The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. Even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections, at least our cable news tribes offer the common experience of getting to hate people together.
His book is Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal.
It seems to me that this is the year when the observation went mainstream that political behavior is tribal. We’re all political psychologists now.
My view of why the problem is severe at the moment is that the incentive in the media is to raise the stakes. Who do you think gets more clicks, a pundit who writes as if the other side’s position regarding today’s pseudo-news is dangerously evil, or a pundit who writes as if both sides have some merit or who plays down the significance of the most-talked-about current event altogether? That won’t change until (unless?) we in the general public can build up an immunity to the inflammatory political viruses.
Senator Sasse may be on the right track. It would be helpful if we could elevate the status of people who at a local level do real work to solve real problems. And we ought to lower the status of people who express and amplify outrage on the national issue du jour.
Mullainathan and Shleifer?
Increasing number of news sources (lower barrier to entry, and now universal if including individuals via social media) and an increasing appetite for political coverage > naturally results in increased polarization, absolutism and extremism of the product of the news market via increase specialization?
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/market_for_news.pdf
What we need at the moment is local problems to solve locally. Unfortunately, we are in the habit of thinking everything should scale and generalize. Thus, a local failure somewhere else is ominous and a local loss or victory is tribal, etc. The stakes are global.
Unfortunately, we have been on this globalism kick for a long time.
My hypothesis is that the country grew increasingly “tribal” since the mid-1990s or later as the Interet became an increasingly popular source of information which (a) is subject to less of an editorial filter and (b) has lowered the barriers to entry of a widely diverse array of opinion, including the most extreme and ill-informed opinions.
In the 1960s, when we all got our news from Walter Cronkite (metaphorically speaking), society had a common pool of information that formed the foundation of political debate.
The internet is not the only factor, but it has been a significant factor in splintering political opinion.
This outcome is not inevitable, but for some reason the Internet has enabled the breakdown of the ethos of reasoned argumentation among people and groups with disparate opinions. (But Arnold’s blog space is a notable exception to my observation.)
I once again object to both the “it’s just the irresponsible and venal media stirring things up to make a buck” narrative (hardly the first time that’s happened in our history), and the “all these people – not you and me of course – are merely suggestible boobs being played by cynical charlatans and succumbing to tribal impulses to hate each other for no reason and with no real basis in fundamental disagreements or threat to their interests.”
It’s not that these things aren’t real and important contributors in human affairs, but they are supporting roles, not the star of the show. The danger is that one will indulge in the intellectual temptation to place oneself “above the fray” in a purportedly transcendent position and use these narratives in a dismissive way, in order to avoid grappling with the fundamentals of the underlying disputes, because that discussion requires more courage as it has become incredibly socially difficult.
My guess is that professors in particular are especially susceptible to this “Sayre’s Law” way of thinking about disputes because of the peculiarities of their experiences, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
The trope of “foolish and senseless tribal fight over a triviality” (or over the narcissism of small differences undetectable to outsiders divorced from the context) is an old literary device. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift there was the war between the Blefuscu and the Lilliput over egg cracking, and more recently we have Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book. The Seuss book was written with the Cold War arms race as context, but imagine a libertarian’s reaction to someone today going all the way with the metaphor and trying to dismiss the passions surrounding the argument about Communism as being merely a matter of effective agitprop on both sides, and, fundamentally, no more important, and no side having the better of the argument, than a debate regarding bread buttering.
In short, “Needs more Ideological Turing Test.”
Imagine telling a progressive that the tensions and political disagreements that led to the Civil War were all a result of that era’s media having financial incentives to stir up antagonistic passions. After all, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – openly admitted to be a work written with the specific intention of inflaming passions for political influence – was the most successful and popular novel of its day, selling 300K copies in the US and over a million in the UK, with continuous stage performances all over Anglosphere for years. And it sparked a whole genre of “Anti-Tom literature”, many of which were nearly as successful in terms of the size of the Southern literate audience.
And there is just no question that these and many other books, pamphlets, and newspapers of the time helped polarize society, making views more extreme and cementing rigid opposition, and that supply and demand for that kind of avant-la-lettre muckraking yellow journalism and inciting factional material were in positive feedback as tensions continued to rise. The Atlantic Monthly was one of the era’s “new media” founded in part specifically to argue for abolition and, as the war approached, often justifying the use of force to bring about that end. It was in those pages where “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was printed in 1862.
Now, imagine trying to tell a progressive that all the tension was merely created by bad media incentives, and that the hate was unnecessary and merely the result of ‘tribal’ social psychological impulses, and that because of this, the fighting should be avoided at all costs, or once started, stopped as soon as possible with immediate cease-fire and truce.
Well, you can already see their eyes rolling. Slavery is obviously a great evil – unjustifiable and unforgivable – and it must be abolished by any means necessary as a fundamental moral imperative. The Union regards the Confederacy with completely just and righteous hate, as slavers, defenders of slavery, and treasonous insurgents. If anything, the pamphlets and so forth weren’t stirring up enough animosity and ill-will.
Meanwhile, in the South, who cares what those people believe or why? Evil people who make their living off of that evil will always hate good people who are trying to stop them. It’s their media that is dishonest and wrong, and which should instead be advocating immediate and unconditional surrender, the surest way to save countless lives. If they don’t do so, it’s not because they have any valid case to make, but only because people only want to buy in the “market for confirmation bias”.
You see the problem? How is one to distinguish between real arguments regarding important political topics, personal interest, and moral imperatives, and about which it is perfectly reasonable to be alarmed and angry at one’s opponents’ desire to coerce obedience on the one hand, and mere egg-cracking and toast-buttering on the other?
Obviously there is no way to do that without assessing the merits directly, which inescapably involves expressing a judgment that at least one side is incorrect in its absolutist claims. In practice the exhorters are usually unwilling to do this because it paints a target on their backs. And that’s part of why I say “exhortation is over”.
Instead of hectoring people, it would be better to propose new institutional arrangements that defuse current tensions by assuring all sides that their opponents will be kept in check and unable to railroad them into unwilling compliance when they capture power. As an example I’ve written about here before, all courts – or even just at the appellate level – could be converted into explicitly bipartisan commissions with even numbers of members, who can be recalled by their party at will, and with no judgment issuing forth without at least one crossover. No more hearings, and no more worrying about “hold your nose and vote because of SCOTUS” in Presidential elections. Let a hundred defusing roadblocks bloom.
Finally, it must be pointed out that there is something altogether odd and contradictory about someone like Sasse – an elected official! (though one could say similar things about Jonah Goldberg) – arguing “Bad economic incentives plus 21st century sophistication turn all media into effective hatemongers” + “Most people are ignorant sheep who fall for this crap and hate their political opponents for no good reason” and then still standing by “Free press ” + “Democracy” as the ultimate political formulation.
Again, Mencken, in “The Genealogy of Etiquette”:
One of the most central ideas that define America is its concept of checks and balances. We already have a fairly advanced system in place to block change.
I would argue that we are in the situation we are in because America no longer is willing to make tough choices. We have stopped evolving our constitution. When we decide not to decide, such as with immigration or gun rights, it doesn’t work, and divides us. When we do decide, on civil rights, or trade or abortion or pretty much anything, the losing side just continues to wage war on the decision, often for decades. Nothing is resolved. America hasn’t accepted a shared sense of commitment since the Kennedy administration.
The scary part is that technology will be presenting us with a whole new slate of choices in the next few decades that are far more divisive and complex than what we are arguing about now. Decisions about medical tech, genetic engineering, what we owe the elderly, privacy, and on and on. We have to catch up, not fall behind.
To me, this is much simpler than it might at first seem.
The core artifact is the failure of the business model underlying radio. Radio stations “should” have gone out of business but they didn’t. The attempt to solve it was more and more consolidation. You had Harris Broadcast and Clear Channel buying up properties, on the “we lose on each but we’ll make it up in volume.” They did; they “got Bained” and are now known as iHeartRadio .
Out of the ashes of that rose talk radio. You can get pretty close to the full story of that transition from the “Shatner’s Raw Nerve” with Rush Limbaugh.
In the absence of any way to provide a service that was differentiated on actual value, what arose was branding and value on the identity axis.
Now add even more capacity to a media landscape with not only too much capacity already, but one in which the identity-value and branding axes have been established as the “growth” model.
I’d attribute all this to the shear between what people *say* and what they *do*. And now, we’re being told “Oh, don’t worry about that, dear – we pretty much know what you’ll do, and it’s important that you say things as you see fit.”
“And we ought to lower the status of people who express and amplify outrage on the national issue du jour.”
Reps need better comedians telling funnier stories about the silly Dems and how in 1958 they would wear white hoods to actually lynch black folks who speak up, where now, 60 years later, they wear black hoods to virtually lynch white Rep folks who speak up.
Reps need more humor to lower the status of the outrage folk.
The key problem has been the successful secret discrimination against Reps being hired as professors in Universities. College has become (n)PC indoctrination, so that a diverse collection of young folk will all respond like non-Player Characters in this – Real Life (not some game, nor even a dress rehearsal).
There’s also the key problem of identity. Are we all Americans? American first, then some sex, some race, some religion, some politics, some sports team? Or are we something else first, like PC globalists? The anti-American elites, who do not like actual equal opportunity, nor Free Speech, nor Due Process, they have become dominant throughout gov’t even as gov’t had more failures, yet become more powerful. If their “Dem (PC)” identity is most important, there will be more polarization.
Things will get worse before they get better — but Trump winning the Flight 93 2016 election puts off USA disaster a while longer.
The discrimination by Harvard of Asians is not as bad as their discrimination against hiring Reps, and both are wrong, both should be illegal, and Harvard should be severely / maximally punished.
I sense a hardening of the battle lines not only politically but ideologically as well.
For example, at one time we had free-trade theorists in the macro economic arena.
This concept has hardened into a type of free-trade theology that is absolute in all situations and in all conditions and at all times.
Some free-trade theologists even posit that to be against global “free trade” is to be immoral, no matter the extenuating circumstances or other non-economic concerns.
Some people sacralize immigration, while other people demonize immigration.
The really strange thing is we have Swiss cheese libertarians who then sermonize about the absolute virtues of libertarianism.
Libertarians never talk about abolishing property zoning, or abolishing the USDA, or delicensing lawyers, or privatizing VA hospitals. Why not privatize Walter Reed Hospital or West Point? Decriminalize pushcart vending?
People are nuts.
Senator Sasse may be on the right track.
I believe he is on the right but he comes across self-righteous in his tone and I don’t see him being very serious at all. In reality, Barack Obama struck a very similar tone in his first ‘Presidential’ speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention (Red State/Blue State) and in his final Presidential speech. So maybe if Barack and Ben are serious maybe they should do something together to show otherwise.
My view of why the problem is severe at the moment is that the incentive in the media is to raise the stakes.
This is probably the more true point here. If you monitor Fox News they were more right center until Bush second term and especially during the Obama years. (Ratings went up as well.) Then we are seeing the same thing with NYTs and WaPo that their digital subscriptions are increasing with their anti-Trump coverage. So now we in a circular function: Is the news source driving the conversation? Or is the consumers (or capitalism) that is driving these divides? Readers want material that they 80% agree with.