Discussing politics in the United States today is challenging, to say the least. Quickly conversations go off on a tangent, often emotional. Some unexpected detour, immersed in an alternate reality, where it is often almost impossible to regain order with any agreed upon constraints, much less actually make progress. I find myself thinking: "Where is this coming from?", "How can someone believe that?", "Don't they realize that is against their own interests?", "Don't they believe in science?", etc. The quandaries become unfathomable. I try a little more (of what I think is) "evidence" and progress may actually regress and my desire to continue evaporates. It starts to become understandable why we have developed a widespread social mores demanding we avoid talking politics at all. Oddly, we can debate/argue sports all we want, but politics has been moved into the realm of the unspeakable, like religion. Problem is democracy is based on the concept of "We the People" presuming that we are able to converse, debate and agree on the basics of our political system. Continuing to try to understand and find solutions to this conundrum is an unavoidable requirement, unless of course, we just give up.
Looking for different content along this line, I recently stumbled on a great discussion of these difficulties in a "Why Is This Happening" podcast by Chris Hayes titled The Information Crisis with David Roberts. I listened to this podcast a couple times and then searched for the David Roberts article, which I found on VOX, titled Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. The podcast discussion between Hayes and Roberts began seamlessly, both having their academic roots within philosophy. Soon the conversation moved into the difficulties of political discussion where they delved into epistemology, defined in dictionary.com as "a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge". They noted this is a complex area of philosophy used to discuss, dissect and understand a difficult problem, but proceeded anyway - WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
David Roberts spent years reporting on Climate Change where he encountered a multitude of people rejecting the science on which Climate Change research is based. Over and over he kept running into the same unconvincible dead ends. Inevitably this led to his article cited above. A common tactic used to gain rhetorical power is to negate as much of the other sides perceived power as possible. Roberts recounts one such effort that was very effective around 2009 that has become a mainstay today:
"Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his radio program to 'Climategate' . . . the episode in which a climate research institute was hacked and the private emails of scientists were leaked. Conservative media sifted through the emails, stripping individual sentences and phrases out of context and spinning them to look sinister, as though scientists were coordinating and manipulating results. Mainstream media dutifully covered the'controversy' . . . five separate investigations later cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but by then, for a large class of right-wing media consumers, it was already settled history, part of shared lore . . . Limbaugh (suggested that) . . . the uncovering of this hoax, exposes, . . . the corruption that exists between government and academia and science and the media. Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!”
Eventually Limbaugh "called these (four) institutions - government, academia, science, and media - the “Four Corners of Deceit.” This became a staple phrase for the right, used to deligitimize all four. In one fell swoop 4 key institutions of basic integrity thrown by the wayside, categorized as little more than sources of lies and deception. Limbaugh wants his followers to believe:
". . . the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority - authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties - are fraudulent. There are no transpartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes . . . one obvious implication of this view is that only one’s own tribe can be trusted."
Roberts goes on to suggest that "Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. 'Good for our side' and 'true' begin to blur into one . . . (having now) found its way to the White House." It seems people naturally sort themselves into groups based on common interests, etc. and Roberts says that "It is well known that Americans have been sorting themselves into like-minded communities by race, class, and ideology, creating more in-group homogeneity and cultural “bubbles'." Studies by Will Wilkinson suggest "the country is sorting itself by personality as well". He hypothesizes, is that the small aggregate movement is hiding an extreme divergence underneath:
"The United States may be dividing into two increasingly polarized cultures: an increasingly secular-rational and self-expression oriented 'post-materialist' culture concentrated in big cities and the academic archipelago, and a largely rural and exurban culture that has been tilting in the opposite direction, toward zero-sum survival values, while trying to hold the line on traditional values."
Roberts says that based: "on this theory, globalization has effectively split the US into two countries: an economically booming urban country (albeit with plenty of poor people inside it) and a stagnant or declining rural and exurban one." He goes on to show charts analyzing elections through various lenses of location, party, concentrations of wealth, etc..
Roberts theory says that "as the right has . . . moved further right . . . there has been a break, a divergence of political worldviews.
"On one side is what we might call the classic liberal democratic (small-l, small-d) theory of politics . . . politics is a kind of structured contest. Factions and parties battle over interests and policies, but the field of play on which they battle is ring-fenced by a set of common institutions and norms. Inside that fence is 'normal politics' - the subject of legitimate political dispute. Outside that fence is out of bounds, in violation of shared standards.
The 'game' of politics is defined by explicit rules (e.g., the Constitution), enforced by various legally empowered referees (e.g., courts and the executive branch). But it is also defined by implicit norms, unwritten rules more informally enforced by the press, academia, and civil society. These latter institutions are referees as well, but their enforcement power operates not through law but through trust. Their transpartisan authority exists solely because participants in the game agree it does.
The idea is that when political participants step outside the ring fence and violate some shared rule or norm, they are called on it by referees and must pay some penalty, reputational or otherwise. In this way, political contests are bounded and contained, prevented from spilling over into violence or illiberalism. That’s how democracy - indeed, any framework of cooperation among large numbers of diverse people - works. Institutions and norms provide structure and limits, the shared scaffolding of cooperation."
Like the John Birch Society this new conservatism "resists seeing itself as a participant in the game at all. It sees the game itself, its rules and referees, as captured by the other side, operating for the other side’s benefit." Discussions with this group are difficult, "They are temperamentally prone to fear change, but a great deal of demographic and economic change has found them anyway. Their anxiety leaves them wanting clear answers and strong leaders. And under a steady diet of radicalizing media and tribal epistemology, their traditionalism has hardened into tribalism. (If you haven’t already, you must read Amanda Taub’s 'The rise of American Authoritarianism.')"
Information is not neglected by this new conservative right, no, they simple have decided to create their own. A summary from an article by Grossmann and Hopkins titleded “How Information Became Ideological” placed blame rather bluntly, saying:
"[O]nly the Republican Party has actively opposed society’s central information-gathering and - disseminating institutions - universities and the news media - while Democrats have remained reliant on those institutions to justify policy choices and engage in political debate, considering them both independent arbiters and allies. Although each party’s elites, activists and voters now depend on different sources of knowledge and selectively interpret the messages they receive, the source of this information polarization is the American conservative movement’s decades-long battle against institutions that it has deemed irredeemably liberal."
Understanding this tribal explanation is enlightening, but it does little to help us move forward, to solve the inability of our political system to make actual progress. If we are to recapture any meaningful basis of rules upon which we can confidently politically operate, changes need to take place and soon. I would suggest there must be a resurgence and strengthening of the same four institutions that have been attacked and disregarded: government, academia, science, and media. They must be made whole again reestablishing their validity and roles as: our guides toward fact, our repositories of rules and our accepted impartial referees of the process. Question is: Do we have the political desire to focus and do it?