Wrestling with our base extremism

My struggle to maintain thoughfulness amidst the politics of enemies

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I have long complained that grown-ups shouldn’t have heroes. Just as we dismiss childhood figures like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, over-simplistic venerating narratives obscure the reality of who people are, in both good and bad ways. Having role models is fine, but too often, heroes take on almost mythic characteristics that contribute to deeply held but misbegotten understandings of history and, consequently, current reality. 

At the same time, our current domestic and global politics require recognizing threats for what they are, and dealing with them in practical ways. In extremis, as the American republic now stands, that means supporting politicians and institutions that offend some of our most deeply held principles, with others paying intolerable costs for our politicians’ political failures. Personal moral clarity so rarely translates to or is reflected in politics and governance, as much as we might like it to, so we must tolerate the partisan cheerleading and whitewashing of the unacceptable because the alternative is far worse.

My moderate iconoclasm

At its most banal, valorization oversimplifies complex people and implicitly sanctifies their lives as correct and just in toto. At its worst, putting individuals on such moral and ethical pedestals makes otherwise thoughtful people defend the indefensible. As one personal example: a then-colleague defended Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved concubinage of Sally Hemings—the teenaged biological half-sister of his late wife—by saying “I like to think of it as a loving relationship,” simply waiving away its egregiousness and building a comforting fiction to excuse it. (Incidentally, this was not the first time I noticed my conception of “liberty” was markedly different from that of my more dogmatic libertarian co-workers.) 

I have scribbled thoughts on abandoning heroes in several notebooks, both paper and digital, but kept failing to publish anything. I kept reciting the litany of political and cultural celebrities whose misdeeds eventually ruined their reputations. In many cases, popularity and power shielded wrongdoers from legitimate allegations, illustrating how contemporary exultation of a few enables the victimization of many. That’s important, particularly for those who want to create a more just world and society, but a list of the disgraced does not get to the heart of a larger cultural problem: a lazy thinking that can enable extremism. 

It shouldn’t be difficult to separate public acts from the private person, nor should extraordinary acts in the public realm excuse the morally reprehensible acts in the same arena. We should be able to appreciate landmark achievements without overlooking or excusing unconscionable personal or policy failures. Rampant marital infidelity cannot erase the bravery of a martyred civil rights leader; nor must we ignore oppressive racist policy on a grand scale when appreciating other exemplary aspects of wartime or crisis leadership. Yet these details can be salacious and used by modern-day opponents as wholly disqualifying. Rather than individuals excusing the inexcusable, the putative hero’s flaws disqualify their entire life’s work. 

I first thought of this problem as akin to a cult of personality: some driving need to create and sustain myths to maintain and adhere to some group norm. It’s a lot easier to build and keep enthusiasm when you have secular saints to rally around. Rather than interrogating contradictions or personal flaws, and what those contradictions may reflect about the person or the human condition, an all-encompassing judgment of whether a person is good or bad dominates, particularly in the political realm. But recent events made me realize the problem is even more basic than cultural or political icons. 

Tribal myopia and the politics of enemies

Tribalism seems inextricably tied up with dichotomous thinking: good versus evil; right versus wrong; us versus them. Having never studied cognition, psychology, or anthropology in any detail, I am unprepared to assign cause or effect. But where there are heroes, there are usually villains. So much of what makes a tribal “us” is directly or indirectly linked to how they differ from “them,” even if loosely or ill-defined. This dynamic is the key of populism, after all: mobilizing people against someone or something else, however amorphous, because that difference is deeply felt, but not necessarily rational. 

In today’s retail politics, it’s often easiest to mobilize against the financial and political leaders—e.g., “millionaires and billionaires” and “out of touch D.C. elites.” The politicians and activists who employ this language enjoy the benefit of appearing to “punch up” because their targets possess real power, so even voters who may not be on board with all of a candidate’s agenda may nod along with forceful calls to increase Jeff Bezos’ tax bill. That said, throughout American history, the targets of the politics of difference are often ethnic, religious, or political minorities. There was never a clean break between eras, so the old and new populisms combine into modern dogwhistles like “cosmopolitan elites” (Jews) and “the woke” (Black folks and other minorities) conspiring to indoctrinate the masses. Not everyone who uses either term hears or means the ethnic connotations, which makes them all the more effective.

In more social realms, us versus them is less intentional rather than self-reinforcing groupthink. For example, so many people who espouse a core belief in the individual and deep skepticism of “collectivism” nevertheless refer to “the left” as if it were a single entity. Such a view is fundamentally sloppy, lumping moderate Democrats with leftist activists, who are typically at odds with one another, especially in contemporary urban politics. Only in the fever dreams of right wing talking heads is the American left-of-center remotely united. If this belief was limited to think tank happy hours and water cooler banter, the damage would be self-contained. But with the proliferation of red-team/blue-team news and entertainment, stoking political vitriol has become big business. 

Irresponsible commentary sometimes posing as journalism has long labeled Democrats as “socialists” and Republicans as “racists” and “fascists.” These monikers have accurately described marginal parts of each party’s coalition for the past 70 years, but these factions have gained power in their spheres as the epithets became more common, as if actualized through nominal repetition like Candyman or Beetlejuice. And because the American political system has two entrenched major parties—reducing most elections to a slate of binary choices—reinforcing ‘us versus them’ helps rally the base. 

“Socialist! Socialist! Socialist!” Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash 

The populism in both American parties is troubling: a politics of enemies and an often casual disregard for basic facts make the compromise upon which our system of government depends even more difficult. That said, one side is far worse than the other. While openly socialist pols hold a few seats in Congress, the Democratic party is still dominated and funded by moderate liberals. The extreme wealth of the country and its decentralized governing structures make the mass confiscation of property that traditional socialism demands a practical and political impossibility. For evidence of this, simply look at the fights by and among urban Democrats about building affordable housing or changing zoning laws. If NIMBYism doesn’t convince you of progressives’ implicit commitment to American capitalism, it should at least assure you they are quite jealous of their own property. This doesn’t mean a populist Democrat could not be dangerous: ambition is a vice that knows no party. But at least for the time being, and despite the stratification of American wealth, there is not a mass audience for a left-wing revolutionary, let alone at the ballot box. 

The same cannot be said for the Republicans and their plan to reshape the American government in an authoritarian mold. As I feared in 2016, the party completely capitulated to Trump, who has no cogent ideology or serious policy interest. Whatever one thought of the Goldwater/Reagan/Buckley era of Republican conservatism, it had a mostly coherent set of principles. Like all political parties, they violated some principles when it suited them, but there was more to their politics than reactionary anti-leftism, though it certainly has long been a part of it. But no longer.

The bulk of the right’s donor class has either resigned itself to Trump or embraced him completely. Many of the intellectuals of the right have similarly made peace with the false “both sides do it” dichotomy or amplify his anti-elite populism in spite of their own Ivy League credentials. There is always a certain amount of bullshitting that comes with politics, but a half-century of bedrock principle and intellectual debate has been subsumed by dimwitted demagogues and unscrupulous political actors whose aspirations to power are based almost solely on the punishment of their political enemies. 

This abandonment of principle for a politics of enemies poses an existential threat to our governmental structure: almost every election is a zero-sum us versus them. Devolving to a politics of enemies thus undermines the democratic project and the peaceful transition of power upon which it rests. The American body politic cannot withstand this threat for much longer, and too few people who know better openly admit this to the public.

What’s past is prologue, not a reprise 

Of course, ‘us versus them’ is not just an American phenomenon. Institutions and governments across the globe have myriad disparate incentives, individually and collectively. Simple narratives don't give the whole picture and deeply held convictions easily become tools of propagandists. Naturally, proponents on either side of any issue are convinced their positions and moral assessments are correct and thus assume a strident “I'm right” and “they are evil” messaging. The politics of war thrive on bilateral myopia.

Unfortunately, as the stakes of intertribal disagreement increase, the tolerance for nuance decreases. This phenomenon is bad enough when considering the American electoral near-future. But in armed conflicts like the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the tendency to unequivocally take the side of either belligerent is moral misconduct. Sympathizing with the victims inside and outside of Gaza doesn’t require defending Hamas terrorism or the IDF’s reckless disregard for human life. Yet many do, because dichotomous thinking lets people justify indefensible violence and carnage. 

It’s even easier to apply the good guy/bad guy thinking to past events. In our technologically advanced times, it may be easier to think of people in the past as simpler, more ignorant, and sometimes even backward-thinking. Removing the capacity to act with contemporary morality helps rationalize what happened in Germany in the 1930s or the American South in the 1850s. “It was a different time!” or “society was different back then!” can excuse anything from an older relative’s homophobia to chattel slavery as an institution. The error not only negates the innate complexity of humans who lived decades or centuries before this moment, but it assumes people of today are somehow better; that our collective experience, knowledge, or moral clarity will immunize us from the biases that would inflict, tolerate, or justify the suffering of great swaths of humanity without recognizing those biases among ourselves. Such an assumption breeds hubris.

The personalization of history—when the acts of politicians or soldiers 75 or 200 years ago becomes what “we” did—begets myriad conceptual problems. The sanctification of the founders in public schools may just be a noble narrative on which to build national pride, but it can also lead to propagandistic documents and censorious laws wielded against political minorities. Combining this personalization with the dominant good guys/bad guys assumptions of history, makes criticism of historical actors a personal attack on people of the present, reifying a wilful blindness to sins of the past. 

Incidentally, the personalization of history can also overemphasize private feelings over political actions. Goldwater used coded language to woo racist Southern votes despite personally opposing segregation; Lyndon Johnson was a lifelong segregationist and inveterate racist, but he pushed the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts through Congress. Why should anyone give a damn what was in their hearts? 

To be sure, not every challenge to the old narratives is correct; agitators are just as prone to good guy/bad guy thinking as defenders of the status quo. Indeed, larger narratives such as white supremacy and colonization that are aptly applied in many contexts can be overstated in others. 

For example, slavery and racism contributed heavily to the evolution of American policing—largely because slavery and other legal racism were integral components of American society—but policing has evolved both because of and independently from those factors. The proliferation of slave patrols in the mid-19th century does not ipso facto delegitimize modern policing, let alone put today’s patrol officers on the same moral plane as slave catchers, despite historical lineage and parallels. 

That is to say, while the racist history of law enforcement should inform crime policy, the blanket condemnation of police as a racist institution—or, in negative, its reflexive and nearly unqualified defense—reflects the narrow, polarized thinking that infects so much of our politics. Historical context should provide policy nuance but, too often, it becomes a blunt rhetorical weapon. 

The practical conflict between policy and politics

But you can’t build a political coalition on nuance. It’s easier to assign bad faith to opponents rather than understand their position, even when—especially when—that opposition is poised to inflict (more) harm. Frederick Douglass didn’t say “Power yields nothing without a balanced proposal formulated after a critical analysis and discussion of relevant perspectives, institutional constraints, and other options with the understanding that: a) the ideal is not likely possible; b) there will be important stakeholders who do not get what they want; and c) that policy defeat may or may not correspond with moral or ethical desert.” What Douglass said was, “Power yields nothing without a demand.”

This is the fundamental conflict between policy and politics: understanding the details of how society or institutions work is not closely related to hard-nosed political mobilization. And as much as certain factors can influence elections—the economy, unpopular wars, fears of crime, abortion—charisma plays an outsized role in determining who holds public office.

Voters care about policy, but they also tend to vote for someone they like. Back in grade school, I didn’t run for student council because I knew the power ultimately rested with the adults and the elections were effectively popularity contests. I wanted to wait until running for office was “for real.”  The problem with my thinking—entirely aside from the fanciful belief I’d ever run for office—is that elections never stop being popularity contests and office holders face institutional constraints. It turns out, being liked is often a more effective electoral strategy than being smart or being right. Life is not an Aaron Sorkin drama: America isn’t pining for a know-it-all-in-chief and being right on policy isn’t enough to win office. And even when your candidate wins, they can’t usually just do what they want.

While clearly not a free trader or a fan of immigrants, Trump is not a man with a lot of policy ideas. People vote for him for several reasons: party allegiance and identity are big factors, but lots of Americans just really like him. His politics—so far as they are legible—are virtually indistinguishable from Pat Buchanan’s in the 1980s and early 1990s. While many things have changed since then, it’s fair to assume Trump’s charisma and popularity brought those politics to the fore in the Republican party. Many more polished and eloquent candidates have adopted his stances since his ascendency in 2016, and yet all failed to make inroads when challenging Trump himself. This doesn’t mean those stances don’t matter, but most are probably secondary to Trump’s personality. It also means that simply being better on policy isn’t enough to beat him.

2024 and beyond

For those of us that oppose Trump, we are given one realistic option. Our policy differences with Biden span the gamut, but a functioning, democratic republic is more important than any specific issue—even Gaza. Biden’s weakness in the face of Israeli crimes and, to a lesser extent, Russian aggression in Ukraine is far more than a minor irritation; it is needlessly costing thousands of lives and undermining long-term stability in both regions. Trump stands with the worst of both aggressors, so on the binary axis, the choice remains an easy one. Nevertheless, supporting Biden doesn’t feel good.

This ambivalence is reasonable on an ethical level, but not helpful on a political one. The electoral reality is that Biden needs enthusiastic support to boost turnout and win battleground states, which one hopes would discourage any Congressional shenanigans next January. (That we need to contemplate a major political party stealing an election outright should shame every extant Republican, but that’s a separate fight.) I take some solace that no one looks to me for political enthusiasm, but “NEVER AGAIN Trump!” is about the best I can manage.

So I find myself torn between my deep antipathy for partisan politics and my hopeful desperation for a resounding Trump defeat. Elections should not be fraught with existential (lowercase-r) republican dread, especially because such feelings feed the cycle of a retributive politics of enemies. But if someone who tries to overthrow a duly elected government isn’t an enemy, the word ceases to have meaning.

We need a functioning republic if we have any hopes of making it better.

Until next time, wishing you peace, love, and soul…

JPB