Negative Partisanship: When Hating the Enemy Replaces Having Principles

Negative partisanship is the psychological solvent that makes the rest of the convergence possible. When political identity becomes primarily anti-identity—defined by who you despise rather than what you believe—norm violations stop registering as violations. They register as victory.

This article uses the Alex Pretti case to illustrate the mechanism: a factual scenario that should activate “small government” and “civil liberties” instincts instead produces a reflexive inversion—because the person harmed is coded as them and the state agent is coded as ours.

Where this sits in the convergence map

In the convergence thesis, negative partisanship is not just a background attitude. It is a permission structure that makes otherwise disqualifying behavior politically survivable:

Executive aggrandizement becomes tolerable because the target is “the enemy” (Bermeo’s incremental dismantling proceeds with mass acquiescence).
The propaganda ecosystem becomes effective because tribal epistemology converts evidence into loyalty tests: information is accepted or rejected based on group identity, not accuracy.
Institutional capture becomes defensible because courts, agencies, and watchdogs are rebranded as “enemy-controlled” obstacles rather than neutral constraints.
Selective enforcement and coercion become popular because rights are no longer understood as universal—only as privileges for in-group members.

The Research: Negative Partisanship as a Measurable Phenomenon

Political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster describe the modern party system as increasingly driven by negative identification: Americans align against one party rather than affiliating with the other. Using ANES data, they show out-party affect has collapsed over time, while in-party warmth remains comparatively stable.

The result is not “people love their party more.” The result is: people hate the other party enough that they will tolerate almost anything from their side so long as it hurts the out-group.

This helps explain why democratic guardrails—mutual toleration and institutional forbearance in Levitsky & Ziblatt’s framework—fail so catastrophically once polarization hardens. Mutual toleration requires seeing opponents as legitimate rivals, not existential enemies. Negative partisanship makes that impossible.

The Behavioral Proof: Iyengar & Westwood’s Scholarship Experiment

Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood demonstrated the behavioral logic in a controlled setting. They asked participants to award a scholarship between two applicants with different GPAs and different party affiliations.

The finding is one of the most unsettling in the modern polarization literature: party identity overwhelms objective merit. Participants overwhelmingly selected the co-partisan candidate even when the out-party candidate was more qualified.

This is the microscopic version of a macroscopic democratic problem. If party label can override “better candidate” in a scholarship context, it can override “rule of law,” “constitutional constraints,” and “civil liberties” in a crisis context.

The Alex Pretti Case: A Principle Stress-Test

On January 24, 2026, Alex Jeffrey Pretti—a registered nurse and legally armed gun owner—was shot and killed by federal agents (ICE) during a protest in Minneapolis. He was reportedly filming agents while openly carrying a holstered pistol.

Set aside politics and look only at the values many communities claim to hold:

Second Amendment rights: a licensed citizen carrying a holstered firearm.
Limited government: protest against perceived federal overreach and coercive enforcement.
Civil liberties: state use of lethal force in a public protest context.
Accountability norms: the citizen recording the state, not the state recording itself.

By the stated logic of many “liberty” and “gun rights” communities, this should be an archetypal outrage case.

The Inversion: Tribe Eats Principle

Instead, the reaction pattern revealed negative partisanship in its most operational form.

Because the protest was coded as “anti-ICE” (and therefore, in tribal sorting terms, associated with the out-group), the victim was treated as an enemy rather than a rights-bearing citizen. The state actor, coded as “our side’s enforcement arm,” was treated as presumptively justified.

This is the essential inversion negative partisanship enables:

Rights become conditional on tribal membership.
State violence becomes acceptable when directed at the out-group.
“Limited government” turns into “use the government against them.”

It is not that principles disappeared; it is that they were never universal. They were group-bound.

Tribal Epistemology and the Collapse of Shared Reality

The convergence framework emphasizes that the information environment is not merely polarized; it is structured to reward outrage and identity reinforcement. In that environment, evidence about coercion and abuse does not produce accountability because it is processed through tribal epistemology: “Is this good for my side?” rather than “Is this true?”

This is how the same coalition can demand maximal police power in one context and minimal police power in another, without experiencing cognitive dissonance. The dissonance is dissolved by identity: if the target is “them,” the action becomes righteous.

Why This Enables Executive Power Grabs

Bermeo’s executive aggrandizement is typically described institutionally—leaders hollowing out checks via “legal” means. But the institutional story requires a public psychology story. Leaders can break norms only when voters, media ecosystems, and elites supply permission.

Negative partisanship supplies permission in three ways:

Normalization: what would be scandalous becomes routine if it harms the enemy.
Moral licensing: violations are justified as necessary to defeat an existential threat.
Asymmetric accountability: only out-group violations count as violations.

In the convergence dynamic, this interacts with propaganda volume and attention fatigue: as violations become constant, citizens stop tracking them, and partisans stop caring about them.

The Core Contribution

Negative partisanship explains why “half the population” can accept what earlier articles document: court defiance, watchdog purges, the reshaping of security forces, and the normalization of political violence. It explains why the same people who claim to oppose state tyranny can celebrate state coercion when it is aimed at enemies.

This is not a marginal psychological quirk. It is the civic substrate on which institutional erosion becomes politically stable.

This is the sixteenth article in a series examining democratic decline. The next article examines democracy indices—V-Dem, Freedom House, Polity, and the Century Foundation—and why independent measurement systems converge once erosion becomes systemic rather than episodic.