Trump as Fargroup
My opinion of the election is “a plague on both your houses.” Kamala Harris is an extreme representative of an ideology I have opposed for most of my life. Donald Trump has three major positions on two of which, immigration and trade, he manages to be even worse than his opponent. While I have some sympathy for his views on the third — I have been arguing against an interventionist foreign policy for something over fifty years now — I do not trust him to execute a consistent and competent alternative. His disinterest in whether what he says is true, extreme even for a politician, I find offensive.
That is my intellectual view of the matter. It is not my emotional view. Reading news stories and observing the effect on my feelings, I note that I am reacting like a Trump partisan. Poll results that look good for him make me happy, poll results that look bad for him make me sad. Accounts of outrageous statements by Trump or Vance I ignore — I don’t expect them to tell the truth. Accounts of demagoguery by Harris or Waltz arouse feelings of indignation. If Harris wins I will feel disappointed. If Trump wins I will feel relieved, at least until the first outrageous thing he does.
The explanation of my inconsistent reaction is provided by Scott Alexander in “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup,” one of the best of his many good essays. In it he points out that someone’s outgroup, the group for whom he feels and expresses strongly negative views, is typically made up not of people distant from him, geographically and intellectually, but of people close. The outgroup of the Nazis was not their Japanese allies or the Chinese the Japanese were fighting, it was German Jews, people with the same language and, in most respects, the same appearance and culture. The outgroup of American leftists is not Muslim fundamentalists but American conservatives.
Conservatives have doubts about gay marriage. Muslim fundamentalists view homosexual intercourse as a capital offense.1 American conservatives would like their schools to be more tolerant of creationism. Muslim fundamentalists want their schools to teach the truth of Islam. And yet, when conservatives criticize Muslims, leftists defend them. When Muslims kill Jews and Jews respond by killing Muslims, it is the Muslims that the American leftists support, the Jews that they blame — although Israelis have much more in common, ideologically as well as culturally, with American leftists than Palestinians do.
We think of groups close to us in Near Mode, judging them on their merits as useful allies or dangerous enemies. We think of more distant groups in Far Mode – usually, we exoticize them. Sometimes it’s positive exoticization of the Noble Savage variety (understood so broadly that our treatment of Tibetans counts as an example of the trope). Other times it’s negative exoticization, treating them as cartoonish stereotypes of evil who are more funny or fascinating than repulsive. Take Genghis Khan – objectively he was one of the most evil people of all time, killing millions of victims, but since we think of him in Far Mode he becomes fascinating or even perversely admirable – “wow, that was one impressively bloodthirsty warlord”. (Scott Alexander, “Post-Partisanship Is Hyper-Partisanship”)
Conservatives are the leftists’ outgroup, Muslims their far group. The far group can be ignored; large parts of the world are more sexist and more racist than any part of America but invisible to progressives campaigning against sexism and racism. The far group can even be supported, at least if the outgroup is attacking it. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Muslim fundamentalists. Hamas.
Kamala Harris is an American leftist. American leftists are my outgroup. Trump and Vance are American populists. I disagree with their views, in some cases more than I disagree with the views of American leftists, but I have nothing against them, just as I have nothing against believing Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Black Muslims or believers in Christian Science.
Trump and his movement are my fargroup. They are being attacked by my outgroup. My enemy’s enemy … .
Corrupt but Decent
In a previous post I wrote that “Biden may possibly be a decent human being” before describing him as “quite obviously corrupt.” A commenter wrote that he had a hard time reconciling those two statements. That started me trying to figure out what made me regard someone as a decent human being. The answer I came up with is that I judge someone as a human being according to how he treats his ingroup. Treating his outgroup, his enemies, decently is more than one can reasonably expect.
Imagine a mafia don in his interaction with his own people. When one of them gets killed or sentenced to a long term in prison he makes sure that the man’s wife is supported, his children taken care of. When the son of a loyal lieutenant gets in trouble with the police, the don uses his contacts to get him out of trouble. If the don makes promises to his people, he keeps them. He may be a murderer, directly or at second hand, but he is a decent human being.
For a real-world example, consider George Washington Plunkitt:
What tells in holdin' your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help. I've got a regular system for this. If there's a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I'm usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines. If a family is burned out I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don't refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things runnin' again. It's philanthropy, but it's politics, too—mighty good politics. Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me? The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs. If there's a family in my district in want I know it before the charitable societies do, and me and my men are first on the ground. I have a special corps to look up such cases. The consequence is that the poor look up to George W. Plunkitt as a father, come to him in trouble—and don't forget him on election day. (William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 6)
Plunkitt was corrupt — he boasted of having held four public jobs at the same time and been paid for three of them. But he was, at least as judged by his self-description, a decent human being.
Angel/Devil
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, not I against them. They are “only doing their duty”, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of then succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it.” (George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” 1940.)
How is it possible for a man who would go out of his way to help someone in need, to comfort a crying child, someone who is honest and honorable in his dealings, to also be willing to plunder innocent strangers, kill wounded enemies, burn crops and barns? Short of war, how can a man behave well to some strangers, badly to others, depending on race, religion, accent, nationality?
The answer, I think, is that we have (at least) three behavior patterns for interacting with others hardwired into our brains — for ingroup, outgroup, fargroup. The ingroup can be as narrow as immediate kin, as broad as anyone who isn’t an enemy.
A high trust society is one where a stranger is by default a member of the ingroup and treated accordingly.
“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.” (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)
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In some times and places Muslim culture has been tolerant of homosexuality; there are two famous medieval essays on the relative attractions of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse and quite a lot of poetry celebrating homosexual love. But the religious doctrine, which fundamentalists take seriously, holds homosexuality to be forbidden.
If you will excuse my saying so, I think your priorities are misplaced. There is substantial reason to favor, for example, Trump over either any Democrat or the establishment Republicans who formerly dominated their party, not on ideological grounds but on what might be called structural grounds.
Some years ago, the Scottist science fiction writer Charles Stross wrote about what he called the "beige dictatorship" (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html): the population of British people who spent their whole lives preparing for careers in politics, who never worked outside the political sector, and whose viewpoints, regardless of party label, take it for granted that everything should be controlled by people like them. Stross summed up at the end of that essay by saying that "the future isn't a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It's a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state."
We can see the outcome of their dominance in the policies of the European Union, and of the UK, despite Brexit, and increasingly of the Democratic Party in the United States:
* Abandonment of the central Enlightenment value of freedom of speech and the press, in favor of forcible suppression of officially unacceptable viewpoints, and now, it appears of attempts to treat people who attempt to preserve these as criminals (as in recent calls for the extradition of Elon Musk to the UK and his trial as a criminal there)
* Suppression of the petroleum economy in favor of "sustainable" power systems that cannot provide reliable power, and that have massive environmental costs, from fires caused by the importation of electricity over interstate power lines, to damage to animal populations from birds to bats to whales, to unrecyclable breakdown products of solar and wind systems, all justified by climate hysteria (accompanied by demands for the forcible suppression of any dissent on climate)
* Suppression of much of farming and ranching in highly efficient countries such as the United States and the Netherlands that feed a disproportionate share of the world's population
* Centralization of the financial sector, with consequent ability to shut dissidents out of the economy and leave them in poverty (and unable to hire lawyers to defend their rights)
* A return of religious intolerance in the form of blasphemy laws that specifically make it a crime to criticize Islam (while not giving the same protection to Christianity or Judaism)
* More broadly, an insistence on special rights for officially "oppressed" groups that injure less oppressed groups (white people, East Asians, men, heterosexuals, and with the transgender movement, increasingly women) and make the "oppressed" groups clients of the state
All of this has generated hostility in large shares of the population, and rightly so. And it has produced the parties not only of Trump, but of Milei, Farage, Wilders, Le Pen, Meloni, and others. Their positions are a mixed lot, and some of what they want is often undesirable. But it's undesirable in a mundane way, not in the totalitarian way of the beige dictatorship; and it offers a possibility of breaking up the beige dictatorship, which is highly to be desired. So I support the American branch of that movement, with, admittedly, mixed feelings, because my feelings about their opposition are not at all mixed.
Regarding the emotional reaction, I'm the same but admittedly more right than you are. I give Republicans much more credit than they deserve from their record because I believe that libertarianism is in their DNA to some degree, even if they often fall short. I think they want the government to be smaller with reduced regulation, and so on (leave out abortion if you need to).
Democrats, on the other hand, seem to like large government for its own sake and appear to go after every excuse to grow it (COVID lockdown the most glaring recent example). I think in the sense that libertarians think of them, they have no base principles and pick whatever position is favorable to their interest groups at the time, flopping back and forth with circumstance. If they ever randomly do something that grows the economy, reduces government power, is economically literate or seems libertarian in some way, I interpret it as an accident that so happened to come along with some other agenda they had.
In recent years, of course, climate and gender stuff has gotten so crazy on the left that I'd vote against them on that alone. And then there's SCOTUS, which if Hillary had won, who knows where we'd be. I'm pretty sure the first and second amendments would be hollow toothless shells that a left SCOTUS would interpret away.