It’s been a few weeks since the DACA kerfuffle, in which the Democrats came to an agreement with President Trump concerning the immigrants who came to the United States when they were very young, over the objections of the GOP leaders and the extremist-right wing that believes it controls the heart-strings of right. They predicted disaster for President Trump’s approval ratings. At this juncture, any such effect should be obvious. And the result from Gallup is …
… yeah, the extreme right wing’s predictions are about as good as Sylvia Browne, the notorious psychic who left a long history of failure in her wake – but kept on smilin’. There was no fall off the cliff (it was a small cliff in any case), and his base stayed in droves. The only folks he might have driven away are the Independents who voted for him, and I think by the time DACA came trotting in, they had already been driven off by his rank incompetence and unsupportable braggadocio.
So how to explain their failure? I’ve been working on that as one of the subjects of this blog, but Andrew Sullivan has published a fine short political history & analysis dating from the time of President Clinton. Not in-depth, but so many of his points correlate with my own observations that I find it a believable piece, and given his own evident independence and willingness to, well, think hard on subjects, I find it appealing enough to use it as a working hypothesis.
And what might be that hypothesis? Unsurprisingly, it’s tribalism, but more deeply explored than I have the knowledge to do so. I found this to strongly correlate with some of the more inexplicable observations of Trump supporters:
One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible. It has been noticed, for example, that primitive tribes can sometimes call their members simply “people” while describing others as some kind of alien. So the word Inuit means people, but a rival indigenous people, the Ojibwe, call them Eskimos, which, according to lore, means “eaters of raw meat.”
And that option to turn off the critical faculty can be a savior for some in a world ravaged by veritable tornadoes of information. Evaluating all that information, true or false, can be a formidable challenge, especially after a long day at work, whether it’s untangling some computer code or laying asphalt on the highway.
But while I can occasionally turn my back on the world and just read something irrelevant to the moment, I find I can’t just sign up to the tribe and start drinking from the community water fountain; hell, I found it hard enough to join the fencing club. Now, that was just shyness; my real objection to the political tribe is my reading of history and how tribes, whether they be Indians or Irish, American cavalry or, in the worst category, the Nazis, so often engage in the worst of atrocities simply because someone is outside of the tribe. Those activities fill me with horror, and while I doubt most political tribes would engage in the worst of these atrocities, I do see them as being of a spectrum of activities that are detrimental to the future of the United States in that they encourage contempt for their fellow citizens. I remember a time when the contributions of liberals and conservatives were of value to both sides.
That’s why I occasionally will mention that I prefer truth over loyalty, and why I don’t understand why Trump supporters are not aghast at his perpetual lying. I’ll remain an independent and an agnostic to the day I die, and I only hope my wife doesn’t have to testify in court that, no, I did not convert to either Southern Baptist-ism or Democrat-ism on my death-bed, unlike poor Robert Ingersoll’s wife[1]. The invitation to stop thinking, to stop analyzing, seems to me to signal imminent death in a world where national competitiveness is more and more important.
But Andrew’s article, while not explicit, does, by implication, explain some of the other puzzling aspects of both Democrats and Republicans. If your party is full of people who’ve put their critical faculties on hold, then whoever is dispensing the ideology suddenly has a megaphone of millions of voices to assert their ideas – rational or not.
This is one reason that I do try to fight bad tribal ideas using the language of the offending tribe, rather than the “talking points” of the opposing tribe. In a sense, I’m trying to awaken those sleeping faculties by slapping them with their own ideas and language, where possible, and with obvious common sense where I must. Accompanying such arguments are always questions of truth; I don’t care what your tribe, liberal or conservative, is saying; you tell me, in your own words, why this or that. Can you make it comprehensible? Or are you really just spouting shallow drek you learned from some figurehead?
Let’s take the recent spate of travel scandals in the Trump Administration. During Democratic Administrations, the Republicans had hysterics over mis-use of funds for travel; yesterday, Republican Tom Price resigned from his position as Secretary of Health and Human Services, not because of Republican pressure, but because the overly sensitive President Trump, prickly to criticism suggesting he has any faults, told him to. But Price had a reputation for demanding extreme frugality in government travel when he was a Representative, and then … this?
Well, sure. The other tribe is always wrong, my tribe is always right. It’s provincialism. And it never occurred to Price that he could be wrong. Until now.
And, to get to the heart of the matter, it’s hypocrisy. If we’re going to continue to survive as a first-rate country, we should discard this acidic habit of hypocrisy in our political behavior, because it leads to bitterness and more polarized attitudes, and that defeats the necessary compromises for this nation’s government to function. Say it with me:
What’s wrong for one political party is wrong for all.
My suspicion is that fewer Republicans than Democrats understand that, but then I take a read through, say, The Daily Kos, and I’m not so sure; the tribalism of the progressives can sure be an example of group-think.
Getting back to Andrew, he worries about the country becoming worse and worse. But can we measure that? I don’t know that anyone is trying, but here’s an interesting Gallup time series graph of their polls:
While the liberal tribe appears to be expanding, the conservative tribe is declining, as are the moderates. I consider this a mixed blessing; what I’d really like to see is an Independent movement getting ready to spit on the two polarized tribes.
Perhaps to that end we need a new party. Its first tenet is that We’ll always self-criticize; the second is We’ll always be honest and honestly communicative. And, perhaps even more importantly, We always acknowledge that members of other political parties are our fellow citizens and siblings, and deserve respect.
Perhaps that last pillar will cause gales of laughter from the hardened political veterans. What of it? I think independents who are paying attention might vote for politicians who embrace principles, not positions, so long as they’re good principles. After all, that’s what the Founding Fathers did, and if they were imperfect in that embrace, at least they gave it a shot.
And it’s a lot easier to be loyal to a principle, well enunciated and understood, than to some arbitrary set of goofy positions. Like Climate scientists are in a vast conspiracy to impose socialism. If my respected reader is a Republican, then you really must repeat after me: That’s just goofy. And disrespectful of a whole lot of hard-working scientists who only want a better future for their kids.
1See The Great Agnostic. For years after the death of the famous Freethinker Ingersoll, rumors circulated that he had converted, on his deathbed, to Christianity. His wife finally testified in court that he had not.
