According to a recent press release, "researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University have teamed up to launch the Polarization Research Lab," which will try and figure out why "Americans hold more negative views toward the political opposition than at any point in the last 50 years."
It seems "polarization spilling over into completely apolitical aspects of day-to-day life," as though the personal isn't political when your identity is a target of discrimination, "yet, we don’t know what is causing these changes in American society."
Who that "we" is supposed to be is unclear, but we certainly have a pretty good idea about what's causing these changes: rich white ideologues are dropping literally billions of dollars on dark money political groups exploiting social media algorithms fine-tuned to spread hate.
Earlier this month, the Koch network tally came in at over $1 billion spent manipulating the public during the 2020 election cycle, helping elect conservatives on platforms of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and anti-"critical race theory" racism. And last week we learned that just ONE donor gave his $1.6 billion company to a conservative dark money operator who's installed Supreme Court justices who are already overturning the right to an abortion — something lots of people used to agree was settled law. Why would anyone be mad, just because Republicans want to force them to carry their rapists' fetus to term? Or nullify their marriage? Or prosecute them for caring for their child? What a mystery!
Unfortunately, odds are slim that this new Polarization Research Lab is going to come to the conclusion that billionaires funding a network of front groups to spread propaganda is driving the polarization problem, because the Polarization Research Lab is funded by
… wait for it …
none other than the Charles Koch Institute!
Even better: two of the three lead researchers, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westood have affiliated with the Koch/Exxon/Scaife/Olin/basically every conservative billionaire-funded Hoover Institute. And to his credit, Iyengar has produced some solid work on this issue, pointing to political candidates chasing “ideologically extreme donors.” But buying up the credibility of serious scholars is a key part of the disinfo playbook, giving the donor a shield to say the work is legitimate, while also exerting the sort of institutional pressures that prevent someone from pursuing a politically-unwelcome finding.
So we're not holding our breath that researchers happy to affiliate with a dark money conservative propaganda and disinformation distribution group are going to find dark money conservative propaganda and disinformation groups are responsible for polarizing the country.
Not that anyone should be surprised about this. Just as the Tobacco Institute sought to find and prove all the ways non-smokers still got cancer, and the fossil fuel industry funds dorks try and draw attention to all the non-carbon dioxide drivers of climate change, Koch-funded polarization experts are going to do lots of surveys and interviews to figure out all the ways people are polarized that aren't directly attributable to the billions of Koch bucks spent on polarizing Republicans against people who might vote for politicians who would regulate the harm caused by Koch products.
There's plenty of existing research on, for example, the "corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change" and the theories Charles Koch embraced that "goes back to the 1950s" to "take apart the liberal state."
If the Charles Koch Foundation really had any interest in reducing polarization, it wouldn't fund a new pseudo-scholarly lab to supposedly research a problem it knows it's causing.
Koch would open up its own records to public scrutiny, disclose who and what groups it's funded, be transparent about what those groups did with that money, and then shutter itself, and all Kochs' supposed philanthropy.
That alone would reduce the amount of polarization plaguing this country by literally billions of dollars, which sounds like a pretty good return on investment!