment opportunities and you can imagine that these factors can contribute to feelings of exclusion and division. Sounds familiar?

Is it deliberate? It's been common for governments and politicians to use divisiveness as a strategy to maintain control and further their agendas. By stoking division and polarization within society, leaders, like Hitler, Putin, Trump, Orban and Macron have distraced from other issues, consolidated their power and rallied their supporters. Divisive rhetoric and actions shift public focus away from pressing social, economic and political issues, effectively diverting attention from matters that might threaten the government's stability or popularity. This divisive rhetoric creates strong divisions within society, leading to the formation of opposing factions. This polarization can make it difficult for opposing groups to work together and can erode social cohesion. Politicians use divisive narratives to scapegoat specific groups as the cause of societal problems. By blaming certain groups ("the others"), they deflect blame and avoid accountability for their own shortcomings, while rallying their core supporters and maintaining their base. By creating an "us vs. them" narrative, they can solidify their support among a dedicated group of followers. By portraying critics as part of an enemy group, politicians like Trump try to undermine the credibility of opposing viewpoints, playing on fears and insecurities within society and fostering an atmosphere of apprehension. This can make people more willing to accept authoritarian measures and restrictions on civil liberties in the name of security. As as we've seen in both the U.S. and France, a climate of divisiveness erodes trust in institutions, the media and other sources of information, making it easier for politicians to control the narrative and shape public opinion.