KEY #19: If everyone's a star-belly sneetch, then no one's a star-belly sneetch

If everyone's a star-belly sneetch, then no one's a star-belly sneetch

We've been talking about tribalism. Let's look at some of the ways that scholars have tried to figure out what that is.

• What's a tribe?

In KEY #16 (March 29), we noted that people have many tribes, and if the identities are unified for a particular individual, that person will be rigidly identified with what is basically a single tribe. If the identities are "cross-cutting," that person's tribal identification will be softer.

So what is a tribe? How do we understand where these multiple tribes come from and why we are so motivated by them? And something to think about for today is one of the ways people have studied this — how little does it take for us to act tribally?

Way back in 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin published a book called "The Image," and among his ideas was that modern Americans have something called "consumption communities." That is, we kind of think of ourselves as united with other people, even very distant from our real-life communities, through what we consume in common.

Sound farfetched? Not to a Deadhead. Not to a Swiftie. Not to a Harley rider. Not to a vegan. There's something about these entirely voluntary choices that connects us with others who share our passion.

Now that everything around us is politicized, it's easy to see ways in which our consumer choices become integral to our political and social identities.

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”

— Barack Obama in rural Iowa, 2007

If I tell you my uncle Bert likes Nascar, eats Chik-fil-A and has three AR-15s at home, you have a pretty good idea who he is. If I tell you my aunt Mildred likes Downton Abbey, drinks ginger green tea lattes and fosters homeless kittens at home, you have a pretty good idea who she is. (All relatives in this paragraph are strictly fictional.) If I tell you that a congresswoman ran an ad in which she shoots a gun at an actual Toyota Prius labeled "socialism" and it blows up in a satisfying fireball, can you guess which party she's a member of? (It was Marjorie Taylor Greene.)

What really, really gets right-wingers feeling snowflakey is when one of "their" brands suddenly gets woke. Currently, they are theoretically boycotting Bud Light for being promoted by a transgender influencer. They've theoretically boycotted the NFL because black people shouldn't have opinions. They're theoretically boycotting "woke corporations" like Disney. There really should be a trigger warning for conservatives on ... everything.

• Winning is nice, but you know what's better?

Henri Tajfel was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, moved to England, became a psychologist, and wondered if he could figure out why people oppress people. He thought he would start by sorting people into two groups based on no real difference at all, and then add differences until he figured out when they started to act tribally. But what he found was that, even at the level of meaningless sorting, they immediately displayed tribal tendencies.

In a 1970 study, Tajfel asked subjects to estimate the number of dots in a series of images, and then (regardless of how they did), he informed them that they were either "overestimators" or "underestimators." Then he said, okay, the study is over, but we have another study — all you have to do is allocate money to other people. Incidentally, those people (whom you never meet) are labeled overestimators or underestimators. Even at this level of fictional, meaningless association, people gave more of the money to members of their own in-group than the out-group. It was a surprise to Tajfel that group identification could be triggered by nothing.

In a subsequent study — and this is the one that's super relevant here — subjects preferred their group to be worse off, as long as the out-group was even worse off than them. This is a simplification (because the original sets of numbers are more complicated), but suppose you're offered these two deals:

Deal 1:
Group A: $50, Group B: $50.
(i.e. equality)

Deal 2:
Group A: $40, Group B: $30.
(i.e. A > B)

People tended to choose Deal 2, in which everyone got less but their own group was on top. Getting more dollars — but equal to what the other team gets — was not as satisfying as seeing the other team get less than you. See, winning is nice, but what you really want is for the other guy to lose.

Takeaway: Many people want to see other people worse off.

• We see this all the time

It's amazing how much of conservative thinking is really just wanting to know that somebody else is below them. That's basically The Key to the American right.

A friend of mine who is a gay Army veteran asked me, when the issue was hot, why they were so scared of gays in the military, and I said it's because they fear losing cultural ownership of the institution.

You could ask the same question about same-sex marriage — why was that such a threat? It's because they feared losing cultural ownership of marriage. Why does it outrage them to hear Spanish in a store? Because they want their group to own public space. Why do they need to "secure the border"? Because different colors of people are going to take away their America. Why do they panic about the right to say "merry Christmas"? Because "happy holidays" includes the Jews in their season.

In spite of all our social change, marriages endure, the military keeps functioning, English remains our primary language, and Christmas continues to be celebrated. The people yelling about losing what they’ve got are actually completely unchanged, but what they have lost is the feeling of cultural supremacy. (The great philosopher Dr. Seuss wrote a book about this called The Sneetches.)

For liberals, there's infinite pie and we should make sure everybody has some. For conservatives, they had one apple pie and other people are taking slices out of it.

• There's something people care about more than well-being.

"West Baltimore and West Virginia have the same problem, but West Virginia doesn't want to solve its problem because that would help West Baltimore."

— my friend Alex

Democrats from Clinton to the present have adopted a "plenty of pie" model based on the popularity of Social Security. Social Security isn't means-tested, so we all pay in and we all get a piece and it isn't seen as a handout. That's seen as the key to its success. Everyone has the same stake in it* and everyone is for it.

(* Not really. Social Security is regressive both in what it collects and in what it pays out, but let's just accept the mythology for this discussion.)

It's still a good idea to create programs like that, but we should also realize that we're fighting some "less pie for you" psychology. One of the right's most powerful rhetorical patterns is, "The government wants to take my hard-earned money and give it to people who don't want to work," and that's why we shouldn't have any government program that helps people. There is little they hate more than a handout.

It's no secret that this rhetoric has been racially coded from George Wallace and Richard Nixon to today. It's no surprise to see President Obama's name strategically attached to policies that the right wanted to kill, from "Obamacare" to "Obamaphones," because that makes the issue a tribal one and it triggers the fear that other groups are getting an advantage over yours.

“You ever see the illegal aliens, the weirdest thing, they come in by the tens of thousands, sometimes, a day, and they all have cellphones. I’m saying, where did they get the cellphones? Everybody has a cellphone. They’re all talking on these beautiful cellphones. And they’re expensive ones, too. They’re nice ones. Our veterans don’t have cellphones, do they? But they put illegal aliens first and everyone first, but he puts America last.”

— guess who

For Democrats, it's hard to see many examples where we would access this kind of thinking. Democrats don't single out population groups for oppression and deprivation, unless you count when Bernie goes after "the millionaires and the billionaires."

But Democrats can be very transactional — i.e., hey, we're going to pass a policy that's going to help you and then you're going to vote for us — and maybe people aren't so clearly motivated by that. What we're seeing over and over is that voters either (1) don't know what the policy is, or (2) don't know which party passed it.

But there is one thing they understand — status. They know if the president is suddenly not the same color as them, which feels bad. And they love a president who is of a lighter hue (be it white or orange) and he’s harming — or outright removing — other groups.

Status is important and we’ll talk more about it in the future.

Joshua Tanzer
jmtanzer@gmail.com
San Francisco

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Takeaway Toteboard

— introduction —

KEY #1: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Swarthmore. (Feb. 23):
• Democrats run an intellectual campaign to voters who are emotional creatures.
• Instead of running an intellectual campaign, we need to use our intellect to create an emotional campaign.

KEY #2: What does the Democrats’ hat say? (Feb. 26)
• The Republicans’ philosophy fits on a hat. Democrats don’t have one.

— where do people’s attitudes come from? —

KEY #3: Love isn’t rational. (Feb 28):
• Politics is emotion.
• If you find yourself trying to argue intellectually, stop! Find the emotional argument.

KEY #4: You’re an animal! (March 1):
• Our attitudes come from our identity.
• You are speaking to the voter's animal brain.

KEY #5: Don’t take away my _____! (March 4):
• Don't get into a fight with people's way of life.
• When you talk about change, find the “win.”

KEY #6: You are this boy and life is this marshmallow. (March 6):
• Find ways to affirm people's way of life.
• Don’t just campaign; build community.

— mental defenses, and how not to argue —

KEY #7: Motivated reasoning (aka “Remember this friggin guy?”) (March 8):
• People believe what they need to believe.

KEY #8: How your head keeps from exploding (March 11):
• People experiencing cognitive dissonance want an alternative narrative to make it better.
• Do not engage with your opponent’s alternative narrative.

KEY #9: Lalalalalalalala, I'm not listening! (March 13):
• People don't hear information that conflicts with their opinions.
• Misinformation stays in people's heads. (And trying to correct it doesn't work well.)
• Don't respond to attacks by repeating the same attacks in your own language.

KEY #10: Maybe there’s hope for people (March 15):
• Get out ahead of charges with your own framing.
• Correct misinformation fast.
• Let people know when they're about to hear something untrue.
• Undermine the source.
• Reframe, don’t repeat.

KEY #11: The first rule of debate club is … (March 18):
• Arguing with people doesn't change their minds.

— how do people change their minds? —

KEY #12: Today’s the day we talk about The Key (March 20):
• Make people feel non-threatened by your approach.
• People can change their minds if they can keep their own identity.

KEY #13: If you steal one idea from me this year, let it be ... (March 22):
• Start by affirming the other person’s identity.
• Create an identity-consistent "path" that leads the voter in the direction you want.
• Create an "offramp" for uncomfortable Republicans.
• The campaign is inside their heads, not yours.
• Use your intelligence not to make an intellectual argument but to make a psychological argument.

KEY #14: That time we got it wrong (March 25):
• Don’t attack people who are changing.

— tribalism —

KEY #15: Yes, we clan! (March 27):
• Do not get into a fight with someone's tribe.

KEY #16: Tribalism works against us ... but can it work for us? (March 29):
• Do not trigger tribal identification.
• People have many tribes. Access a different tribe.

KEY #17: It’s coming from inside the house. (April 5):
• Your message should come from real people.
• The party-leavers in your district are your messengers.

KEY #18: Liz Cheney is not the only Liz Cheney. (April 8):
• Disrupt Republicans by exploiting distrust.

KEY #19: If everyone's a star-belly sneetch, then no one's a star-belly sneetch. (April 26):
• Many people want to see other people worse off.