Given the contentiousness of the past couple years, I’ve been reflecting a bit on the meta conflict between tribes to help understand how the future might play out. What is the underlying conflict between our two tribes? There’s been a lot of chatter about the mechanism of polarization (social media) or the demographics of the movements (urban/rural/race/income/whatever) but what do we know about the deeper nature of our two camps? I’d like to share a few ideas which felt compelling to me.
One view comes from Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized”:
It looks like Congress started polarizing around 1975, probably as a delayed reaction to the Dixiecrat split. Normal people didn’t really start polarizing until around 2000 - 2005, but the reasons seem less clear. It probably wasn’t because of technology and social media, which were happening in lots of other countries that didn’t follow the same course. It might have been a very delayed reaction to Congress, or a very confusing reaction to racial demographics, or something something inequality and the economy (though nobody has been able to fill in the something something).1
I find this unsatisfying but wanted to start with Ezra because he’s a reliable representation of leftist elite narratives.
Bryan Caplan provides something a bit more pithy albeit glib:
1. Leftists are anti-market. On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes. No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?”
2. Rightists are anti-leftist. On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists. No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.” 2
That resonates with me. Leftist seem to equate money and markets as something dirty or sinful and the Right finds every Leftist affectation repulsive. But isn’t that feeling mutual? I have a tough time believing she/her pronouns are any more obnoxious to conservatives as “Let’s Go Brandon” is to liberals. Maybe Bryan’s observation was more of a pre-Tea Party take before the Right just stopping having any filter.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the matter called A Conflict of Visions. There’s the unconstrained (utopian) vision which
[…] relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good. Those with an unconstrained vision distrust decentralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action. They believe there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection. Sowell often refers to them as "the self anointed." Ultimately they believe that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exist some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.
And then there’s the constrained (tragic) vision which:
[…] relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition. Compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Those with a constrained vision favor solid empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.
Sowell really hates Marxism and big government so he’s intentionally uncharitable to the Utopian (Leftist) view of the world. A lot of his work stands the test of time but this piece probably doesn’t do well in the post-Bush era where conservatives showed no restraint in building authoritarian institutions. I think Sowell thrived in an era where principled conservative elites controlled the movement more than whatever populist-ish gestalt drives things today.
More recently, Richard Hanania took a more behavioral approach asserting that “Liberals read, Conservatives watch TV”. He doesn’t put much weight in the traditional narratives on left/right:
[…] some have claimed that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than liberals. When you ask people whether individuals should like the military and defer to cops, surprisingly enough conservatives are more “authoritarian.” Yet change the elites in question, and suddenly liberals become the authoritarians. Attempts to explain that conservatism is rooted in prejudice similarly fail because it turns out both sides are prejudiced, just against different groups.
The second way to explain differences is by positing different moral values. I don’t think this effort has had much success. Jonathan Haidt showed that in the abstract conservatives and liberals will adopt different values, but moral foundations matter a lot less than partisanship in the real world. This research is also extremely sensitive to how one defines terms like “sanctity.” When it comes to religion, conservatives are higher on this value, but as I saw Haidt himself once ask an audience, what would the reaction in the room be if he made a joke about Martin Luther King?3
There are a lot of good tidbits in his long essay but I can’t say he really brings it all together. The best synopsis of it all is a table he made:
There’s certainly something deeper that drives people into one of these tribes. I’ve only been able to draw two, low conviction conclusions:
It may not be possible to create messaging to span across both tribes. I mean, beyond the obvious threat to existence stuff like “These crazy pedophile jihadists are going to kill you and your family”.
The best tactic to push anything substantive forward may just be to avoid the behaviors that outright piss off the other side. The left could probably lay off the censorship stuff and the right could probably keep their protests from ransacking the US Capitol. This probably applies to interpersonal matters like refraining from calling your queersexual coworker a libtard or starting meetings with a land acknowledgement.
Just something to chew on though. Don’t get too crazy, ya’ll.
The quoted text is a book review of Ezra by Scott Alexander
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/my_simplistic_t.html