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I read just now that Derek Chauvin is sentenced to 22.5 years for the murder of George Floyd.
Looking at both left and right-leaning subreddits, I find that
Why is this case so perfectly split down partisan lines? Do either side stand to gain something from either outcome?
(Frame challenge, but otherwise agree with @DonHosek 's answer)
I think there is a wrong assumption, perhaps driven by looking at Reddit discussions as a source. Public opinion is not split in the middle, even if it is certainly affected by party affiliation.
Newsweek states that:
Three-quarters of Americans overall said they agree with the guilty jury verdict found for each of the three charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd. But among Republican voters, about half said the outcome was the "wrong verdict," according to a new survey.
The exact results were as follows:
| Democrat | Independent | Republican | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consider verdict justified | 92% | 56% | 47% |
| Consider verdict not-justified | 4% | 26% | 36% |
| Not sure whether justified | 4% | 18% | 17% |
So, yes, while it is disheartening to see the proportion of Republicans who think Chauvin got a raw deal, and while you can expect the vast majority of those who disagree to be Republicans, this is not the same as saying that public opinion is perfectly split right down the middle along party lines.
If you want to look at the glass as half full, rather than half empty, consider that the Rep agrees outnumber the Rep disagrees and the average suggested sentence amongst Reps is far from lenient at 13.5 years (txs @Nat for fishing out the actual poll).
Being a Republican doesn't mean you necessarily think Chauvin was wrongfully convicted. But thinking that Chauvin was wrongfully convicted probably means you are a Republican.
And again I defer to Don's answers as to the reasons why some Republicans can disagree with the verdict. Along with an over-tendency in Republican circles to support Qualified Immunity and police actions come what may. And, for at least some, racism.
p.s. Yes, I know this poll is about the verdict and the question is about the sentence. But since the sentence came out today, we'll have to wait for polls.
p.p.s. Even the right-side mainstream media's coverage is more nuanced than some claim. Chauvin is just not that sympathetic a character, the video was too damning and the verdict and sentence were just not good hills to die for.
Currently the US is caught between two distinct moral universes:
One moral universe (mainly associated with conservatism) is roughly Kohlberg stage 4:
Police hold a particular problematic standing in this worldview. As guardians of authority and social order they are perceived as intrinsically good, and almost any behavior they engage in can and will be explained away as necessary to preserve the intrinsic good of authority and social order. Further, any officer who oversteps even this leniency will invariably be cast as a lone individual working against the law and social order.
The other moral universe (mainly associated with Left-liberalism) is roughly Kohlberg stage 5:
Police in this moral worldview are viewed as public servants, not reified authorities. Their purpose is to maintain the 'peace that is established by law', not to impose law as an end in itself. While individual police officers may themselves violate the law, that is superficial; the deeper problem is officers who (wittingly or unwittingly) use the law against society, not to promote society's interests.
With respect to the Chauvin case in particular, those in the first moral universe are inclined to think that Chauvin — as a veteran officer — was more deeply aware of the needs of the moment than any normal citizen, and that his actions arose from an unbiased, clinical assessment of the situation. They give Chauvin the benefit of the doubt that he believed his actions were necessary; they view Floyd as a criminal actor who was morally responsible for any harm that befell him; they see Floyd's death as unfortunate, perhaps even excessive, but consistent with the spirit of maintaining authority and social order.
For those in the second moral universe, Chauvin's actions were deeply inconsistent with the nature of the crime in question, and deeply insensitive to the rights and needs of Floyd (whom they see as a morally sound citizen). Chauvin (as a veteran police officer) should have been aware of the troubles Floyd was experiencing, and should have treated Floyd as a citizen to be protected first, and a criminal to be prosecuted under the law second. Chauvin is morally at fault for failing to attend to Floyd (and to the social contract he was hired to uphold) to such an extent that it resulted in Floyd's death.
This moral universe divide was further aggravated by the large-scale protests, which those in the second universe saw as a means of opposing unjust policing, while those in the first universe saw as mere disobedience to authority. And the situation was inflamed further by any number of Kohlberg stage 2 politicians and media personalities who felt they could make personal (political) gains by leveraging the divide.
Edit with respect to comments
The main critique of this answer seems to be that each side is going to have a slew of different understandings, leading to a multiple set of moral universes, not just the two outlined. The first part of that critique is perfectly true: in any group we will find people working at each of the six Kohlberg's stages, and while (say) stage 6 conservatives will have a different perspective from stage 6 liberals, both will be working from carefully thought-out abstract moral universals. Well, technically speaking, anyone still in stage 1 would lack any meaningful political perspective, so it might be difficult to distinguish conservatives from liberals at that lowest level. But set that aside...
However, even though the beginning of the critique is sound, the conclusion of a moral multiverse doesn't quite follow. Groups always establish a dominant narrative, and that dominant narrative carries the moral reasoning stage of the group as a whole. The dominant narrative in conservatism is stage 4, and has been since (at least) the Reagan era; the dominant narrative in liberalism has been stage 5 since maybe the 1970s. Subgroups might have different levels: The dominant narrative of Libertarians and old-school social conservatives is probably Kohlberg stage 5; the dominant narrative in Trumpism is Kohlberg stage 2 or 3; the dominant narrative in the Q-Anon movement may actually be Kohlberg stage 1. It may be that the dominant narrative in conservatism is on the cusp of changing to Trumpism, which will lower the overall moral level of the conservative narrative. But as of now, most of the leaders and adherents of conservatism are still clinging to that stage 4 narrative in which law and social order hold sway.
Concluding from the fact that the subreddits are split that the population is split is a fallacy. Reddit naturally generates groupthink. The karma system is a reward system centered around saying what other people want to hear. Posting views that go against those of a subreddit results in downvoting and loss of karma. This deters disagreeing with prevailing view of the subreddit, and buries dissenting views (lower karma posts are deprioritized, and negative ones are hidden), causing social proof to promotes agreeing with the prevailing viewpoints. This system is highly conducive to creating echo chambers where those who toe the party lines are the loudest, and those with more moderate views either leave or censor themselves.
Since support for Black people and opposition to the police are coded as "left", and downplaying the concerns of Black people and supporting the police (as long as they're not standing between rioters and Congress, that is) is coded as "right", the opinions expressed in subreddits have followed the prevailing politics leanings of their subredditors.
There are a couple dynamics at work here. One thing is that the right tends to take strong "law and order" stances which often becomes an uncritical support for law enforcement and assertion of the need to punish criminals.
The other is that the right has a largely unified media framework in the US that dictates reactions. There were a number of case studies I encountered during the Bush administration that showed how messaging came from party leaders and was quickly spread through Fox News and talk radio so that by the end of the day there was a clear and unified set of talking points of how to approach an issue. Commercial concerns have led to an increase of extremism (outrage drives engagement drives revenues so outrage must be increased to maintain engagement lest Fox News lose eyeballs to even more extremist right-wing media outlets like OANN). This in turn has led to increasingly race-based issues being driven through right-wing media (witness the moral panic about "critical race theory" which, much like Humpty Dumpty's "glory" means just what they choose it to mean—neither more nor less, so they apply it to things like having kids being aware of their impact on others' through their actions and declare that this means that it must be stopped so that white people won't be made to feel racist), and so add a bit of racism to uncritical support for the police and boom, instant partisan divide.
I reject the notion that "the truth is somewhere in the middle" - it rarely is. The most objective and least partisan source available is the court itself which, while imperfect, was designed for exactly that purpose. Some of the facts it establishes are as follows:
Mr.Chauvin’s actions inflicted gratuitous . . . pain, by inhibiting George Floyd’s "ability to breathe when Mr.Floyd had already made it clear he was having trouble breathing" and after he "expressed the view that he was dying as a result of the officers’ restraint."
Mr.Chauvin “continu[ed] to kneel on the back of Mr.Floyd’sneck . . . for more than two and a half minutes after one of his fellow officers announced he was unable to detect a pulse”
Rather than ending the restraint when it was obvious that Mr.Floyd not only was no longer offering any resistance but was in medical distress and starting CPR, Mr.Chauvin instead chose to continue to restrain Mr.Floyd
Mr.Chauvin’s continuing insistence that he believed “he was simply performing his lawful duty in assisting other officers in the arrest of George Floyd” and was acting “in good faith reliance [on] his own experience as a police officer and the training he had received,” [...] was rejected by every supervisory and training officer of the Minneapolis Police Department who testified at trial [MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo, MPD Sgts. David Pleoger and Jon Edwards, MPD Lt.Johnny Mercil, and MPD Commander Katie Blackwell]
Under normal circumstances, a vast majority of people would agree that this is not tolerable behavior by any human being and extremely far from (as the question puts it): "Chauvin did nothing wrong".
As is, I'm aware of 3 plausible explanations why more than a third but less than half of Republicans support the factually unsupported "Chauvin did nothing wrong" argument:
They are aware of the issue but unaware of the facts. Major right wing news networks in the US having difficulties getting accurate information to their viewers is a known issue.
They, (just like people on the left) are subject to the "trust the first story" syndrome, where people are more likely to believe the initial story they hear. When the George Floyd story initially broke, left wing media were liberal in assigning guilt based on the available evidence, while right wing media were very concerned with providing explanations why the people involved might be innocent.
It's a well established view that politics in the US has become more polarized and more tribal in the last decade. The George Floyd incident has invigorated Black Lives Matter, created peaceful protests, created violent protests, triggered violent attacks on these protests, Rittenhouse, gotten entangled with CRT and Anti-Racism, which themselves are accused of promoting a racial divide and racist ideas (e.g. "all [race] are racist" & "[other race] can't be racist"). In an overly simplistic/polarized world, these are not just all connected, they are all the same. Therefore if one is on one side of one of these issues it's easy to figure out on which side one should be on all the others.
TLDR: Because everything is polarized in a two party system, especially with social media.
Binary politics are simply a "feature" of a two party "winner takes all" system, which incentivizes picking your team and sticking to it no matter what, thereby causing the range of acceptable opinions to concentrate around two poles with no glory to be gained in the middle.
Suppose you make a middle-ground observation about the topic at hand: Derek Chauvin deserves to be punished but the trial's fairness ist questionable, considering that the jury was not sequestered and received threats as well as the amount of public pressure with both congresspeople and the president himself calling implicitly or openly for a conviction. Whereas the jury probably made the right decision, it could not possibly have made any other dicision without having to fear public lynching and severe personal consequences.
Congratulations, now you got both sides angry at you instead only one. Life would be much easier if you just sticked to your team, at least publicly. Basically, the middle ground is the WW1 no man's land between both armies: You get shot from both sides.
It should be mentioned, that there probably are a lot of people with a more differentiated opinion on this and other topics, but social networks and the general state of the media exacerbate the polarization through echo chambers, news-feed-algorithms and a harsh court of public opinion in which the loudest voices have the most power.
