BUT THEIR TRIBES FOUGHT WITH EACH OTHER SO THEIR LOVE COULD NEVER BE
Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine (link below) has expanded considerably upon a theme I’ve touched on lightly – the notion that Republicans, are essentially tribal. I agree with about 75% of the essay, which isn’t bad, all things considered.
The part that I disagree with is Sullivan’s insistence that Democrats are equally tribal. Democrats have problems of their own, but in my view, tribalism isn’t one of them. Luckily, Isaac Chotiner, in Slate (link also below), wrote a critique of Sullivan’s article that articulates my objections. Between the two of them, their respective analyses say what I would have said, if I were smart enough to say what they said.
I could embed the links and leave it at that, but I’d like to add a few comments of my own.
The very first political blog I ever encountered was called Instapundit, by a University of Tennessee law professor named Glenn Reynolds, back around the turn of the century. I haven’t looked at his site in well over a decade, but before the September 11 terrorist attacks drove conservatives insane, Reynolds appeared to function primarily as an aggregator, linking to bloggers with diverse views on various points along the political spectrum. I followed several of those early blogs, and especially after 9/11, I began to notice an interesting difference between Republican and Democratic bloggers.
Democrats weren’t hesitant to criticize Republicans, including members of the national party as well and the conservative writers and media personalities who served as their cheerleaders. Republicans, on the other hand, spent their time criticizing something called “the Left.”
It soon became clear to me that this was a deliberate strategy. Republican bloggers would scour the internet for inflammatory statements by the most obscure figures on the far left. They never ran out of fodder, usually from cartoonists in low-circulation underground newspapers and obscure college professors, whose original audience was minuscule.
Step one of their strategy was to find these statements. In step 2, Republican bloggers would latch onto one of these inflammatory statements (many of which were indeed foolish and obnoxious) and collectively share it with their own, much larger, audience. Suddenly, a faux pas by some adjunct professor at Podunk State reached thousands of people, rather than a few students. Step 3 was to feign outrage and insinuate that this outlier view was in fact mainstream Democratic opinion. Step 4 was to insist that any Democrat who didn’t immediately denounce the statement and its author obviously sympathized with the opinion they failed to denounce. “Objectively pro-terrorist” was the line they used, echoing George Orwell.
They were trolls, in other words.
And they, or their descendants, are still trolling today. Notice how often conservatives respond to criticism of Donald Trump by bringing up (for instance) Antifa, who are anarchists rather than Democrats. Similarly, Trump fans (including Dinesh D’Souza just this weekend) often claim that it’s Democrats who are racists. Their proof? Between the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, white southerners tended to vote Democrat. D’Souza hopes you’ll ignore 50 years’ worth of changes in both parties and let him claim both Abraham Lincoln and those “very fine” Nazis and Neo-Confederates who rioted in Charlottesville a few weeks ago.
Don’t fall for this sleight of hand. Ignore apples-to-oranges comparisons. The people who make them are either not very bright, or they’re trying to cheat to bolster a bad argument. Or both, I guess. They are objectively pro-tribalism.
Now, here are the links to the articles by Sullivan and Chotiner.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/can-democracy-survive-tribalism.html