New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

New study by Bernstein, Zambrotta, Martin, & Micalizzi on political tribalism. Disturbing and not surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears. Title is: "Tribalism in American Politics: Are Partisans Guilty of Double-Standards?"

Here is the discussion section:

Across experiments, we found strong evidence for the existence of political tribalism and the application of double-standards. In Study 1, we found that tribalism occurs for the perceived legitimacy of hypothetical election outcomes. When asked whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be the legitimate president under three different scenarios, Republicans viewed Trump as more legitimate than Biden while Democrats viewed Biden as more legitimate than Trump. Similarly, in Study 2 Part 1, Republicans supported identical presidential policies and actions more under Donald Trump than Barack Obama while Democrats supported identical policies and actions more under Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

A noteworthy element this study is that each item was, in fact, true under both Presidents, which highlights the study’s real-world importance and is an important contribution over prior experiments. In Study 2 Part 2, we showed that Republicans viewed identical statements attributed to Bill Clinton as more bigoted than those attributed to Donald Trump while Democrats viewed the statements as more bigoted when attributed to Trump instead of Clinton. Further, Republicans viewed a statement advocating colorblindness to be generally not racist when attributed to either Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) or Donald Trump (though racism scores were slightly higher in the latter condition); Democrats also viewed the statement as low in racism when attributed to MLK, but the racism score increased drastically when attributed to Trump. Taken together, these studies suggest that tribalism permeates many aspects of political life and discourse. Policy agreement differs according to the person enacting the policy. Perceptions of racism and xenophobia depend on the person who utters the statement. Alarmingly, even the perceived legitimacy of elections is dependent upon the winner; that is, people assign different standards for election legitimacy depending upon whether their preferred candidate wins or loses. Moreover, some of these effects are rarely seen in the social or cognitive sciences (e.g., Fs>250 when sample size <150), which suggests that tribalism plays a large role, at least in certain contexts.

Our main interest was in documenting if bias exists among each side of the political aisle. However, the study does invite us to ask which side exhibits greater tribal bias . . . To the degree that our results can help weigh in on this question, there was some indication that bias is higher among Democrats, which we call “left-leaning asymmetry”

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WaPo’s Concocted Reasons for Fighting Wars That do not Benefit Ordinary Americans

At the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen recently authored "This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine." I strenuously disagree with his "facts" and reasoning throughout, but his final five "reasons" are especially bizarre. None of these five reasons justifies U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Most glaringly, none of these reasons consider a meaningful cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of ordinary Americans. Further, his "reasons" lead to the bizarre conclusion that the U.S. should instigate and prolong numerous unjust wars that fail to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, a major issue conspicuously ignored by Thiessen. Here are his "reasons" (6-10) for continuing with our warmongering 6-10:

6. "A proving ground for new weapons."

This is a valid reason for indiscriminately going to war!  Yes, indeed.

7. "Arming Ukraine is revitalizing our defense industrial base."

Yes, we need to make sure that weapons manufacturers can afford to pay big salaries to management and to their lobbyists.

8. "The Russian invasion has strengthened U.S. alliances."

Not true if you poll people outside of the readership of U.S. corporate media. And if only there were other better ways to strengthen U.S. alliances other than killing people and blowing up their cities . . .

Further, consider attitudes of people outside of Western countries:

Almost a year after Russia’s war against Ukraine started, it has united the west, according to a 15-country survey – but exposed a widening gulf with the rest of the world that is defining the contours of a future global order.

The study, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank, surveyed opinions in nine EU member states, including France, Germany and Poland, and in Britain and the US, as well as China, Russia, India and Turkey.

It revealed sharp geographical differences in attitudes to the war, democracy and the global balance of power, the authors said, suggesting Russia’s aggression may be a historic turning point marking the emergence of a “post-western” world order.

“The paradox of the Ukraine war is that the west is both more united, and less influential in the world, than ever before,” said Mark Leonard, the thinktank’s director and a co-author of the report, based on polling carried out last month.

Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, who also worked on the study, called the findings “extremely sobering”.

Consider this graph, which strongly clashes with the prevailing narrative of U.S. elites:

9. "Victory helps prevent nuclear proliferation."

Do you know what else would prevent future nuclear proliferation? Starting a nuclear war. As Joe Biden admitted on October 6, 2022:

In remarks at a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said it was the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that there has been a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons’ being used, "if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going.”

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said, offering his bluntest comments about the use of nuclear weapons since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Biden admitted that he engaged in this stunningly reckless behavior months before recent days, when  decided to send Abrams tanks and F16's to Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong with this?

10. "Victory in Ukraine is achievable."

Didn't we hear this same claim, year after year, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Thiessen presents no factual basis for believing that this specious claim is any more true in the case of Ukraine.

It seems that Thiessen's article was penned by a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex, but it seems like Thiessen would not be the kind of person who would be so incredibly unreflective. For instance, Thiessen wrote candidly about the Durham Report--the headline is "The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI — and the media."  I would now suggest that he soul-search Hillary Clinton campaign's lies about Russian collusion with Trump, something she did to enhance her personal political ambitions. What is the connection to Ukraine? I suggest this. There is a hatred of Russia simmering under the lack of a meaningful national discussion regarding the Ukraine War. That poisoning, I suspect, motivates unreflective articles of the sort Thiessen has just written about the Ukraine war.

For more on the many ways that the Ukraine War fails to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, see this episode of Glenn Greenwald's System Update: Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home?

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Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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