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Your right to swing your arms ends just where another person’s nose begins.2
Enlightenment-born constitutions put the Primitive Mind in a cage, but just how strong are those bars?
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education. —Henry Adams
A common practice is what we might call trend-anecdote swapping. It’s simple: If you come across an anecdote that supports the narrative, you frame it as evidence of a larger trend to make it seem representative of broader reality.
The straw man fallacy also has its inverse—the “motte-and-bailey” fallacy6—which can be used as a defensive tactic. The name comes from a type of
There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961. The trick of many of our vaccines is to expose a person’s immune system to a weak version of a dangerous virus. After the body defeats the weak version of the virus, it develops an immunity against all versions of the virus, including the strong ones. McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.
It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door. – David Hackworth
Me against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers.32
Political realignment tends to start off as a slow trickle, against a strong force of inertia and entrenched loyalties. But once the trickle starts, it can become a self-reinforcing process.
affective polarization, i.e., people not trusting or liking those from the other party. This has been on the rise—and this is the phenomenon we’re mostly exploring in this chapter.
“Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.”
In a simplified simulation like this, the only way areas stay diverse—racially, ethnically, politically—is if people prefer diversity significantly more than they dislike being in the minority.
Americans have formed geographical Echo Chambers, where they find themselves surrounded by political likeness at dinner parties,
1976 presidential election, 27% of Americans lived in landslide counties, with the remaining 73% living in more politically balanced “purple” counties where the election margin was closer. By the 1992 election, the percentage of Americans living in a landslide county had moved from 27% to 38%.
When people are surrounded by ideologically homogeneous groups, their views become more extreme.
Deliberation also increased consensus, and dampened diversity, within the groups.
that two of the most horrifying events in recent human history—the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—were made possible by disgust.
“in politics—as in chess—the man who holds the center holds a position of almost unbeatable strength.”3
dividing reality into two antithetical halves.
The worst thing that our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.9
culture that says, “this is how we do things here.”
would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.23
His grace, self-deprecating humor, and grandfatherly warmth made him easy to like.
Reagan usually spoke to Americans’ Higher Minds.
Most of these criticisms, though, are horizontal disagreements.
steadfast about principles but flexible about policies.
Unity does not require unanimity of thought.”
25,000 Tweets. During Reagan’s 1980 campaign, he called America “a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free.”56 Trump began his campaign by calling America “a dumping ground for everybody else's problems,”
Progressive conservatives of the 1960s, writes political author A. James Reichley, “remained essentially conservative in that they viewed reform as a means for preserving the underlying soundness of the existing system.”
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
They subscribed to the classic Marxist notion of false consciousness—the idea that revolution is prevented by the oppressed believing that the status quo is simply the natural order of things.
Marxism 2.0: Critical Theory.
Critical Theory updated the Marxist model by broadening the focus beyond economic class oppression to subtler deceptive systems, like pop culture, education, and institutional structures.
recent efforts to center the Marxist framework around “a new privileged revolutionary subject which might come to replace the working class.”8 They wrote that, among others, “women, national, racial and sexual minorities”9 were considered “popular candidates for the carrying out of this new role.”
In other words, there was a burgeoning movement to replace class politics with identity politics as the organizing vehicle of modern Marxism.
critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order.”
Crenshaw called this idea “intersectionality.” Under the premise that it was insufficient for identity-related struggles to be addressed individually, intersectionality was the notion that these fields must be brought together into a cross analysis.
Modernity, as I mentioned, emphasized the notion of objective truth that anyone, anywhere could work toward using scientific methods.
Postmodernists are radical skeptics who see nearly all beliefs as false consciousness.
The whole society is permeated with a “metanarrative” that’s so well embedded in the minds of citizens that it feels like the natural order of things.
But intersectionality provided SJF with something physicists haven’t yet discovered: a unifying theory of everything.
Such a narrative, built on clear-cut explanations and unquestioning certainty, makes things easy for its believers. The scientific method is hard and the SJF way of thinking removes that burden.
When a group of people relies on total belief in a single narrative, they must go to great lengths to control the flow of information and enforce intellectual conformity within their ranks. Which brings me to the next bucket:
“If you disagree with me, you can’t be thinking for yourself”—a message he calls “both racist and arrogant.”
“There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
SJF is that racism = prejudice + power,
“over-smiling allows white people to mask an anti-Blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white.”51
“autres temps, autres moeurs.”55 Other times, other customs.
you’re treating groups of adults like children. Which is awfully patronizing.
“the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
