If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
A few weeks ago I read the book American Carnage by Tim Alberta. Alberta is the Chief Political Correspondent for Politico, and the book was a fascinating look behind the scenes of politics since the 2012 election. If you’re like me, you might expect the book to answer the dominant question of the day, which might be stated “Why has politics gotten so nasty recently?” But, to my surprise, after reading it, I ended up wondering about almost the opposite. “Why isn’t it always this nasty? What kept it civil for so long?” As I considered those questions, in the light of everything else I know (or at least suspect) I came up with a theory. A theory that answers those questions and also the question of why it’s gotten so nasty recently. A theory I’m going to share with you in this post, but before I get to it I need to lay some groundwork first.
To begin with, we’re a nation of nearly 330 million people. We have farmers, tech workers, hunters, inner city gang members, entrepreneurs and factory workers. And while we’re unlikely to have 330 million distinct political ideologies it seems equally unlikely that we would end up with just two. This is part of what I mean when I ask, why wasn’t it always this nasty? Or to borrow from Alberta, why didn’t the “carnage” start sooner?
Coincidently there’s been a couple of different articles written recently which have touched on this very subject, and while I think both has touched on some part of the puzzle, I don’t think either has put things together in quite the same way I intend to do, but reviewing the pieces they have contributed will help provide the foundation for the theory I’m proposing.
To begin with, I’m obviously not the first to question whether something deeper is going on. Whether something fundamental has shifted in the way modern democracies operate. Frequent commenter Boonton pointed me to a story on Vox, The Anti-liberal Moment by Zack Beauchamp which is probably worth reading in its entirety if you have time, but for the moment I want to just review the author’s starting point because it very much describes the same problem I’m seeing.
Beauchamp starts off by talking about the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler.
One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nation’s citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.
“Even if Bolshevism is suppressed and Fascism held at bay, the crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome in the least,” he wrote in 1926. ”It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.”
As I mentioned the question I was left with after reading Carnage was not why it was happening now, but why it hadn’t happened sooner, and in effect Beauchamp is offering the same observation, when he says, “Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.” The natural state of politics is not compromise, it’s conflict, and that is precisely what’s happening currently between Democrats and Republicans. Further, as the quote from Schmitt points out there is an “inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.” With that in mind, my question might be reframed as how did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently?
As part of the answer to that let’s turn now to the other article I recently read, though in this case it’s more a series of articles. After an exceptionally long hiatus, Tim Urban over at Wait but Why? has started posting what he’s calling the Story of Us. He’s already on chapter six, so I’ll obviously be touching only on a small part of what he says, and once again, I would recommend reading the series in its entirety, but here’s the small part that directly speaks to my theory.
To begin with, he mentions an old Bedouin proverb (I actually heard that it was a Pashtun proverb, but regardless.)
Me against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers.
This proverb makes frequent appearances across the whole series, and for Urban it speaks to the formation of individuals into tribes and tribes into nations. At each stage order emerges based on external threats. Threats where whatever conflicts you have with your brother are set aside if you end up in conflict with your cousins, and those conflicts are in turn set aside if you end up in a conflict with strangers. He likens this to an elevator which move up to higher levels of cooperation and then back down when those higher levels aren’t necessary:
If you pay attention to the world around you, and to your own psychology, you’ll spot the elevator in action. Ever notice how countries in one region of the world will often despise each other, focusing most of their national dickishness on each other—until there’s a broader conflict or war in play, at which time they put aside their differences? How different sects of a religion in fierce conflict with each other will suddenly find common ground when a rival religion or other outside entity insults or threatens their religion as a whole? How about when rivalries in the world of club soccer become less heated during the World Cup? Or when political factions with differing or even totally contradictory ideologies start marching in the street, arm in arm, during a national election or mass movement? I saw the elevator shoot upwards in the days following 9/11, when millions of New Yorkers who normally can’t stand each other were holding doors for each other, showing concern for each other’s well-being, and even hugging each other in the street. I remember thinking that while an alien attack would suck overall, it would do wonders for species solidarity.
With all of the above in mind, here’s my theory:
The chief reason for the current level of conflict within the nation is the lack of external, unifying threats to the nation.
After reframing, the question I started with was how did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently? With this theory in hand, the answer boils down to: war. Or to look at it from the other direction, the Long Peace, the lack of wars between the great powers since the end of World War II and the development so beloved by people like Steven Pinker, has, somewhat paradoxically, led to another kind of war, the current internal political war. Just as Pashtun Tribesmen will stop fighting their cousins in order to fight the Americans, Republicans will stop fighting Democrats in order to fight the Nazis. But go back to this fight once those external enemies are defeated.
You may argue that the problems with unity didn’t start in 1946, and that’s a fair point, but even though the Cold War didn’t feature any direct hostilities between great powers, there were lots of proxy wars and as someone who grew up while the Soviet Union still existed, I can tell you it definitely felt like they were a threat. As further evidence of unity I offer up the Cold War policy that politics stops at the water’s edge. Something which definitely is not in effect now, and which can’t all be blamed on Trump either.
Moving forward in time, even after the Cold War ended there was 9/11 which brought a brief period of unity as well. Though given the relative mildness of that attack (from a historical perspective) and the weakness of the supposed enemy, that unity didn’t last very long. But taken together in the past these threats have necessitated the unity we’re currently missing. That the natural state in politics, as I intuited while reading “Carnage” and as Beauchamp and Urban point out, is deep divisions and in-fighting, but these impulses are periodically checked by external threats, which have the effect of resetting relations between the internal factions.
Once this theory occurred to me several other observations and questions immediately followed. The first was the natural impulse to check it against other instances of historical internal unrest, and of course the 800 lb gorilla in this category is the Civil War. Much has been written about the severe fractures between North and South, including, above all slavery, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any mention that as far as external threats the mid 1800s were unusually quiet. The only countries capable of posing any threat to the US were all in Europe which was largely convulsed by revolution (the numerous revolutions of 1848) or busy in their own backyard (the Crimean War of the mid 1850s) also recall that Germany, the country destined to be the future antagonist in all the major conflicts of the next century wasn’t even unified until 1871. I find it interesting to speculate on whether the Civil War would have happened when it did if the War of 1812 had instead been the “War of 1840”…
Moving closer to our own day there was the political instability of the late 60s, early 70s, and I’ll admit that the connection here is not as clear. That, in fact, not only were we engaged in a war at the time, but most people feel that the existence of that war was a large contributor to the unrest of the time. On the other hand I don’t think that anyone considered Vietnam an actual threat. In fact I would go so far as to argue that by distracting people from the threat of the Soviet Union that the overall perceived threat level may have actually dropped. Additionally while the violence was greater than we’ve seen currently, the unrest as a whole seemed more confined, which is to say that the unrest of Vietnam was deeper, but not as wide as what we’re experiencing now, a non-trivial difference. Finally, I think there’s a case to be made that Reagan brought us out of things by placing a lot of focus on the threat of the Soviet Union, and creating a narrative that we were the good guys and they were the “Evil Empire”, precisely what you’d expect from my theory.
There is of course the other side of the theory. That in addition to telling us how a nation might split apart it also suggests how one comes together. To adapt the Pashtun saying, forging a nation would appear to involve something which turns strangers into at least cousins if not brothers. And once again the theory points to some interesting possibilities. There have been lots and lots of revolutions, and by and large, all of them have failed. Either through being overtaken by another revolution a short while later, or by being co opted by a dictator and losing sight of their original principles. Except the American Revolution. Off the top of my head I can’t think of another successful revolution where the revolutionaries said “these are our principles” and hundreds of years later those principles remain, largely unchanged in the nation created from that revolution. Can you think of any other examples?
Why is this? Well, the other thing that appears to make the American Revolution unique (again I’m open to counter examples) is that it’s the only revolution which took place in the face of a strong external threat. Based on my theory this is precisely the sort of unique condition that would yield a similarly unique outcome.
To return briefly to Urban, as his metaphorical elevator goes higher it represents cooperation from a greater number of people, he calls these large groups of cooperating people giants, because of their power. We have lots of these giants, though we generally call them nations. Some would argue that reverence for these giants is what we call nationalism, a term that’s pretty controversial at the moment.
But what if the only way to get the power of a giant is by way of the nation? (It’s true that other ways have been tried, mostly in the form of multinational organizations, but they’ve largely been unsuccessful.) If that’s the case nationalism starts to seem pretty important.
And what if the only way to get a nation is through putting a group of people into a life or death struggle against some external threat? Then war starts to appear fairly important as well.
What then happens if there are no more suitable wars or existential threats?
One assumes that the number of people willing to cooperate would steadily decrease. That the giants would become more numerous, but also smaller. Resembling less vast colossuses, bestriding the Earth with the power to do amazing things, and more squabbling children. Which, unfortunately, is what appears to be happening, at least in the West.
I realize this all boils down to a defense of war, but this would not be the first time I’ve come to its defense. And certainly, as I pointed out then, it’s not inconceivable, given it’s historical ubiquity that things might have adapted to benefit from the presence of war and that nations might be included on that list. It is worth noting that in most civilizations and even the US until very recently it was expected that leaders would have served in the military and even better fought in one of these wars. Thus not only were nations forged by the external threat of wars, but it was presumed that leaders were as well.
If I’m correct that external threats are necessary to maintaining cooperation, for maintaining the alliance of cousins and brothers against strangers than you would expect that actual politicians would have figured this out as well, even if they don’t end up stating it in the same terms, and indeed I think we can see that happening. There are of course two ends this effort could be conducted from. You could either try to strengthen the feeling of brotherhood, or intensify the perception of threats. I want to say that in the past the former was more common (probably because there were already plenty of threats and they didn’t need any artificial boost) but these days it’s all about intensifying perceived threats. As you might imagine based on their ideologies this intensification takes different forms depending on that ideology.
To begin with, arguably the neo-cons vastly intensified the threat posed by radical Islam in the wake 9/11, and as I already said it did have the effect of, temporarily at least, uniting the country. However, when one considers the toll of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s hard to imagine anyone saying that it was worth it.
Moving to more recent examples, the Republicans are clearly working to intensify the threat posed by immigration. How much you think they’re intensifying it probably depends on your own ideology. I would personally argue that while there is definitely some exaggeration at play, that there is also an actual threat underlying it all as well. Also, at least the Republicans have chosen to focus on a threat external to the country. I’m going to argue that the Democrats are also intensifying perceived threats, but in their case the threats they’ve chosen to focus on are largely internal e.g. racism and inequality (among others).
I’m sure your own ideology will provide a ready answer as to the actual threat level these things pose, I’m more interested in the consequences of deciding to focus on internal as opposed to external threats. At first glance it would appear to be very, very bad, particularly in light of the theory I just put forth. If it’s impossible to maintain cohesion and cooperation with the lack of external threats how much more difficult will it be to maintain cooperation if, on top of that lack, you also decide to focus on threats coming from within the entity you’re expecting on cooperation from!
None of this is to say that the Republicans aren’t also engaged in intensifying internal threats, or that the threats the Democrats point out aren’t real, most of them are real and potentially very serious. Neither am I suggesting, if this focus on internal threats does result in the nation breaking up into small factions, that this is necessarily a bad thing. But if for some reason you are trying to maintain national togetherness and cooperation, I am suggesting that you should take all of the above into account as you decide what sort of things are going to help or hinder you in that effort.
I am one of those people who think we should try to maintain as much togetherness and cooperation as possible, and my big worry in all of this is that if, in the forge of a life and death struggle, we can go from strangers to brothers, then it’s also possible to go in the other direction as well, particularly in the prolonged absence of any such struggle. And this is precisely what appears to be happening. Now I know that the Pashtuns go back to fighting their cousins as soon as the strangers are gone, and maybe that’s just what we’re seeing with Republicans and Democrats, and that if a sufficient threat emerges they will once again join forces, but such a threat might not emerge, at least not soon enough, because it also seems possible that if things go long enough and get bitter enough, that reconciliation will no longer be on the table. That, past a certain point, the ties of nationhood could be permanently severed. That it doesn’t matter how big some future threat ends up being, the many sides in the country will never again be one. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that we may already be past that point.
Not many people are brave enough (or foolish enough) to make an argument in defense of war, if that sort of bravery (or idiocy) appeals to you consider donating.
Will have to parse this post out in more detail but I pondered reading:
“Moving closer to our own day there was the political instability of the late 60s, early 70s, and I’ll admit that the connection here is not as clear.”
How are we measuring instability here? Protests against the war? But every Presidential election during that period was pretty normal two party stuff by historical standards. It was in 1948 a 3rd party led by Strom Thurmond got 38 electoral votes.
Were we unified during the War of 1812? Possibly, I’ve read that the war was very unpopular with the North with Main more or less trading freely with England while the rest of the country was at war with it.
You do raise a question why ‘the system’ seems to veer towards a two ideology conflict rather than more. I would say:
1. Energy efficiency, in a ‘battle royale’ multiple players will likely migrate into two clumps at odds with each other rather than multiple random attacks. It is easier to find some common ground with others because that makes for more efficient use of resources. This is essentially how multi-party Parliamentary systems work. Small parties agree to form coalitions to achieve a majority and it is not unheard of for one small party to be in change coalitions over time.
2. You just aren’t seeing the ideologies. For example, there is a distinct set of voters who are simply pro-life. They are a rather unhappy group IMO because they are essentially trapped in the Republican Party even though there are many of them who bristle at most of the GOP’s stands but feel they don’t have ‘permission’ to vote for anyone who isn’t pro-life.
3. You haven’t really addressed race in your analysis and it’s more important than you’d like to think. The Civil War was a type of synthesis or as Lincoln said ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’. Supporting racism was a position both parties had to cater too which caused a lot of the ‘stability’ between parties. If the Democrats pushed too far, the Republicans would push civil rights. If the Republicans pushed too hard, the Democrats would push populism. After the 1960’s, though, supporting racism ceased to be bipartisan making the division between parties more clear and more partisan
3.1 Brexit is an interesting model to look at here. One would think the most logical thing would be to have one party supporting Brexit and another opposing it. Yet there are factions of both in both major parties. While Boris’s implosion doesn’t look very stable there seems to be a lot of stability between the parties with members frequently joining together to pass legislation!
4. Ideology is less important than interests. Free trade, recall, was a a ‘major’ Republican ideological stance. You may recall Bill Clinton was once viewed as some type of pseudo-satanic mastermind because by ‘tranglulating’ and supporting one or two GOP things like free trade and school uniforms, opposition to him became impossible to sustain. Neocons and other never-Trumpers are in a state of shock, a bit like a wife who has discovered what she thought was a perfect marriage of 30 years was really almost endless flings her husband had behind her back. They once thought they were leaders in the Republican Party and now see no one was really following them, at most they were just indulged in by voters. With their casual lies and incoherent logic, there seems to be a bit of a middle finger Trump intellectuals seem to be giving their ‘friends’. A sort of “you spent a week agonizing over your column, we just make up a bunch of stuff and toss it on and we get the jobs, you get twitter trolls calling you a ‘cuck’ and sending you death threats hahahaha”.
I don’t know that anyone would call the 1968 Democratic convention “normal”, but your point about Strom Thurmond’s election in 1948 is a good one. I know less about that than I should, I’ll have to look into it.
As to the rest I largely agree, though I think you missed the effect winner take all elections have on dividing things into two camps. Note how everyone considers voting for a third party to be throwing your vote away.
This is great — thanks for taking the time to set this out! I’ve come to a lot of the same conclusions, but have found it hard to think of how to use them constructively.
A few things crystallized for me when I read this piece. Your point about finding a way to induce the external threat dynamic is simple, but somehow I never gave it much thought. I guess it seemed entirely unworkable and creepy to continue the endless wars at higher intensity. But now we’re already doing this level of manipulation internally, and no matter how ridiculous it gets, it doesn’t fail. It makes more sense to accept this and direct it externally, but I still can’t see that ending well. Maybe there is a way to frame this around a non-military conflict.
The thing is, we are so interconnected that it seems hard to have a convincing external threat that doesn’t become all about internal issues. If sufficiently serious, it would just make people want extreme action and agree to live under a military state. I see it as really hard for us to organize realistically as a community against anything under modern conditions. Our rejection of nationalism for globalism has probably not been wise–I agree that nationalism, done in a healthy way, may be the only way to get these forces to work properly. It seems like a strong pride of culture is the only hope as something to unite in defense of, but that is failing. And we’re just so big and dominant that there is not an overarching commonality–thing are taken for granted, not recognized as distinctive.
I agree with your general assessment of history’s dynamics here, though of course a discussion like this simplifies a lot of things. Mass communication is a major factor–it is true that some of this is not very new or notable, but that we just hear about it at a higher volume. But the feedback loop that results means that even if it starts out more as a perception, it affects major portions of reality.
Others have made similar points at other times, and I’ve thought that some sort of struggle would eventually rise and straighten us out for a while. Yet the possibility seems to no longer be there because of the rhetorical monoculture–nothing can be separated effectively into real interests. Most disputes become abstract and disappear into partisan controversies played for ratings. Even a war becomes just one more talking point. And the nature of modern war doesn’t allow for the same community building. Political interests battling it out is healthiest, IMO, but they have to be concrete interests with observable consequences for which the people affected actually advocate. And the coalitions have to be large and made up of regular people, not performative or on just proclaimed to be on behalf of regular people.
I agree it would not necessarily bad to break into smaller communities, but that if people decide to stick with trying to live in a big one, they need to get real about it. We need to get clear on what we’re going for, and then make sure our actions aren’t in direct contradiction with our goals. The squabbling keeps us from having to clarify our actual positions and take a tough stand in reality.
“How did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently?”
I don’t feel you have sufficient consideration to whether the first part of this statement is true. I disagree that at any point you can look back and find ‘democratic homogeneity’. Quite the opposite. I don’t think the current moment is even a special case.
I think it’s true there’s a perception that people are at each other’s throats today, but I think that’s mostly an internet phenomenon. Specifically: it’s a load of astroturfed outrage. It’s not real.
There was a time people questioned the validity and identity of anything they saw on the internet. It’s bizarre that as computers have gotten better at spamming us we’ve gotten more gullible at believing everyone is who they say they are.
And it’s also not true that Nations either fight among each other or fight foreign threats. Yes that does happen, but sometimes both internal and external conflicts happen at the same time.
The biggest example of this in recent US history is Vietnam, which I feel you gave short shrift to. Certainly it was worse than the war on terror in terms of lives lost, yet you use WoT as a positive example of unity through war, and dismiss Vietnam as a ‘distraction from the Cold War’ even though ‘Nam was PART of the Cold War. A detail lost on nobody at the time.
I don’t doubt something like this thing you’re describing happens, but I don’t see it as a law of nature (out even a major trend) that we’re either fighting at an international level or we’ll start fighting internally. Nor do I think an external conflict will necessarily unite the nation. It wasn’t war that united the country in 1941 and 2001. It was Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Unity was a response to external threat, not war. War was a manifestation of the response in both cases.
It is possible that I didn’t sufficiently establish my premise, and perhaps I’m mistaking dominance for agreement. Perhaps what has changed is that modern technology has allowed opinions and targeting to be sliced so fine that each parties message is finely calibrated to carve out exactly half the territory.
But… Based on my reading of “Carnage” the outrage is not astroturfed. Also how do you explain something like this: https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
I will grant that there’s lots of things going on when you talk about the psychological health of a nation and perhaps “attacks” should be considered separately from wars. But I continue to maintain that having the occasional true existential crisis is as necessary to the health of a nation as vitamin C is for the continued health of humans.
I’d be interested to see analysis of a period that goes back father than 1994. I’m not saying the Clinton years were free of discord, the man was impeached by the opposition party and there was a lot of partisan bickering over his agenda. Still, I’m wary of confirming my biases from a political chart that considers less than a half dozen comparators.
That said, I’ve seen a lot of news and research about all the ways interested parties can surruptitiously signal boost. From Twitter farms to Russian bots to collusion among reporters.
This isn’t even confined to L/R bickering. For example, Elon Musk is frequently a target of smears because traditional auto manufactures and – more particularly – car dealers hate him. They buy negative press against him all the time. Sure he’s done dumb stuff from time to time just like any private person, but the difference between minor story and major scandal is how it’s sold and boosted.
Meanwhile, we know the Russians purposefully sow discord by creating fake viral issues. They want to weaken the US. As the major component of NATO and a force that his never taken their complaints seriously this makes good geopolitical sense to them. I’m sure they’re not the only ones doing it, too. This kind of thing is cheap enough for the average millionaire to buy fake public outrage for multiple causes.
It’s gotten so bad that most news outlets have closed down their comments sections. You look at the time stamps for the comments on any of these controversial figures and they’re up within seconds of the article/video being posted. That’s faster than it’s humanly possible to respond to a notification and write the comment, let alone actually review and react to the content itself. That’s a bot at work, and they’re all over the place because they’re digital and cheap.
Sure, real people are angry at each other, and I used to wonder where all this came from on a sudden these past few years. But now I think they’re mostly just reacting to the hot air from the bots and comment farms. Maybe it’s gotten worse in the past few years, but I think that’s more due to perception distortion than reality.
Also it occurs to me that external threat sets an upper bound on the internal discord. During the cold war that upper bound was “politics stops at the water’s edge”. During the Vietnam war there was a lot of unrest but you still had the upper bound of Nixon’s “Silent Majority”. And I imagine (though I am less familiar with it) that there was an upper bound during the War of 1812. And more than anything else that’s what we seem to be missing at the moment is any ceiling on the discord.
From a more global and longer term view this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty of examples of dissident groups – some a sizeable percentage of the electorate – choosing a time of conflict as the perfect opportunity to increase discord. I recommend the Revolutions podcast for a few examples of this in action.
I have listened to every episode of revolutions, which revolution do you think is the best example of your point?
I love Revolutions podcast! I’m still catching up on all the back episodes. I recently finished the Mexican Revolution, which had a few instances of in-group fighting despite broader out-group threats. Sometimes on the government’s side, sometimes within the various rebel groups themselves.
I actually came over to it from History of Rome podcast, which also had lots of examples of internal infighting during times of external threats. It wasn’t uncommon for a general to go off to war and come home victorious, only to discover he had to fight an insurrection at home. Honestly the best time to fight a revolution is while the central government is preoccupied elsewhere. I mean, it worked for the American Revolution. (Also, there are plenty of examples of this happening in the Book of Mormon wars.)
Again, I agree that sometimes internal divisions are mended in response to an external threat. This is clearly the strategy regimes like Iran and North Korea employ to control internal conflict. Indeed, they’re probably the best example you could use to support your hypothesis above. Following the script of Orwell’s 1984, the former vilifies Israel (and the US) to diminish dissent among their own people by refocusing them on a common perceived threat. The latter has crafted a whole ‘history’ of sleights that add up to an imagined N. Korea-US centuries-long feud – again with the intent to unify the country against an external threat.
I’m not disagreeing that this kind of thing happens. I’m saying that the opposite also frequently happens, where internal strife is accentuated by external conflict. The more so in a free society, and more still when a nation is perceived as having started the fight.
Finally, a counter-example that proves the rule. One of Ghandi’s greatest accomplishments was fighting against the vehement objections of his own followers when he proposed they NOT rise up against their UK rulers during the War. Another great accomplishment was in keeping both the Hindi and Muslim factions from fighting each other during the revolution. Something they did anyway, but which also got worse after independence was finally won.
Both these trends happen. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to roll the dice that you’ll get unity and not division in response to external threat. Kind of like a marriage that hits hard times. Sometimes struggles strengthen the relationship. Sometimes they tear it apart. Which one happens depends partly on the relationship going into the difficulties. If that’s not good to begin with, hard times can spell disaster.
But was Mexico really a nation? Particularly at the time of the revolution, was there, for lack of a better term “patriotism”?
And as far as Rome, I think we have to draw a distinction between ambitious individuals and the nation splitting into two ideological halves.
Of course part of the problem is that I’m saying that what we’re seeing is a new and unique phenomenon, which is interesting, but also looks a lot like unfalsifiability…
Did you get anything like this when there really was an existential threat, like Carthage?
You bring up some valid points that I definitely need to spend more time thinking about, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between a minority which never really felt itself to be part of the nation and unrest on the scale of the majority…
I’m not trying to falsify the idea that an external threat CAN cause unity. I’m arguing against the idea that this happens either all or most of the time. I think it’s one of the ways an ingroup responds to outgroup threats, but I don’t think it’s the only way or something we can predictably rely on. Indeed, it shouldn’t surprise us that large numbers of people would disagree on the right course of action in the face of an external threat, or that this disagreement might be cause for significant internal division at the moment of greatest need for unity. That humans ever manage to coordinate during such times is probably evidence that the ingroup dynamic is a strong pro-adaptive force in human behavior, but it’s clearly not always dominant over competing interests.
Given that this is, at its core, an ingroup/outgroup dynamic I’m not sure why we should expect it to be a recently-developed phenomenon. You said earlier you believed this phenomenon was as vital to the health of a nation as vitamin C is to humans, and if so it would be strange for this to be confined to modernity.
I’m also not sure why we should narrowly define it (and define it away) based solely on national boundaries. I thought the idea of introducing the elevator concept was to explicitly define this as ingroup/outgroup dynamics not tied to national identity (likewise with the brothers-cousins-strangers quote).
Despite this, there are still plenty of modern examples of factionalism impacting national sensibilities during periods of both outright war and during periods of significant external threats. This is part of why the French contributions during WWII are so complicated, because not everyone agreed what the best course of action in the face of the German threat was. It’s difficult to argue they weren’t a nation with a distinct identity at that time.
You could go into detail about each of the different factions and their reasons for resisting, tolerating, or aiding the Nazi regime; but then you’re just defining away every outlier as an exception to an overly-broad rule. “Outgroup conflict suppresses ingroup conflict, but only a. on national scales, b. for nations that have an established history of national unity, c. in modern times but not ancient ones, d. not counting far away overseas conflicts like Vietnam unless there are physical threats manifested on national soil like 9/11, e. unless the threat is part of a broader geo-political conflict like WWII but not like the global War on Terror.”
I think it’s incorrect to define the Roman factions as being solely based on following individual sensibilities. There were clearly two factions in Roman life that were stable, fought each other over generations, and didn’t depend on which general was vying for supremacy: 1. the cause of the common people (grain subsidies, land reform, admitting Italian groups as Roman citizens, etc.) and 2. the cause of conservatives (maintain status quo, continuity of the Senate, sanctity of Roman laws and traditions, territorial security and expansion).
It didn’t matter whether the charismatic figures fighting were Pompi, the Grochus brothers, Ceaser, or Sulla; these dynamics were always at the heart of the Roman dispute during that period of nearly a hundred years (different issues dominated later, but issues still dominated). They didn’t go away when some foreign invader came knocking, and the fact that charismatic leaders could take control of the out-of-power faction while the in-power faction was fighting a known external threat is evidence that internal conflict can still rage during times of external threat.
I’m not trying to say external threats can’t unite a nation. I’m saying I don’t think they always do. Finally, I question whether having an external threat unite a nation is even healthy. Again, I would cite back to nations that have traditionally used external threats for unity, like N. Korea, Iran, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or a dozen other embattled totalitarian regimes. In my mind, a strategy of using external threats to unify a nation is not a good strategy for remaining a free society.
“Moving to more recent examples, the Republicans are clearly working to intensify the threat posed by immigration”
Or you could say Hitler tried to make Jews the external threat. This post seems to be veering towards the external threat is useful for ‘bringing people together’ as opposed to the more common sense view of threats, which would be you should worry about real external threats and not go looking for them for the sake of it.
The ‘manufactured external threat’ seems to tie together immigration and Brexit in that they produce a kind of dysfunctional ‘togetherness’ that allows a group to get some measure of power but either doesn’t accomplish much or what is accomplished seems to drive the nation apart more than together.
I would argue that something like immigration is not actually seen as an external threat by anyone involved in Brexit (in terms of the main dynamic–some rhetoric is compatible with it for sure). It is seen as an internal threat. That is the exact problem. Were it seen as an external threat, you would not have the total polarization where the framing is that non-Brexiters think the system is working great and people who want to leave are crazy. They might differ on how it should be dealt with, but they would consider it a serious conversation. Brexiters are pretty angry with certain groups in their own country who they hold as responsible for immigration issues, because what they see as the threat goes to the idea of the EU itself. They are angry that the leaders are “enabling” the immigrants, in their minds, to become internal problems. The internal threat focus has caused total dysfunction. Parliament is not acting together in respond to an external threat at all–they are trying to stop each other. Conjuring up an external threat has the potential to go quite awry, but I don’t think Brexit is an example of this. If an external threat is being conjured, it is globalism, and it is not perceived as a threat to the nation overall, but to certain groups.
If Brexiters just wanted less immigration why not push for a law that does that, then challenge the EU to kick the UK out (which it wouldn’t since the EU doesn’t require states to accept any number of immigrants).
I would agree with you there has been some embryonic ideologies forming around being critical of globalism but to be honest it seems like vaporware to me. It’s a mile wide of 4chan comment threads and not an inch deep.
They have already demanded immigration laws. All of their complaints have been ongoing for quite a while.
Many of these complaints are considered silly, unrealistic, and confused by many other people in the country, and the laws have not passed. This made the threat increasingly an internal dispute.
The same thing happened in America. A lot of people angry about immigration seem to view the political opposition that promotes immigration as way more threatening than immigration itself. People who lament they are losing their “way of life” are almost always worried about change that involves the consent of their fellow citizens, not an external force.
Their complaints are not necessarily valid or practical, to say the least. As you said, a lot of this is very shallow and incoherent. That is how most people think about political issues. But that does not invalidate the fact that people perceive a threat and react to it–they just can’t identify it because it is too complicated and varied. That type of shapeless confusion is more common in internal conflicts, in my opinion, and contributes to their danger. Something like globalism can’t really be viewed as external in the sense of causing national solidarity, because so many people in these countries enthusiastically embrace it. But it can definitely be perceived as a national threat in the sense of a way of life disappearing thing, and cause certain groups within a country to unite.
The EU promotes a more open system, so the two directly relate. Right now Brexit is held up largely because of a border issue.
Many of these complaints are considered silly, unrealistic, and confused by many other people in the country, and the laws have not passed.
What laws have not passed? Can you cite a single ‘silly’ immigration law Brexit supporters have brought to a vote? If immigration is so important where is the policy?
The EU promotes a more open system, so the two directly relate. Right now Brexit is held up largely because of a border issue.
Let’s consider some other movements. In the late 70’s a deregulation movement in the US rolled back regulation, esp. Federal. In the UK, Thatcher came to office on a platform of privitization. Did critics of both argue their ideas had elements that were silly, unrealistic etc (there were, for example she declared society didn’t exist there were just individuals and families).
Democratic government makes two demands on rulers, one is get elected and two is implement your policies. To date the alt-right, nationalists, populists, etc. seem to have barely accomplished the first but cannot even formulate policies let alone implement them (Johnson, for exammple, tried to claim he was negotiate the Irish question in Brexit by just sending in the same proposal and scratching out Ireland from it). It is amazing to see a political movement that demands the opposition carry the water for them and appeals to the supposed ‘feelings’ of supporters is getting beyond tired now.
Here’s the fact, at any given time there will always be evidence of people with ‘feelings’ you can cite. Farmers who work hard. Auto workers laid off. Coal miners who pine for the good old days. Bruce Springstein is old these days and he is probably not looking to hire a song writer. Fact is you and I know nothing about the ‘feelings’ of voters who populate our imagination. I don’t know why a slim majority of a minority voted for Brexit or why a minority of a minority voted for Trump. I do know none of them are paying me to psychoanalyze them so maybe the best thing to do, the best way to respect them is to stop pretending their feelings and emotions trump facts. If they voted then they are grownups and will engage with me as a grownup because I treat other adults as grownups whether they like it or not.
They claimed something would work. It’s not working and the people they selected are unable to get do the job. It’s not my job to convince them, it’s their job to convince me (and you) that their guys deserve more time.