Social Matter

Contemporary political discourse is shrill. Hell, that might be it’s most characteristic feature. Shrill and nigh omnipresent. My wife complains fairly regularly that her facebook wall has devolved into links to snarky “thinkpieces” and running comment wars about them. Frequently between people who have known each other for years to boot. Fathers divided against sons and daughters against mothers, that sort of thing. Twitter’s much the same, far as I can tell. Superheated rhetoric, mutual incomprehension, acrimony. These two platforms are social media, of course, which tends to exaggerate all those phenomena. But I think it’s fair to say that even our more traditional forums are becoming louder, angrier, more combative as well.

Political polarization is a major driver of this shrillness, certainly. And Americans are more polarized now than we have been in quite some time. That Pew Research report I just linked to is worth looking over, especially the section that animates the shifts in our political values over the past twenty years. You can see the steady slide leftward that both Democrats and Republicans performed for the first decade of the period, from 1994 to the 2004. Followed by a period of widening difference. Followed by a mad rush to the extremes starting in 2011, one that we’re still in the throes of today.

You can complicate that graph a bit, too, by keeping in mind that Pew is only talking in terms of one spectrum and two parties, while in reality America is fragmenting along any number of faultlines. So there’s a way in which that report understates the problem of our division. But the trends that they note are nevertheless significant and readily observable: growing intra-group ideological consistency, growing inter-group antagonism. These are behaviors of groups that are going to war. You identify with your own side as completely as possible, and you villainize the other guys. (For your edification, I’ll include another Pew graph that I think suggests a widespread sense of impending conflict.) As a nation, we’re in a bad way.

It’s customary to follow up sermons on polarization like aforegoing with an altar call to become ourselves more moderate, to find a common ground with our opponents, to initiate national healing, that sort of thing. But I’m not going to do that. I actually want to take this opportunity to do the opposite. I’ll admit that, yes, we’re a bitterly divided nation right now. Like I said, we’re in a bad way. Calls for moderation, however, are generally misguided. And they certainly would be in this particular situation.

There’s nothing wrong with moderation per se. Sure, a certain portion of self-styled moderates are just  gutless cowards angling for the path of least resistance, but a lot of the virtues that make for an honest-to-goodness moderate are perfectly admirable ones. Many of the “moderates” I know in my own life are skeptical, for instance, of “movements” and of identifying too completely with them. Fair enough. Mob mentality ought to be suspect. It doesn’t bring out the best in anyone, and it’s frequently at odds with civilized life. Moderates also like to give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. They like to hear both sides of the story, let the evidence accrue for a little while, and then come to a decision in moments of comparative tranquility. Once again, that’s a perfectly healthy instinct. Intellectual even-handedness ought to be aspired to. Moderates aren’t themselves defective.

No. The main problem with self-styled moderates is a conceptual one. It’s the same sort of oversight you could accuse the Pew graphic from earlier of, in fact. The problem with moderates is that they tend to be universalists. They think that everyone (or at the very least everyone in America) can be fairly represented as existing on one giant spectrum and that the paramount problem right now is that people are piling up on the ends of it. But that’s a very superficial picture. It only works at the largest scales of analysis. Things are actually far messier than that. Politics are tribal, and there are tribes within your own polity that share few common interests with your own tribe. That’s a guarantee. The transnational corporations and the financial interests who possess tremendous influence over our politics, are you going to reason with them? The faculties of our elite universities who teach your children to hate historical America, what vision of the future do you share with them? And this is to say nothing of the distinct ethno-cultural groups that already exist in America. Or the ones that we’re actively importing. Principled moderation is good for resolving family disputes and squabbles among friends. It has a less stellar track-record in inter-tribal warfare.

If you’re by natural inclination a moderate, that’s fantastic. You’ve likely got the exact sort of cool head that’s useful in turbulent times like our own. Help your folks refine their arguments, their agendas, their goals. Help them navigate a path. Rein in their most extravagant flights of fancy. Just don’t make the conceptual mistake of thinking that everyone is your folk. We’re not all sitting around one big conference table attempting to come to a mutually agreeable solution. There isn’t some middle ground available to everyone. America is breaking apart. Fissures are appearing. And attempting to locate the middle ground between two given fragments of America just increases the likelihood you’ll slide into one.