I vs. Us
I choose my tribe because it is congenial to me. I like being a nerd; I like finding out the intricate details of this or
that body of knowledge. I like martial arts. I like, overall, the Left.
But the match isn’t perfect. I mentioned before that when
the Left starts censoring its songs to be less ableist, so we can no longer
“stand up” and fight, they’ve lost me. But they haven’t lost me—I laugh, and I’m a bit annoyed, and I put up with
it. Because in the end it’s a minor point and I agree with the major goal of
inclusivity. It’s an example of tribes tending to be self-reinforcing and
getting more extreme. I think this is a bit too extreme, but extreme in the
service of a worthwhile goal. And I expect that once they’ve played with it a
while the community will come to the same conclusion and back off a bit.
So an important aspect of the tribe is the values around
which it coheres. Values of inclusivity and mutuality matter to me, so I’m
willing to put up with a little silliness in pursuing them. Individuality also
matters to me but I can still find a home on the Left because the aspects of
individuality which I think are important aren’t threatened by them. In my
view, not paying taxes is not an important marker of individuality. Being able
to marry whomever I please is. Owning any gun I please isn’t important to me;
women being able to control their own bodies is.
Having the right to defend myself is an important value, and it is under some threat
from the Left. But as long as it amounts to a requirement for proportional
defense—only as much as is needed to deal with the threat and no more—I can not
only live with it but agree with it. If I commit to taking on the role of
policeman of my own life, it seems reasonable that I should commit to the
constraints the police work under. If a cop must not shoot the bad guy who’s
running away, why should I have that right—even if the bad guy is still on my
property?
There is a point where the Left could lose me. If they
started to insist on equality of outcome, as the Right pretends they do, so
that we create the world of Harrison Bergeron,
I’d be gone. That would be warping my values of inclusion and mutuality out of
all recognition and it would violate my values of individuality and excellence.
But because a tribe’s drift is gradual and incremental,
there’s no bright dividing line marking where it goes wrong. How, then, to
recognize when it’s gone too far? What are the signals indicating you should
jump off the train?
We’re starting to see instances of that now with the
Republicans in Congress, and it’s a bit discouraging. First, the values of the
Republicans since Nixon have been “win elections”—and if it takes appealing to
racists to win, that’s acceptable. (That is exactly what the Southern Strategy was.) And the values of the Right since Goldwater have
been “let the rich keep more stuff”—and the rich have been heavily bankrolling
the right since the 80’s. All the individualist values serve the two primary
values of money and power and when the two come in conflict, the party has
chosen money and power every time.
To get explicitly partisan for a moment: the values of the
two parties are apparent in how they use power when they have it. When the
Democrats get power, for all their manifest faults they tend to burn it in
pursuit of a goal they think worthwhile. In the 60’s with supermajorities, they
burned it to pass civil rights and gave away the South for a generation, as
Johnson said—and he underestimated. Clinton burned his mandate trying to pass universal
healthcare but had to settle for CHIP. Obama burned his successfully passing
healthcare reform. The Republicans? They use their power when they have it to
pass tax cuts skewed towards the rich and regulatory reforms to make it easier
for the rich to get richer. And that is pretty much all.
So the Republican party isn’t giving its members strong
values to hold to in the first place. As moral thinkers have pointed out since
forever, money and power do not make a sound basis for a good life.
Yet we do see a few Republicans peeling away, and it’s those
over whom money and power have the least sway. John McCain is the poster boy
here—nothing like staring death in the face to make other considerations seem
trivial. Conversely, “it is almost impossible to convince a man of a thing when his
income depends on his not understanding it.” So it seems that when
the actions of the tribe conflict with other values, and the individual’s
commitment to the values of the tribe is simultaneously weakened, there’s an
opening for change.
Which is discouraging because there are other markers and
I’d like to think they work better than they do. In logic, there’s the reductio ad absurdum; if your premises lead you to an
absurd result, the premises must be false. If the values of your tribe lead you
to write a letter to a hostile power telling their leaders not to trust your
own president, surely you will notice this is wrong? If they lead you to go on
the electric TV machine and tell obvious falsehoods, about “death panels”, say,
surely this will make you uncomfortable? If they lead you to believe the whole
federal government is in cahoots to cover up murder, won’t this set off your
bullshit meter? If they lead you to turn on another member of your tribe, an
honorable man who has devoted his life to public service, simply because he is
investigating your president, surely you will feel somewhat awkward?
Or, apparently, not. None of these seem to be enough.
(To be continued)
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