KEY #20: Just for that, you're not my friend anymore
Just for that, you’re not my friend anymore
Suppose you're Steve Bannon. (Or, if you are Steve Bannon, just relive the memory with the rest of us.)
Life is great. Truly. You're independently wealthy because you somehow own a piece of Seinfeld. People look up to you as an important political mind, and you tell Donald Trump what to do all the time. You have one of the country's top podcasts, where for three hours every day you tell people how they can do more fascism. (I checked it out once and it was so full of evil shit I couldn't listen for more than a half hour, but there are hordes of people who did.) You can wear three shirts whenever you want to. So you're on top.
What would really not be cool in this situation is losing your whole charmed lifestyle by going to prison and being just some peon in a cell instead of a giant among men.
That's the choice that Steve Bannon had to make, and he chose prison (but actually got pardoned just in time to avoid it). And he's making the same decision a second time right now, as he's on the edge of going to prison over his refusal to testify to Congress about Jan. 6.
Let's think about what it would have taken for Steve to remain a free man. He would have had to rat on his boss, Mr. Trump, whether to the FBI or before Congress on national television. The point is, saving himself would have required betraying MAGA — in full view of all the MAGAs. Can you imagine getting back behind the microphone after that?
Steve was willing to lose his liberty but not his voice, not his standing — not his tribe. It would have been death to the persona that is Steve Bannon. Instead of that, by sacrificing himself, he gets to be twice the hero. No other choice was possible, and that's because of the judgement of other people.
• "Social death"
Over and over, we've seen Republican officeholders wrestle with their choices. Lindsay Graham called Trump "a kook" in 2016, and then became Trump's bosom buddy, then he said "I'm out" after Jan. 6, and then, within days, he was right back in.
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
— Michael Corleone
Now that Trump 2024 is inevitable, we see Republicans who know better falling like dominoes. Bill Barr, who resigned with a month left in the administration in an attempt to not be associated with Trump at the end, now says, "Between Biden and Trump, I will vote for Trump because I believe he will do less damage over the four years." Chris Sununu, who called Trump a "loser," now says, "I’m going to support Donald Trump." (The folks at The Bulwark point out that he didn't need to say anything at all and nobody would have noticed.) The onetime normie hope, Glenn Younkin, did it too. And because we still expect SOMEONE over there to have integrity, we're like, "But you ... you just said ... like a week ago ... dude ..."
We shouldn't be shocked when they weasel their way back into the fold, because what happens if they don't is that their careers are over and they lose all their friends. They end up like Mitt Romney, eating alone, or Chris Christie, a pariah.
Regular people face this problem too. If a deli near me put up a Trump sign in the window, my neighbors and I would immediately stop going there. If Smitty McWesson put up a Biden sign in his gun store, he would be out of business in 24 hours. And all his friends would be gone.
In the first few weeks of The Key we talked about the internal ways we protect ourselves from having to change our minds. There's also a very important external mechanism that punishes us for changing our minds, and that's "social death."
Our need for social belonging and our fear of social exclusion are strong, dating from cavepeople times when we needed to stick with our tribe to survive. (And don't we still?) So banishment from the tribe must be a very serious threat in our brains, right? And in fact that's what researchers have found.
Psychologists at UCLA and in Australia had subjects play a little computer game (called "CyberBall") in which three people passed a ball to each other. Then, suddenly, the other two players cut the test subject out of the game and wouldn't throw him/her the ball. So mean!
In some cases, they told the subject that there was a technical difficulty, and the other players wouldn't be able to throw the subject the ball for a while, which meant that the subject didn't have to attach any social anxiety to the situation. In other cases, they let the subject play for a short time and then be deliberately excluded by the others without explanation.
So this is a pretty small-scale simulation of social exclusion, but it enabled the researchers to scan the brains of people while they were experiencing it. The parts of the “shunned” subjects’ brains that lit up in an fMRI machine were:
- the anterior cingulate cortex, which lights up when we experience pain and connects our emotions to our decision-making.
- the right ventral prefrontal cortex, which receives input from the amygdala (our primal animal core, see KEY #4) and manages our reactions to risk and fear.
Being ostracized is painful! And scary! And this is something to keep in mind — you aren't going to change the opinions of red folks in red areas with arguments and facts and figures, because they have to show up at church, Little League and Thanksgiving where the social pressure is tremendous. Beliefs are social.
Takeaway: Beliefs are social.
Takeaway: The fear of ostracism makes it impossible for people to change their minds.
Well, that seems unhelpful if we’re in the mind-changing business. But we like to end these newsletters by thinking about ...
• Okay, so how does this help me?
I can think of a couple of ways this helps you.
1. If your opponent has ever been on both sides of Trump (or abortion or infrastructure or anything else!), he's a flip-flopper.
One problem with running against, say, Don Bacon in Nebraska is that if you say he's too close to Trump, that helps him, and if you say he's too independent of Trump, that helps him too. He's perfectly positioned as a loyal AND independent Republican.
But "flip-flopper" is the ideal reframing. Why? Two reasons: (1) It makes both of the conflicting positions embarrassing, instead of making them both strengths. The politician seems to be running away from both positions. And (2) because it seems to rest on a neutral value, which is consistency. "He's flip-flopped on Trump so many times" — that emphasizes his unreliability to both the right and the moderates.
I'm making a note to write about this in the future, because "flip-flopping" is part of a breed of frames that the media and the public will adopt because, as I say, it seems like a neutral value. We'll get back to that.
Takeaway: If your opponent is trying to play both sides, he's a flip-flopper.
2. Strengthen the Democratic tribe in Republican places.
I've knocked on a lot of doors way out in the exurbs of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and every single Democrat I met has told me, "I'm the only one." And I always say, "You'd be surprised. We've been talking to Democrats all day. It might be only 30 percent Democrats here, but it isn't zero."
Psychologically, "I'm the only one" is a terrible feeling to let your people hold on to. These folks are surrounded by pickup trucks with giant "FUCK BIDEN" flags on them, and they're feeling extremely alone out there.
Can your campaign make them less alone? Can your candidate, or maybe a legislative candidate, do some coffees at people's houses where 15 people meet each other and form some bonds?
Takeaway: Strengthen the Democratic tribe in Republican places.
Whew! That finishes up our discussion of tribalism. Coming up, we'll look at what makes people liberal, conservative and independent. Could it be our brains?