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Elon Musk’s polarization: Examining his contemptuous approaches to political disagreement

In June of 2024, I got an op-ed published in TheHill.com about Elon Musk’s polarization — specifically his affective polarization, which refers to how he perceives and treats his political opponents. Like many people in our highly polarized, angry society, Elon Musk treats the “other side” with much contempt and disdain. You can often find him insulting and demeaning people on his social media platform, as well as claiming to know with high certainty the hidden, malicious motives in his opponents’ minds. This episode includes a reading of my op-ed and some additional content. Topics discussed include: How conflict leads more and more people to behave in high-contempt ways; how high-contempt approaches amplify the conflict; why high-contempt approaches are self-defeating for one’s own goals and activism; how we can criticize “our side” to encourage better ways of engaging.

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A transcript is below.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding the people around us: the things they do, the things they say. Their psychology and behavior. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. As you might already know, I often focus on topics related to conflict and polarization; I’m the author of a couple books aimed at helping people understand and reduce toxic polarization – and these days I work full-time on the problem, between my own work and working with a non-profit organization. 

Since Trump’s election in November of 2024, Elon Musk has been getting a lot of attention so I thought it’d be worth sharing some thoughts about Elon’s polarization — specifically his affective polarization; that’s affective, spelled ‘affect’, which is not referring to swings in beliefs or stances, but referring to how people view the quote “other side”. When people talk about the problem of polarization, they’re largely talking about the highly contemptuous and pessimistic ways in which Elon and others view their political opponents and the contemptuous ways they engage with those they see as their political opponents. 

For quite a while, you can often find Mr. Elon Musk sharing very emotional and contemptuous takes on Twitter about all manner of incidents and events. For example, he often speaks as if it’s a certainty that Democrats want lax immigration laws to win elections; as if he can read minds; and that’s what people often do in conflict; you can find similar mind-readers on the left about Trump and other Republicans; about their dastardly, evil, hidden motivations for all sorts of stances. This is how you wind up with people expressing the utmost certitude that Laura Ingraham definitely performed a Nazi salute at the Republican convention despite there being no good evidence of that and even fact-checking sites saying that was unlikely (https://apokerplayer.medium.com/an-examination-of-extreme-polarized-liberal-side-political-rhetoric-from-a-r-95b7107a609b). We just know what’s in their hearts, after all. With great conflict comes great mind reading abilities. 

You can also find Elon regularly being factchecked by his own platforms community notes. Here’s a recent one where he shared a tweet by an account titled “Anti-left Memes” that read “I’m extremely worried about Germany” and referenced a headline that read “Pro-pedophile activist group celebrates as Germany decriminalizes child porn possession.” The community correction noted that “This is incorrect. The minimum sentences were reduced to allow courts flexibility. Before the change parents or teachers who reported child pornography would still have to be charged with posession and faced jailtime, which made no sense.” End quote. 

You can often find Elon behaving in these emotionally motivated ways; so much emotion. He also doesn’t seem to care about correcting mistakes; the ends, after all, justify the means when you view yourself as in a serious life and death battle. You won’t find him, for example, following up to that tweet of his saying “Oh, sorry, I got that wrong; here’s some more nuance about it.” No, to admit one was wrong or got carried away is weakness; you must always be waging the good vs evil, highly righteous fight. To hell with whoever criticizes such highly emotional and unreasonable approaches to our political battles; those people clearly don’t fucking get it; they must be clueless, or be enemies themselves.

Elon: “Go fuck yourselves” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_M_uvDChJQ). 

In June of 2024 I got an op-ed about Elon Musk’s polarization published in The Hill.com. My motivation to get that op-ed out was related to some frustration about how little people talk about how conflict and polarization play out in society; there is often, for people like Musk or other well known people engaged in the political and cultural wars, a tendency for us to focus on beliefs, and not on the much more important dimension, in my opinion, of how they engage with those they disagree with. 

Clearly Musk isn’t the only person who engages with high contempt with people he disagrees with; that is unfortunately par for the course these days for many; that is what conflict leads many of us to do. 

As I mention in this op-ed I’ll read to you, when I or others criticize Musk for such things, there will be a reaction from people who agree with Musk that I am attacking his beliefs. This is because we, as a society, simply lack a good language for not separating how we engage from what we believe. We conflate them. This, among other reasons, is why I think we, as a culture and as a species, are just fundamentally, deeply ignorant about conflict dynamics. We too often conflate beliefs with how we engage; we fail to see that how we engage, how we disagree, is an entirely different dimension from our disagreements over issues — in my opinion, it’s a much more important dimension. Because we’ll just always disagree about all sorts of morally charged questions; that’s a given. 

One way to see what I mean: recently someone who largely agrees with Elon Musk’s stances wrote to me on Twitter, basically saying “Elon’s driven himself crazy; It surprises me that more people don’t talk about that.” This person talked about how we should be able to agree with people’s stances while seeing that their minds have been addled by conflict and us vs them thinking and contempt. I wish that were the case, but the truth is that we have a really hard time distinguishing such things; we’ll make excuses for people on “our side” or tell ourselves the battle is too important to level criticisms at people on “our side,” these kinds of things. Or we’ll just be too anxious to level such criticisms. 

Elon Musk would probably take offense to these criticisms. But the interesting thing is that I think these are criticisms that would help him be more effective. I think the high-contempt approaches Elon takes are self-defeating, just as all contemptuous approaches generally are. They help create the very pushback that bothers them. That’s what conflict leads us to do. We may even know or suspect that our high-contempt 

There is a tendency to think that the contemptuous, aggressive ways are helpful. That that is how “we win.” Elon and Trump and others may see Trump’s election, no matter it being very close, as proof that aggressive, contemptuous ways are necessary; that such approaches win. But the election was close: Harris got 48.3% of popular vote, Trump got 49.8%; that’s what I’m seeing now. And it’s easy to imagine if the Democrat candidate were more popular Trump would have lost. These are close numbers. It’s like 2 million people. It may be a decisive victory but it’s not in my opinion or in many other people’s view a landslide. If you think it’s a landslide, I’d ask you to consider how you’d feel about it if the winner was reversed; would you still feel it was a landslide? Or wuld you look for other framings to downplay how significant a loss it was? My only point is to say it was quite close, as most of our elections have been recently, no matter the winner. 

If Trump had lost, would Elon and Trump and others think “huh, maybe we should try a different, less contemptuous approach?” No, because that is seldom how people feel when they feel they’re engaged in a serious battle. Many would reach the conclusion; we’ve got to fight harder, more aggressively; we need to persuade others of how horrible our opponents are at heart; how malicious their motivations are. That is the conclusions many Democrats and anti-Trump people reaach; we have to be more like Trump, many say; we have to be more vicious. And you can find Republicans saying the same thing: we have to be more ruthless, more like Democrats. Conflict always leads us to find justifications to ramp up the contempt and aggression. 

Let’s say Republicans lose in 2028, and many of their policies are rolled back. Do you think that’d be an occasion that would lead Republicans to think: maybe if we weren’t so contemptuous, we’d be more persuasive and actually win more? Is it possible Trump’s aggressive, contemtpuous style of politics is actually hurting us? Could we actually win more votes with more persuasive, respectful dialogue? No, many would simply think “We’ve got to fight harder, and be more ruthless.” 

People on both sides fail to see how their high-contempt approaches are often self-defeating. They fail to see that they catch more flies with honey than with hate. They fail to see that such approaches end up creating pushback to your stances, making the quote “other side” more extreme and committed — and also, it can mean that, if and when you lose power (as you often will) you’ll find that the animosity and pushback in society that you’ve helped create then results in many of your wins being shortlived, with the seesaw fluctuating the other way.  

When I interviewed psychologist Matthew Hornsey, who’s studied group psychology and persuasion across group boundaries, something he said stuck with me. He said, and I quote:

That’s another thing I’ve had to let go of, is that I always thought that when people were arguing about ideas, they were trying to persuade the other group. And then it took me a while to realize that actually that’s not true either. Because if they actually thought they were trying to persuade the group, they’d do it differently. I think often what they’re doing is that they’re just enjoying the tribalism and they’re enjoying marinating in their own kind of virtuousness and they’re enjoying signaling to their own side their credentials as an in-group member.

End quote. 

Okay next I’ll read you the op-ed I wrote for The Hill. The op-ed has various links to resources to back up and reference some of my points, so if you want to see the op-ed for that reason, I’ll put a link to it on my site in the entry for this episode. Along with some other related resources. 

The op-ed was titled “Elon Musk is making political debate more toxic — here’s how to change course.” For what it’s worth, I actually didn’t like that title; that was chosen by the editors. Sometimes you have to choose your battles. Okay I’m going to read the op-ed now. 

[The op-ed is here.]