Sheesh, cousins, what has come over you?
I’m typing these words on a flight back to London after a week in Chicago, New York and Washington. Hand on heart, I can’t recall a time when American politics was so angry and distempered.
Sure, I’m not old enough to remember Watergate or the Vietnam protests — let alone Lincoln’s election or the vicious factionalism of the 1790s. But I’m pretty sure that none of those quarrelsome periods coincided with such high living standards as now.
Your economy is growing at a rate north of four percent. Unemployment is at an 18-year low. Wages are rising, the stock exchange is strong, consumer confidence is surging. The governing party ought to be strolling to an easy victory before a pleased, prosperous and peaceable electorate.
But barely anyone is discussing the economy. Republicans are not getting an opportunity to talk about the remarkable growth rates. Democrats, conversely, are not getting the chance to talk about the fact that the deficit is being doubled and will soon stand at a trillion dollars. Nor is there much discussion of foreign policy or education or healthcare or any of the bread-and-butter issues that normally decide elections. Instead, the country is convulsed in a kind of clan conflict, in which every totem associated with the other tribe is viciously targeted.
It’s the culture war, stupid.
Now you could argue that this is a problem of prosperity. A nation that can get worked up about whether Ernie and Bert are gay is a nation, you might think, that has plainly overcome poverty, crime, and bad schools.
But does the tone of American political discourse strike you as contented? Take the row over l’affaire Kavanaugh. Sure, past Supreme Court confirmation fights have been aggressive, but this one feels like a war about values, not party.
On MSNBC last week, I heard a woman asserting that whether or not Judge Kavanaugh was actually guilty of a sexual assault was beside the point, because what really counted was his failure to empathize with his accuser.
“We need to judge Brett Kavanaugh, not just by what he may or may not have done, but how he treats a woman’s pain,” said Ana Marie Cox, a columnist and commentator. “I don’t think Brett Kavanaugh takes women’s pain very seriously, and I know that because of the decisions he’s made as a judge.”
Got that? Whether or not Kavanaugh is guilty as charged is irrelevant. His guilt can be inferred from his opinions. Regardless of whether he technically assaulted a particular woman, his conservatism constitutes a kind of meta-violence against women in general.
Not that his supporters are much more dispassionate. On the contrary, they display precisely the same tendency to start from whether they agree with his politics. Both groups work backwards from their conclusions. Try to argue that memory is a treacherous thing and that (as any courtroom clerk will tell you) two people often have wholly incompatible recollections of the same event, and you will be shot down by both sides.
How are we to explain such bellicosity among voters who, by geographical or historical standards, are incomparably wealthy? Psephology offers no answer; but perhaps psychology does.
In New York last week I met — as I always try to do in that city — the behavioral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, offers a brilliant explanation of why students, almost overnight, have become so unwilling to countenance opposed opinions. Haidt explains that all human beings are, on a genetic level, tribal. The really remarkable thing is that we have managed to repress that tribalism in order to build the shared institutions of a pluralist open society. Those institutions need to be sustained by an application of reason and tolerance that does not come naturally. Stop inculcating these values and people quickly revert to their hunter-gatherer instincts.
To put it another way, the rise of tribal identities of every kind — the determination to categorize people politically by color, gender and sexual preference — has called into being an answering identitarianism from white people and men.
It shouldn’t need saying that, in a multi-ethnic, immigrant-descended population, these tendencies are dangerous. The centripetal force of the postwar era, when a high proportion of Americans were native-born, watched the same three TV channels and shared a common patriotism, has been replaced by a centrifugal force that defines and separates people by micro-culture. Without shared national identity, opponents become enemies. A strong sense of common national loyalty distinguishes the United States from, say, Syria or Somalia. Think hard before you throw it away.
