Left Vs Right As Bickering Backseat Kids
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From Robin Hanson
Please consider three historical models for talk and politics today.
First, long ago anonymous pamphlets and letters, and evasive gossip columns, consistently differed from other writings at the time. These were bolder and sharper, with more style, invective, satire, and rumor. They tended to “name names”, and to focus on higher status targets.
Their credibility came more from buzz and virality, and less from author prestige and position in the world. They more emphasized wit and lampooning, less logic and evidence. They focused more on accusations of moral failings, and allowed themselves weaker evidence and innuendo, and less tried to prove their accusations carefully.
All of these have analogues in the new more negative and moral social media talk of today, suggesting that a big cause of many changes has been low accountability of traditional sorts, via effective social distance. When you are online, either they don’t know who you are, or you are too far away from them in the world of non-online social relations for threats of retaliation there to have much effect.
Second, consider the common strategy of orgs and social movements pairing a respectable leader, more officially in charge, with a less officially in charge and thus more deniable “attack dog”. Like MLK and Malcolm X, Gandhi and Tilak, Nixon and Agnew. A “motte and bailey” rhetorical strategy, reified in terms of two different people. The official leader is moderate, reasonable, principled, and speaks softly, while the attack dog uses sharper language, fires up activists, and makes threats by comparison to which the moderate leader’s proposals look more reasonable.
Third, consider a bickering couple, or two feuding kids in the backseat on a long drive before screens. Or rivals in a social world who continually poke at each other while trying to maintain a sufficiently polite appearance to others. Such parties tend to allude, mock, sigh, fake evidence, and accuse rivals of bad motives, hypocrisy, and rule violations. And such rivals tend to get especially good at subtly provoking, i.e., doing things that bother their rival a lot more than they count as violations of neutral rules from the view of outsiders. Think of kids in a car tapping, humming, or moving elbows into others’ space.
Ok, now that we have these three historical models in view, consider left vs right political coalitions in the US. They attack each other in the new social media world like anonymous pamphlets did long ago. They are each split into a larger reasonable moderate wing, which take on official roles in parties and governments, and a smaller extreme attack-dog wing, which does more of the social media attacking.
And like bickering couples and backseat kids, stuck together in a society but eager to takedown their rival, left and right have been getting very good at figuring out what will bother the other side, especially the more numerous and powerful moderates on the other side. People often try to model left and right as having essential ideologies expressed in terms of what their policies try to achieve in the world. But it seems to me that they are better modeled as trying to achieve various random ally agendas, and trying more systematically to poke at whatever will most bother their rival, to induce from them a reaction that will seem to outsiders as an unreasonable over-reaction.
This helps me to understand Trump, defund-the-police, all right racism, covid and immigration policy, and many Oscar best pictures in recent years. Each side is evolving to become whatever would most bother the other side, while seeming in their own eyes to be protected by some reasonable excuses. “I’m just tapping out of habit, not to bother you.”
This is related to Bryan Caplan’s story that “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist”, except that I see the left being anti-market as more fundamentally a way to poke at and defy right moderates; it really bothers them, but seems easily rationalized on the left. And the right isn’t just anti-left, but is looking for ways to poke at whatever most bothers the left, while seemingly easily rationalized on the right. Like via “human biodiversity”.
