The Cost of Dehumanization: How Political Rhetoric Shapes Public Resistance to Cooperation with Adversaries

Policymakers evoke dehumanizing images when talking about their country’s traditional adversaries. Despite tough rhetoric, when national security interests are at stake, politicians do change their discourse and are willing to engage in pragmatic strategic cooperation with adversaries. To date, no study has analyzed how politicians’ use of dehumanizing images affects the public’s preferences for strategic security cooperation. We argue that politicians’ use of dehumanizing images of enemies in public discourse creates a psychological barrier to strategic thinking in security policy at the public level, and this barrier is greater when they are used by Republican politicians. Using data from a survey experiment of a nationally representative sample of Americans, we show that once politicians have used dehumanizing images to describe an adversary, the American people are more likely to oppose cooperating with that country. We also show that enemy images invoked by Republicans are stickier than those used by Democrats.