Rather than Republican Presidents being right-wing Fascists and using soldiers against civilians, they have been far less likely to federalize National Guard troops.(1) June 8th was not an alarming case of a Republican sending in 'jack-booted thugs' who ripped up the Constitution, as social media claims about the U.S. military have stated(2), it was only exceptional in that a Republican did it.
President Kennedy federalized the National Guard in 1962 and 1963 while President Johnson did the same in 1965, 1967, and 1968. A Republican, President George H.W. Bush, federalized them in 1992, also at the behest of the Los Angeles Police Department. In all those cases, it was because Democrats were rioting and committing arson.(3)
If you don't know that, it may be because people on the left have become more intolerant and far less nuanced than people on the right.
Luders et al. found what the science community and the Facebook have long-known. Find a person with one belief, and you have a good chance of estimating lots of beliefs, not just about one person but about their friend circle. In 2012's Science Left Behind, for example, we noted that if you took a compass and drew a radius around a Whole Foods, you were not just going to find people who believed in organic food and supplements, you would also find that they denied vaccines and nuclear energy. They were overwhelmingly wealthy Democrats.(4)
Their analysis of eight hot-button topics - abortion, gun control, immigration, etc. - revealed that the lattice of diversity declines when a group is more likely to call other people Fascist and claim to care about tolerance.
Political identification was self-selected using a scale of maximum disagreement (1) to maximum agreement (7) then they were asked to rate their attitudes toward Democrats and Republican with Unfavorable being 0 and Favorable being 100.
Then they asked participants to identify the political orientation of a person expressing their view about one of the 8 political issues, and how they feel about that person.
A is the network distribution of forty attitudes into two clusters. Dark Blue is Strong Disagreement. Pale Blue is Moderate Disagreement. Grey is Neutral. Orange is Moderate Agreement. Red is Strong Agreement. B is attitude clusters depicting latent Democrat (blue) and Republican (red) belief-systems.
The results, that the left had less diversity of thought, are either a bit of a surprise or just what you expected, depending on if you think having common cause is a weakness or a strength.
These are still surveys, not behavior, so just like Harvard School of Public Health epidemiology claims about Miracle Vegetables and Scary Chemicals, they are not science, but unlike claims made from food diaries, if everyone has windows on identity then there is a baseline for credibility. Since they were all Prolific Academic paid participants they are all basically equal.(5)
Which means it is a provocative result, and therefore interesting, depending on your tolerance for confounders.
The left has a rebuttal for this result just like they have a rebuttal for charges that there is so little diversity in faculty jobs. In this case, they can claim they have reached a consensus while dopey Republicans are still arguing about universal basic income. Yet that would mean they have also created a consensus around gay marriage even though the Democratic party only accepted it in 2012, and then only by accident.(6) Likewise, they have to claim there is a consensus about allowing unchecked illegal immigration when Trump this year will not come anywhere close to the deportations Democrats created in 2013.(7)
In other words, they have to be convinced in advance that they were wrong in the consensus of the past but are correct now. Or that they just got smarter and changed their minds.
The other confounder is the 8 topics, some of them which come across as redundant - more economic support for black people, more socialism and more welfare are all in the same economic sphere. When it comes to trans people, Pew Surveys show the left is actually more nuanced/diverse than the right. They agree among each other less than the right does.
NOTES:
(1) In the case of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, Democratic Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block black children from entering. President Eisenhower, a Republican, federalized them and made them instead protect the students from Democrats who were violently trying to prevent desegregation.
(2) It was because the Los Angeles Police Department Chief needed help, and he felt like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom were using his people as political bait in letting them be hit by Molotov cocktails. That Trump could make rabid critics look anti-cop, and let them paint themselves as anti-military, was political gamesmanship, and California Democrats lost.
(3) Kent State was not a case of National Guard troops being federalized and mowing down wholesome protesters, they were mobilized by the Ohio Governor because of the violence. The vast majority of the country supported the National Guard then, but later cultural journalism showed how less balanced it is by making it seem like Republican Richard Nixon did it to kill Vietnam protesters. President Nixon did federalize National Guard troops, when government union employees at the Postal Service went on strike. That was when the US Postal Service still mattered, and wasn't just a job works program with $120 billion in unfunded liabilities.
(4) It was shown again in the election that year. President Obama got just over 51% of the popular vote nationwide but 80% of the vote in counties that had a Whole Foods. Now things are different. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Obama had floated to run EPA after winning in 2008, switched to Republican when he failed to get the Democratic nomination in 2024 and Republicans dutifully switched also, and embraced his progressive anti-science beliefs about food and medicine.
(5) It's not like university faculty departments blocking out Republicans and then claiming Republicans don't want high-paying jobs for life, this is legitimate.
(6) Joe Biden was long-known to be a bit of a loose cannon. In the 2012 election he claimed gay marriage was part of the Democratic Party platform, when Obama and Clinton had both opposed it in the 2008 election. So they had to either claim their Vice-President was a buffoon or quietly add it, which they did.
(7) He won't even achieve in his entire second term the deportations Obama had just that year. If Democrats are smart they'll take credit for that also. There were so many fewer illegal immigrants for tough because they were for law enforcement during the Obama years.
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