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How tribalism ruined politics, with Andrew Heaton
2.6k Plays1 month ago
Politics shouldn’t be a team sport, but it has become one. Far too many of us blindly support politicians or parties as opposed to critically assessing ideas and policies. Where has this tribalism come from, how has it got so bad, and what do we do about it?
To help Will answer those questions, he is joined by comedian, political satirist and author, Andrew Heaton. Andrew's new book is titled, "Tribalism is Dumb: Where It Came from, How It Got So Bad, and What to Do about It.”
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. I posted the following tweet a few days ago. i was relieved Trump won.
00:00:31
Speaker
I think most of his executive orders have been brilliant and he sparked a much-needed cultural vibe shift. With all that said, and his comments on Ukraine are factually wrong and morally indefensible.
00:00:43
Speaker
I thought it was a pretty vanilla comment. It was another way of saying I agree with Donald Trump on some things and not others.
Tweet Reactions and Political Tribalism
00:00:50
Speaker
It says a lot about the times in which we live that it went somewhat viral, being viewed over one million times.
00:00:57
Speaker
It also led to thousands of comments, many of which flayed me for being cuck or ill-informed or a Ukraine plant, and even some that got stuck into me for supporting Trump's executive orders.
00:01:08
Speaker
Hardly the point of the tweet. Politics shouldn't be a team sport, but it has become one. Far too many of us blindly support politicians or parties as opposed to critically assessing ideas and policies.
00:01:20
Speaker
Where has this tribalism come from? How has it got so bad? And what do we do about it? To help me answer those questions, I am delighted to be joined by Andrew Heaton. Andrew is a comedian, political satirist, and author of the new book, completely coincidentally titled, Tribalism is Dumb, ah Where it Came From, How it Got So Bad, and What to Do About It.
00:01:39
Speaker
Andrew, welcome to Fire at Will. A pleasure to be here. And Will, don't don't feel bad about being a cuck. I'm a cuck. It's fine. It's all right. There's plenty of good guys that are cucks. Don't
Online Culture and Political Language
00:01:50
Speaker
worry about that.
00:01:51
Speaker
Badge of on. What does being a cuck actually mean for perhaps the audience members who aren't au fait with internet slang? Yeah. i i thought Okay. You know how like, all right, in the 90s, if you were just not a conservative and the conservatives didn't like you, you were automatically a socialist.
00:02:08
Speaker
And like in the flip side of the coin, if you're a conservative, but you're kind of scary, you're a fascist. I think a cuck is if I don't like you online. I think that's it. If you're online and I don't like you, you're a cuck.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I like it because it has a hard case on to it. So I enjoy saying it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to have to check this, but I think the original term, and I may be wrong, was someone who is, i think it comes from being cuckolded. I think it comes from someone who's, who is being cheated on.
00:02:40
Speaker
I think you're right. So so i'm I'm not very big on pop culture. Will, I'm, I'm, I'm fairly out of touch. And I had the same thing. I was like a cuckold, like in Shakespeare, when they, when they,
00:02:51
Speaker
And was like, oh, no, apparently it's a porn term where a guy bangs your wife and you just sit and watch it. And i I always find that kind of funny because I'm like, look, like,
Politics and Personal Life Balance
00:03:00
Speaker
how do I put this?
00:03:02
Speaker
I'm not willing to accept criticism from ass raptor for 32 on Twitter telling me that I'm a cuck. Like, I at least I have the backbone to use my own real name on the Internet.
00:03:14
Speaker
Until you have enough of an alpha personality to have your real name on Twitter, I'm not willing to accept cuck from you. I agree with that. The other funny thing is how internet meme culture and internet slang and terms and the vibe of internet subculture has now basically infiltrated popular politics.
00:03:35
Speaker
And we now have the vice president of the United States often speaking in internet meme terminology. it's a ah It is a change. or Or like Doge, like like like ah in an American federal lexicon department is a cabinet level federal agency, which would be a part of the chain of command in the event of a nuclear war.
00:03:55
Speaker
So Doge is like a task force. It's a task force. And but we they call it Doge because they just really wanted it to be Doge because Elon Musk likes doge coins or whatever.
00:04:07
Speaker
How do you feel about that as an aside? Not doge, but how do you feel more generally about the memification of politics? The memification of politics, honestly, I haven't thought about it in terms of memification before.
00:04:20
Speaker
Generally, I don't like it well. I am a little government guy, and I am now old enough that I've become one of those really irritating dudes that says, but you know, we're not a democracy, we're a republic, which made no sense to me when my um when i was in my 20s. I thought that that was just a man shaped like a bathtub trying to sound smart and Now I'm like, no, actually, they have a point there. Like ah a democracy in a in a pure sense is like where we all come together and we vote on a thing.
00:04:46
Speaker
And a republic is, no, I'm really busy and I
Evolutionary Roots of Tribalism
00:04:50
Speaker
have to do my job and I'm taking care of my family. And I don't want politics to be the center of my life. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give my proxy vote to some nerd who's going to go worry about this on my behalf.
00:05:02
Speaker
I think that's a pretty good government setup. I don't think that politics should be central to everybody's life. I think it should be fairly ephemeral. like when I first started going to the UK, Will, and and hanging out in hostels, I would talk to Canadians back in the day and and me just being polite, I'd be like, oh, you're from Canada, cool, is Stephen Harper's still the prime minister?
00:05:21
Speaker
And they would go, ah Yeah. And you could tell that there was a second where they'd think about it. And I am so jealous of people that have that. like if you I think Swiss people might be like that, where if you ask them who the president is, they got to think about it for a second.
00:05:35
Speaker
That's a sign of a great country in my mind. So I don't like that politics has become a blood sport. I think politics ought to be an important but... but small part of life that is kind of quotidian and boring. I feel like it should mostly be proceduralism and like making things efficient and, and arguments about national values. That's part of it too.
00:05:58
Speaker
But I, I think that politics has kind of become this, this last arena that we all participate in. It's the last thing that hasn't become long tail splintered culture.
00:06:09
Speaker
And so it's become this kind of blood sport, this kind of like, ersatz religion, which I don't think is at all healthy. So I would love it if I would love it, Will,
Cultural Viewpoints and Political Differences
00:06:20
Speaker
if myself and all of the other political media people became less successful because all the people in life were like too busy living their lives. And it was just the nerds that listened to your show and my show that were weighing into politics and everybody else like got really good at piano.
00:06:34
Speaker
i I heard you use that line with Charlie Cook, that politics has become a type of religion. And I actually thought the question that I went to there, which we'll get to in a moment, was how much has that got to do with the actual decline of religion in the Western world and whether it is actually a replacement.
00:06:51
Speaker
But park that thought for the moment, because I want to ground the audience in the context of tribalism. A new-ish rule that we have on the podcast, stolen from friend of the show, Jonah Goldberg, on his show,
00:07:03
Speaker
Whenever there is someone on who's written a book, the first question is, what is the book about? Ah, thank you. ah Tribalism is Dumb is about... why we are innately partisan, why why we like to form groups and hate other groups and where that came from. So the kind of working thesis for this, and i I talk about this in the intro, is I am a comedian by training, and I knew getting into comedy that everybody is,
Modern Tribalism and Media Influence
00:07:30
Speaker
everybody to some extent is concerned about death and sex. There's a lot of jokes that involve courtship or relationships or aging. These are all death and sex jokes. we And we all I think everybody kind of understands that.
00:07:41
Speaker
The thing that really surprised me going into stand-up comedy is tribal identity is just as important to people as not being killed and getting laid. Tribe is extremely important to people.
00:07:53
Speaker
So that was already kind of percolating. And then when Trump got elected, everybody went nuts for four years, just ah kind of across the spectrum, by the way. And and i I was really disturbed by it because I'm a fairly...
00:08:05
Speaker
low T Mr. Rogers personality type by inclination. I'm not particularly combative. I i like having friends that disagree with. And that became not in vogue for a while. And i I was really disturbed by that. And I, I wanted to figure out what was going on. And so,
00:08:20
Speaker
I did a lot of anthropological research and sociological research. Don't worry to listeners thinking about buying the book. I put in a lot of jokes. It's pretty funny, but I i did the heavy lifting for you in terms of reading about all of this.
00:08:32
Speaker
The conclusion I come to is that we are innately clannish, groupish, tribal. It's really important to us that we're part of some kind of group, and this is crucial to it. We also want to go looking for groups to fight.
00:08:46
Speaker
It's not just that we want to support our community and then An external threat comes and we all rally against it. We are proactively looking for an enemy that's built into the human experience. And ah it can be good if it's like sports or you know competition between business.
00:09:03
Speaker
like that there There are good places for that to manifest. But I think increasingly that is... getting directed into
Solutions to Political Tribalism
00:09:10
Speaker
politics, and it's making governance impossible, and it's making politics toxic.
00:09:14
Speaker
And so that's what the book is about, is that the kind of the underlying evolutionary psychology that compels us to be that way. Next, if that is the case, why did things change? If it's if it's an underlying constant, what altered in the last 20 years to make things worse? And finally, what do we do about it?
00:09:32
Speaker
I most people would instinctively get why tribalism or being part of a tribe makes sense in terms of finding support or in terms of loving a group or whatever.
00:09:43
Speaker
But that point you just made, how it's also part of our tribal instinct to proactively go out and actually look for people to attack. That's a ah slightly difficult more difficult one to understand. What's the the psychological or evolutionary reasons for that element of tribalism?
00:09:59
Speaker
Right. So you're right on both counts. And this is what for i get a surprising amount of pushback on the Internet, Will, from people who haven't read the book. They're like, but isn't tribalism built in? And I'm like, yeah, it is. but i I wrote the I wrote the book on this.
00:10:13
Speaker
Ask Raptor 432. Why do I keep arguing with you? You already called me a cuck. Yeah, the that that bit there's there's
Constructive Political Discussions
00:10:20
Speaker
I use the term tribalism in the pejorative sense of of being kind of reflexively clannish and partisan, but ah there there is clearly healthy tribalism. I think community great.
00:10:30
Speaker
I'm very, very much in favor of people being part of community. i think we're living in a very isolated, alienated time, and that's a lot of what is precipitating the current crisis. So the the evolutionary part of being in a tribe, but i think, is fairly self-explanatory. if If we're living in the Serengeti 250,000 years ago,
Conclusion and Book Praise
00:10:50
Speaker
and I go to sleep and no one's around at all, I'm a lot more likely to get eaten by a tiger.
00:10:55
Speaker
Whereas if I've got buddies with me, maybe one of us stays up and and looks out for tigers. We don't get eaten. i Me and my cave wife have a kid. That's a lot of lot of time and effort going into that kid. But if we've got other members of the community here, we're able to watch out.
00:11:11
Speaker
I get sick. You can take care of me. Maybe I'm not particularly good at hunting caribou. And so you you shared with me some of your more prejudiced caribou hunting. But it turns out I'm quite good at it whittling spears or something like that. There's all sorts of reasons that We want to be a part of a group and it's really, really built into us. It's why we get lonely.
00:11:31
Speaker
We are our brains secrete stress chemicals when we're not around other people for any period of time to compel us to be a part of a group. Whereas we get like hits of serotonin. If we touch other people, you get a hug, you you get serotonin. So we're constantly being brought back into this group fold.
00:11:47
Speaker
And we're also really, really concerned with our standing in the group and and not getting censored by the group and having having high status in the group. These are all really kind of the positive, I'm a part of a community side of things.
00:12:00
Speaker
Where the the anti-group, anti-partisan part comes in, and I will admit this is supposition on my part. I can't scientifically verify this. I have to make a a deductive reasoning on it, a deductive reasoning pass on it. But and my my thinking is this.
00:12:17
Speaker
Based on current scientific understanding of the human species, we're about 300,000 years old, and our immediate antecedents are about a million and a half years old. and And when I say that, I mean like Homo erectus, which was ah species very similar to us that walked upright, killed things with sticks, had probably had fire. If you saw them from like 100 yards away, you wouldn't realize they're a different species. They might might have been able to talk. We know.
00:12:40
Speaker
Within the human experience, there's been a moment like our homo sa helpless Homo sapiens species, there's been a moment where there was an intense bottleneck for our species where we nearly went extinct and in our species lifetime.
00:12:53
Speaker
And there was another one ah that happened under Homo ergaster in that that antecedent period that I want to say about 2 million years ago, where we were an endangered species, we the whole human population or Homo population was about the population of of Bixby, Oklahoma for around 80,000 years.
00:13:11
Speaker
So a really, really long time. So my my thinking is this, as... as pro-social as it is to to share with your community and get along and not be violent or combative, which is clearly of an overriding impulse in human beings, I think that there have been multiple demonstrable bottleneck moments in the history of humanity where we probably did get kind of Cormac McCarthy, where there were so few resources available that that the groups that were proactively aggressive would end up outliving the groups that weren't.
00:13:45
Speaker
And so the ones that were passive would die out. The ones that were aggressive would live. And there's a lot of debate about this. There's there's a whole school of thought that the the aggression we see in our species, the war, all that kind of thing is a byproduct of agriculture and property rights, that before we had sedentary agriculture,
00:14:03
Speaker
you know if If my group ran into your group, well, I could just walk away. Who cares? i don't I don't know anything. It's like, that's okay. I think there's some validity to that, that you're probably more defensive if if you have agriculture.
00:14:14
Speaker
But at the same time, if there's limited resources, and there certainly were, and there was scarcity of calories, the group the that goes, oh, they're wandering into our our buffalo grazing area. We got to fight them off with sticks.
00:14:28
Speaker
They're going to get more calories. and And if eventually we do come to blows, we're going to win. So I think that there is a a built-in proactive desire to ward off other tribes from resources, not just to wait for you to attack us, but for us to vigilantly patrol the borders of whatever our tribe is to see if there's any incursions coming in and ward you off. And that's why On an instinctive level, we love competition. It's why people intuitively understand and enjoy organized sports.
00:14:56
Speaker
Like if an alien came down and was like, why are you kicking a dead pig on a field? What is that about? Like what? We blame i don't we just love doing it. Like why why do geese form Vs in the sky? I don't know.
00:15:07
Speaker
We just naturally clump up into two groups and fight each other. It just makes total sense to us. It's because we have this deep instinctive desire to form a group and fight another group.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So just in case someone was thinking that tribalism followed Donald Trump down the escalator in 2016, we can say it's probably been around for considerably longer than that.
00:15:31
Speaker
You mentioned, I think, a really lovely little anecdote, which goes to the foundational importance of tribalism for us, which again is another really interesting counterintuitive anecdote in the book, and that is about the lobstermint.
00:15:46
Speaker
Tell me about the lobstermint. Yeah, this is a a fun and interesting quirk that I stumbled onto in the course of research on here. So I got really interested in accents in writing this book, and What I found really interesting about them is I had previously just sort of assumed that accents were random, that they were just a a kind of drift that occurs.
00:16:06
Speaker
So i'm I'm from Oklahoma, which is basically the Australia of America, by the way. I used to date a gal from Perth and I went and visited Perth and I was like, I totally get this.
00:16:17
Speaker
Perth is just the three plus kangaroos. Like it is like, it was like, it's a big, flat, friendly area, a little bit homophobic, but they'll fix your car. This is where I'm from. So I totally get Australia.
00:16:28
Speaker
And you you and I sound different, even though we probably have very similar migration patterns that our ancestors, ah your your ancestors were kicked out for crime. Mine were probably some kind of sex perverts. i don't know.
00:16:41
Speaker
But it in any event, we both got kicked out of England. Right. um And yet we sound different. Why is that? Well, I always sort of a sound assumed that it was adrift. That's not the case. Accents are an evolutionary feature. They're not random. And what's happening is, again, as near as we can tell using deductive logic, that if we go back to that Pleistene era, pre-agriculture, we're we're wandering around the Serengeti, killing stuff with sticks.
00:17:02
Speaker
it It seems that it was way more beneficial to the average human to rapidly identify whether someone was in their group or not than it was to be able to interact with them. So like today, it's great if I can interact with people. I don't like if if if I go to another country, I want to be able to speak the language or have you know Google Translate so that I can buy stuff and hit on the locals.
00:17:22
Speaker
But but, you know, you go back 200,000 years, if a bunch of dudes come over the hill and they don't see me, I need to be able to hear them and go, oh, no, I don't know their language. They're probably going to murder me. I need to get out of here.
00:17:34
Speaker
So. It seems that accents happen very regularly. Languages become mutually unintelligible to the speakers over about a thousand years. So like if you go back, if we were to go back to England 1000 years ago, that would be about when we would have no idea what they're saying and they wouldn't be able to understand us.
00:17:52
Speaker
And it it happens regularly in all lifetimes. It's why teenagers are saying weird stuff all the time. Like, I'm not going to say sick to describe something as cool, but also my grandfather would find it very weird that I describe something that's great as like a ah ah thermal register. like But there's there's those are happening all the time. There's little bits of argot that are being spit out.
00:18:12
Speaker
So with the lobstermen, one of the things that was really interesting that happened in linguistic anthropology in the 20th century is there is a totally understandable presumption that as the United States and other places in the world are becoming more cosmopolitan, transportation's easier, the automobile exists. This is mid-20th century that I'm talking about. Automobile's been around for a while now.
00:18:33
Speaker
Train's been around for you know hundreds of years now. The radio's been around for for quite some time. you know we're in We're in generation two of radio where we have these very clipped ah announcers giving this standardized transatlantic accent type thing.
00:18:48
Speaker
There's a presumption that all of the accents are going to meld together. And to some extent, that is happening. One linguistic anthropologist goes to Martha's Vendort, which today is where people that use summer as a verb like to go on vacation.
00:19:03
Speaker
So rich people hang out in Massachusetts. I've never been there, but it it is now like, you know, very like, like where, where rich people go. Around like 1940, that transition had not occurred yet. Martha's Vineyard was a sleepy little lobsterman village. It was not really distinguishable from other small fishing hamlets in and New England.
00:19:21
Speaker
So while I'm sure it was quaint, it was very blue collar, very, very working class. And it it starts getting colonized by people from from the cities that like to come out there in the summer. And that puts a lot of pressure on this one fishing village, this one lobster village, because housing prices are starting to go up.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so what this linguistic anthropologist found was that against all of the prevailing wisdom, the accents were actually getting stronger in Martha's vineyard. They weren't declining. They were getting stronger. That the the the the New England accent associated with this particular town was actually exacerbating.
00:19:58
Speaker
And it seems that on an instinctive level, I don't think any of the lobstermen decided to like convene a lobstermen meeting. and go, let's all let's all not say ours so that we can figure out who's visiting from you know Pennsylvania or whatever.
00:20:11
Speaker
It seems that when we're under duress, when we feel that we're stressed, we instinctively we instinctively exacerbate our own tribal accents in order to rapidly identify who is the outsider and who's with us.
00:20:25
Speaker
And I think that that is happening politically as well. I think that we're forming political tribes of conservative and progressive, red team, blue team, all of that stuff. And we have these shibboleths that exists in our tribes that we unconsciously, just like the lobstermen, are using to signal our membership or the outsider very quickly. And I think a lot of a lot of the crosstalk that currently happens in political discourse is just a result of this, is that we're all kind of on edge.
00:20:50
Speaker
We're all kind of pissed off at each other. And I meet Will in a bar and Will says something, something, something social justice. And I'm like, fuck Will. Fuck Will. I know all about fucking Will. All right. What next? The oppressive Olympics, right?
00:21:06
Speaker
Meanwhile, I say like God fearing and patriotic. And Will's like, oh, I know this guy. All right. He's just, you know, give him a little bit of test. get Give him a little bit stuff.
00:21:19
Speaker
whatever makes your muscles grow. Testosterone. Yeah, testosterone. He's next stop Attila the Hun. And a lot of the stuff is is is' like, it it really is meaningless, right? So like me being from Oklahoma, I just sound like a Republican. I'm aware of this. I'm a baritone that doesn't say justice a lot. So everybody thinks of a Republican. and Like it turns out i'm I'm an independent. I have very complex views. There are some things that i'm I'm progressive or liberal about. I'm libertarian about quite a lot of things. There's a couple of things I'm conservative about, but I'm a unique individual guy.
00:21:48
Speaker
But I'm going to be interpreted as as a Republican a lot of the time. And ah so I think we wind up just accidentally pissing each other off a lot. And then if I could ramble a little bit more, Will, there there is a kind of like, in addition to these words, these shibbolets, there's an actual like accent that's happening heuristically or epistemologically where i'm I'm using explicitly the work of Arnold Kling here, of whom I'm a big fan.
00:22:13
Speaker
Arnold Kling posits that ah in the American experience, but I think that this is probably pretty close to the experience in Australia and Britain as well, that there's sort of three political languages that people use to not only communicate with each other and signal tribal membership, but also to like winnow down what the most important thing is in a complex situation.
00:22:34
Speaker
So what he posits is that
00:22:38
Speaker
Progressives understand and communicate the world in terms of oppressor versus victim. little guy stepping on or Big guy stepping on a little guy. one One would assume that if I were to go through The Guardian, The Guardian would have a lot of language that is around the big corporation stepping on the little guy or or the the dominant group ah oppressing the the minority group.
00:23:00
Speaker
My guess is, I don't read The Guardian a lot, but my guess is that that would probably be in there. Conservatives, you you brought up Jonah Goldberg earlier. I think Jonah Goldberg is actually perfect example of this. Conservatives are are thinking about and...
00:23:13
Speaker
describing the world as civilization versus threat to civilization. That could be external, like ah terrorism, immigration, invasion. It could be internal, as in moral atrophy.
00:23:25
Speaker
But kind of the the subtitle to the conservative language is civilization is delicate. It is a garden that is always under threat from pests and drought and everything else. We got to be real careful with civilization.
00:23:39
Speaker
And libertarians, classical liberals tend to have a language of coercive versus voluntary. Did you make the guy do it or not? Like i do funny videos for reason here in the States.
00:23:50
Speaker
And you'll find that like almost all of the stuff is, did the government force somebody to do something? if If the government didn't force them to do it, it doesn't really compute. There's not really like a hook for it as much. And and we could probably add a fourth one, I think, of populist of outsider versus insider, salt of the earth versus establishment, yeah that kind of thing. And I'm sure we could subdivide these further, but a lot of the time, the conversations we get into politically, I'm i'm talking i'm probably talking in the voluntary coercive language. That's where my default's going to be.
00:24:26
Speaker
Whereas progressives are talking in that that ah oppressor versus little guy language. And so we're going to crosstalk a lot. And It's probably good to become fluent in all of these languages, not to trick people, but because you don't want to get siloed. There are times where it's appropriate to to think in terms of oppressor versus victim.
00:24:44
Speaker
Weirdly, with Donald Trump, who you brought up earlier, Democrats became very, in in this sense, in the linguistic sense, they became very conservative. like In 2016, 2017, the language that the Democrats were employing wasn't so much big guy versus little guy, it was Trump is a threat to civilization.
00:25:02
Speaker
And it's actually healthy for us all to do that. But I think that there's all these crosstalk moments where we're setting off fire alarms in each other's heads in terms of tribalism that makes it difficult to communicate and get along.
00:25:14
Speaker
It's interesting you said that the the Democrats took on that language because I've sometimes thought that the Republicans or at least right-leaning or conservative people had an advantage over Democrats in the last 10 years because so many of the institutions have taken on a centre-left or progressive bent, whether that be much of the mainstream media, whether that be the educational establishment, whether that be Hollywood,
00:25:37
Speaker
you are exposed to the way that they talk. You're exposed to the ideas of social justice or you're exposed to the ideas of, for want of a better term, wokeism. Whereas because there isn't the same, i would argue, institutional capture from conservative ideas in those establishments, many people who are progressive just aren't as exposed to that language, to those accents as frequently.
00:26:01
Speaker
So when Trump pulls off a shock victory in 2016, he's or when Brexit happens, or when Trump 2.0 happens, they go, how on ah how um in God's name did this happen? We had no idea.
00:26:13
Speaker
And because they don't have the same access, think they have the same access to the language or the ideas as often as people on the right are exposed as exposed to those ideas. Yeah, I think you're, I totally agree with you on that. One of my friends, I actually brought that exact theory up to one of my friends and he pushed back and I want your thoughts on it. But I agree with you, like in the States,
00:26:31
Speaker
I thought this for a while. I think that the conservatives have like an epistemological advantage in that if you are growing up in Scabies County, Montana, or Longstain, Missouri, or some other delightful place in a red state, you're consuming content from the coasts constantly.
00:26:47
Speaker
like If you're watching daytime television or you're watching films, you were getting you you understand what people in Hollywood think, even if you don't agree with it. And probably you like Tom Hanks. So maybe there's some wiggle room for being able to project. i like people I disagree on. Maybe not. I don't know. But either way, you you're you're getting that content.
00:27:04
Speaker
Whereas I don't think people in the the blue states are are getting that as much. they're they're not People in and New York City are not going to NASCAR rallies. They're they're not going to agricultural meetups or conventions or state fairs or anything like that.
00:27:16
Speaker
That being said, that that is I agree with you on that. My friend brought up in the in the case of the states that Yeah, but like half the people in New York City moved there from a red state, you know, like half the people in L.A. moved there from red states. So, you know, wouldn't that negate that? I'm i'm not sure. I don't know. What what do you think about that?
00:27:34
Speaker
Well, they would then just go into their own smaller bubbles within those those states. So they would probably go into, just like, you know, Austin is this liberal oasis amidst the red state of Texas.
00:27:45
Speaker
They would probably small form their own little versions of the coast that would would then be insulated just on a smaller scale than the whole of America. That would be how I would think about it. could be, and it could be a self-selection thing. So like I'm from, as I said, Oklahoma, which is very much a red state.
00:27:59
Speaker
I now live in Washington. I lived in Austin the last five years. I was in New York City before that. Now I'm in Washington, D.C. So I live exclusively in in blue cities. In my case, I like Oklahoma. I didn't like flee it. I left it for a variety of career reasons, but I like Oklahoma.
00:28:15
Speaker
But ah maybe a lot of other people are not in that camp where they're like, thank God I escaped the hillbillies. And like, so they, once they, once they go there, they they just never think about it again. And they, they kind of castigate the origins as, as rustic or something like that.
00:28:29
Speaker
The comment around Tom Hanks sparked something. So you said, well, look, you'd watch Tom Hanks. He was probably, he's a lefty. We've seen actually his latest Sunday Night Live skit. He's definitely a lefty, but probably many people on the right, at least up until that skit, probably still liked him and liked his movies.
00:28:45
Speaker
It raises that, it's probably even a cliche now, if you are, and let me get this right, If you are on the right and you disagree with someone on the left, you just disagree with them. If you're on the left and you disagree with someone on the right, you fundamentally think that they're a bad person.
00:28:59
Speaker
There is a moral dimension that some people on the left take which is different to some people on the right. And it raises the question, is there a difference in terms of tribalism on different sides of the political spectrum? Or is this just a, is it consistent in terms of how people actually approach it?
00:29:18
Speaker
That is a phenomenal question. And the answer is both, which I realize is contradictory, but I kind of mean it at different layers. So i know I know what you're talking about, and I've felt this. Me being an independent who leans libertarian, my experience the last 15 years of very frequent conversations with people I disagree with is that when I talk to conservatives that I disagree with, which happens pretty regularly, they think I'm naive.
00:29:43
Speaker
conservatives tend to think they kind of want to pat me on the head and go, it's cute that you want to do that, but it's not going to work. I know how the world really is. Like even with like Doge right now, where I'm like, I think they're violating the constitution. Like my conservative friends are like, you know, it'd be great if everybody actually followed the constitution like you seem to, but that's just not how the world works. We need to take what we can get.
00:30:03
Speaker
and I find conservatives tend to talk to me like they're the uncle at the barbecue and I'm this college sophomore that has a lot of pointy headed ideas. So it's a kind of like, pragmatic condescension and a naivete that they ascribe to me.
00:30:16
Speaker
When I talk to progressives, it's much more, and I should say, not all the time, but I'm much more likely to encounter somebody that's like, oh, well, you're a bigot. Or or you know deep deep down, you're either selfish or a bigot. There's no other option for why you would disagree with me.
00:30:31
Speaker
There's a lot more moral condemnation I find when I talk to when I talk to progressives and when I talk to libertarians, when when they disagree with me, it tends to be if you would just look at my goddamn graph, you would understand like this is blindingly obvious, you idiot.
00:30:46
Speaker
Just also become autistic and look at my graph and then you will take my place. and And so it's I should say it's possible that because I code, I sound like a a libertarian or Republican, it's possible that they're just nicer to me because they think I'm a cousin. And that's what's going on, that there's nothing inherently kinder about them. That's that's a distinct possibility.
00:31:07
Speaker
I don't think that's the case. I feel like enough people have this phenomenon where the the progressives oftentimes believe that if you disagree with me, it's because there's some sort of moral lapse on your part.
00:31:20
Speaker
But the the the deeper question is, why is that? So i I'm friends with a guy named Jonathan Rauch. I quote him in the book. He's actually a blurb on the back of the book. Great guy, by the way, Jonathan Rauch. I asked him about that, the same thing we brought up. And and his response was, right.
00:31:36
Speaker
everybody's default state, like every tribe's default state is the other tribes are shitbagged. Like it's like, like that, that is the default state is everybody's default state is you have a moral lapse. The reason that you disagree with me is because there's something fundamentally bad with you.
00:31:49
Speaker
So there's something that's mitigating that with the conservatives when they, when they merely ascribe naivete to you. The reason that I bring this up is I really, really, really hesitate to ascribe like,
00:32:02
Speaker
permanent spiritual facets to conservatism and progressivism, it's really tempting to do that. And I see it all the time where conservatives will hear me say something like that and go, right, because deep down, all progressives are Stalin.
00:32:17
Speaker
Deep down, they're all evil And if you give them a little bit of steroids, they will wipe out Ukraine. Like, and it's, that's not what's happening. The, the, the default state for all of us seems to be the other team is evil and stupid and something's mitigating that. So in our conversation, well, we might've, we might've identified why there is that slight variation. It could be,
00:32:40
Speaker
And this makes sense to me that conservatives are consuming content from the coast. They do see people that they like, that they disagree with. And so on some level, they're they're having to come up with a ah mindset of, i I guess it's possible there are good people that I disagree with. So maybe they're just kind of like, they they don't get it. Right.
00:33:01
Speaker
Whereas if you're a progressive and you're living in New York City, you don't have any friends that you disagree with. And you also don't have any cultural figures on on TV or radio that you're reading that are conservative.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's a lot easier for you to go, oh, well, they they're just evil. I don't know anybody that I disagree with that I like. So I think that that's what's going on. I i don't think that there is. is is As great as it would be if I could weaponize my own political views and say that there's some deep spiritual deficit in every other political philosophy, I don't think that's what's going on. I i think it's more of a heuristic structural thing where the default is we ascribe malice to each other and it's mitigated by some structural factor.
00:33:39
Speaker
Yeah, that that seems really plausible to me. Okay, so I want to move to why we think or what are the underlying reasons for why this tribalism has got worse. But I guess that there is a clarifying question before that is, has it actually got worse?
00:33:57
Speaker
Or is this a recency bias thing and it's actually been bad for a long, long time? And for whatever reason, we're now just noticing it more. I would love for you to wax on this. i'll give you my my perspective in a second, but i i being a navel-gazing American, only i am very concerned with what's happening in the United States. I would love to stress test all of this by you telling me about Australia or the United Kingdom.
00:34:23
Speaker
ah Particularly Australia, because I know the UK pretty well. But Australia, which is, again, like our our cousin that happens to have animals living in pouches, is like the closest like ah American cultural proxy. So I'm really curious as to what your experience is and what you think is going on in Australia, because that could that could stress test my own thesis here.
00:34:41
Speaker
So we we are we are more partisan, tribal, all of that stuff is happening. But the phenomenon that that is occurring is not ideological polarization. And the data is pretty good on that.
00:34:52
Speaker
I know that sounds crazy, but again, the data is good on it. what's What's happening is we're actually way better sorted in the American context. So if you go back to like, not even that far, when when I worked on Capitol Hill, this is like 15 years ago, I was at the time a conservative Democrat.
00:35:08
Speaker
I was a blue dog Democrat. So I was in the Democratic Party, but I was a fiscal conservative. And ah there were a bunch of us. There were like 20 members of 20 to 40 members of Congress that would have identified as conservative Democrats.
00:35:21
Speaker
And if you were to go back when my dad was working on the Hill, 30 years before that, you would have found a decent amount of Republicans that would have told you that they're liberals, that they're liberal Republicans, and they're they're Republican, but they're pro-gay, or they're a Republican, but they're they're not big on guns or something like that.
00:35:39
Speaker
When we go through the data in the United States and we we we pull people not on how do you identify Republican, Democrat, conservative, progressive, just how do you feel about free speech, guns, same-sex marriage, multiracial marriage, stuff like that?
00:35:54
Speaker
The distribution is not any any wider than it has been since the 70s. In fact, it's converged quite a lot because you go back to 1960, half of America thought it was immoral and should be illegal to have mixed race marriage. And like now if you ask an American, that will punch you in the face. It's like 99%, of course, that's fine.
00:36:12
Speaker
Even same-sex marriage, like that's really converged in the last 20 years to where most conservatives are either like, yeah, that's great, or you know what? Not a big deal anymore. I'm just not going to fight on that one. So the the what we think is not actually polarized.
00:36:26
Speaker
What's happened, though, is folks like me who were a conservative Democrat have left. We're no longer in the Democratic Party. the The liberal Republicans have left the Republican Party.
00:36:38
Speaker
This is part of why there's such a massive amount of independence. There's a lot of people for whom the Republican and Democratic parties are either either they are too impure and too.
00:36:49
Speaker
sell out or they are way too extreme. And like, I'm a Democrat, but I like guns and everybody's mean to me. So I'm leaving or I'm a Republican and I like gays and everybody seems kind of weird about that. So or I'm pro-choice and the Republicans are free. I'm leaving the Republican party, whatever.
00:37:05
Speaker
The result is that if you were conservative, you're a Republican. If you were progressive, you're a Democrat. And if you're anything else, you're an independent and your vote doesn't count as much. And so the result is you have a conservative party and a democratic party, which are more extreme.
00:37:20
Speaker
The actual, the the coalitions themselves have become extreme, even though the aggregate individuals have not, if that makes sense. The constellations have shifted while the data points have not. Now, what has changed is effective polarization.
00:37:34
Speaker
Ideological polarization is what we think. Will loves guns. I hate guns. Effective polarization is, i hate Will. That's it. I just, I hate Will. I hate the other team. I'm on blue team, Will's on red team, and I just hate him.
00:37:48
Speaker
That has gone up. The data's real good on that. So where we are in the States right now is the the, I don't like the other party is as high as it's been based on what we can tell since the Civil War.
00:38:02
Speaker
Even in the 60s, when it was really politically fraught time, i mean, there were a lot of political assassinations going on. I think i think we could argue it was actually worse politically in the 60s, given that a lot of people were dying. when you pulled Americans of like, what do you think about the other party?
00:38:16
Speaker
There was a lot less rancor because the other party didn't really mean anything. Like if, if you said like like Democrats, like, well, you're talking about like a Massachusetts union guy or a Stanford hippie or like an Alabama bigoted Jim Crow Democrat. Cause the term is meaningless yeah Republican. Are you talking about a moderate like George Romney? Are you talking about a libertarian like Barry Goldwater?
00:38:38
Speaker
Are you talking about cuck? like Nelson Rockefeller in New York City. And so in terms of like just hating the other party, that's really, really increased. And so I'm i'm very curious.
00:38:49
Speaker
It seems to me, Will, when I go to the UK, that that phenomenon has also occurred in the UK, that the The Overton window of what the government ought to do is much smaller in the UK. From an American perspective, everybody in the UK is a Democrat.
00:39:04
Speaker
like it's like it's just It's just like, are you a centrist Obama Democrat, a Tory, or are you a like Bernie Sanders, we should fucking distribute resources through interpretive dance level Democrat? Yeah.
00:39:18
Speaker
But like you're all Democrats from the American perspective. And yet, when I go to the United Kingdom, like I see the exact same thing. like I spent a lot of time in Scotland. They hate Tories in Scotland.
00:39:28
Speaker
They hate them. One of my friends defriended me. I'm not making this up. When Margaret Thatcher died, I put a joke on Facebook and I went, RIP Margaret Thatcher privatizing the pearly gates.
00:39:42
Speaker
And my friend defriended me for indicating I thought she might not be in hell. That was how much she hated Margaret Thatcher. So I think I will say it's really difficult for me to, I did look into this from a data perspective, but none of the polling language is the same. So I can't make these comparisons. Like i there's no one-to-one ratio that I can do.
00:40:02
Speaker
And it would, it would be, statistically irresponsible of me to cobble together various polls that don't have the same terms. So there's there's no standardized thing. i can't actually I can't actually figure out what the effect of polarization is in other countries. But in terms of vibes, seems to me that this phenomenon is occurring in the United Kingdom.
00:40:20
Speaker
And I don't know about Australia. The phenomena, I think, is the same in the United Kingdom, and I think it is the same in Australia. I think it is the same because the underlying reason that you've identified for why this may be happening is also applies to those countries.
00:40:33
Speaker
But I'll keep that powder dry for one second and leave the audience in suspense. The interesting thing is I think it manifests in slightly different ways because the political systems are different. So in the US, you have all of your conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans have sorted into the independent bucket, and then they just don't really matter anymore.
00:40:52
Speaker
or alternatively, they moved to the other party. In Australia or the UK, there have been these third parties, fourth parties, fifth parties, minor parties that have been growing because the political systems enable that. So now, for example, because you've had the Reform Party in the UK, which is now leading in the polls above and beyond the two major parties.
00:41:10
Speaker
Really? be cool oh Is it Nigel Farage's outfit? It's leading in most of the parties. leading most of the parties. really. Above the conservatives, which would be the equivalent of a third party in the United States entering and within the space of 10 years or even less, in the space of five years, overtaking the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of popularity.
00:41:30
Speaker
That's just never going to happen in America because of the nature of the system. Similarly, in Australia, you're seeing minor parties that are also growing in popularity and taking votes away from from the two major parties.
00:41:41
Speaker
So the phenomena is the same, but the the way that it it it shows up in electoral calculus is is different and basically those people who feel left out from the two major parties have more avenues to be able to to enter the political realm.
00:42:00
Speaker
And that I think is another interesting paradox, particularly in the UK and Australia, is that tribalism is going up at the same time as loyalty to particular parties has never been lower.
00:42:14
Speaker
So political party membership has just continued to decrease and decrease going from the 1950s onwards. We've never been less loyal to an individual party before, but this is happening at the same time as tribalism has increased. Why do you think that is the case?
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah, I and it's i agree. it is It is a weird thing. It's like, why is it that people hate political parties or have less respect for political parties and at the same time are becoming incredibly partisan about the other parties. It's a really weird thing.
00:42:43
Speaker
I think there's my observation and and the underlying cause of what I think is occurring on it. I think the time period we're living in, Will, is very similar to right before World War I. And I don't mean that in the sense that we're going to go fight the Germans. I think we've got at least another 50 years before we have to fight the Germans.
00:42:59
Speaker
I think it's a... i'm I'm joking for anybody at home. i don't I don't mean that we are about to have a war. That's not what I mean by pre-World War I. What I mean is that I think we're living in a time of the old institutions are...
00:43:15
Speaker
collapsing their kind of zombie institutions. Like you go back to World War I, right before World War I, like Russia has a divine right czar. The like half of Europe is run by the Habsburg dynasty.
00:43:29
Speaker
The United Kingdom, I think the House of Lords still has a lot of clout. you've You've got all of these institutions that nobody actually believes in anymore that are still running the game. And i I kind of feel that's what we're living in right now, where like the republican Republican and Democratic Party are massively, massively important and powerful entities, and nobody likes them. like All polling data is like, no, i don't like I reluctantly vote Republican or I reluctantly vote Democrat.
00:43:54
Speaker
For whatever reason, I don't like them. that's there's There's a significant amount of people, probably 80% of independents are independent in name only in the United States where they will reliably vote Democrat or Republican.
00:44:06
Speaker
Maybe every once in a while they'll split. They're going to fall back to the the home team on election day. But it's very telling that they will vote that way every time, but they're still going to register independent because they just don't like the political party so much that they don't want to be in a club with it.
00:44:22
Speaker
That's very telling to me. You look at other institutions, like every institution in the United States, except for maybe the Pentagon, has just collapsed in terms of public approval, legacy media, academia, Congress, the presidency, government. They've all kind of just collapsed, right?
00:44:41
Speaker
And it's interesting, what is precipitating all of that? My theory is that that what's precipitating all of this is technology. and And the reason that I come to that conclusion, there's lots of different, theres there's a whole cottage industry of why are we more partisan? Why is social trust going down? All that kind of thing. And some of the explanations are, well, it's because of inequality. In the United States, we have lots of inequality compared to compared to Europe.
00:45:06
Speaker
And if you just enact my my policy agenda and pulp all of the billionaires and and put Elon Musk in one of those tanks from the matrix to suck the stuff out of his body, then then it'll fix all of the stuff.
00:45:19
Speaker
And I look at that and i'm like, i don't think that's the case because this seems to be a phenomenon occurring in Europe and in Britain and in all these countries that have that. So we can kind of stress test that and go, no, that's not the case. It's it's falsifiable.
00:45:30
Speaker
There's there's there's lots of different lots of different explanations that come up with electoral reform. I mean, I'm big on electoral reform in the States. I would love to have more third parties. I'd love to have ranked choice voting. I'd love for us to look more Australian in that capacity.
00:45:42
Speaker
And at the same time, though, the fact that you guys are going through this, that Britain's going through this, maybe that's a mitigating factor in my country, but it it does seem to be not the main factor. Otherwise, it would just be us if that were the case.
00:45:54
Speaker
So... you One that I would add, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the one which I actually think is an interesting one, and I don't know if you've considered it, and it would never happen in America because it's just anathema to the American psyche, non-compulsory voting, of which Australia is one of the few countries that has noncomp ah sorry compulsory voting, ah and yeah and Australia is one of the few countries that has compulsory voting.
00:46:17
Speaker
actually guards against part tribalism on the part of political parties because they're forced to appeal more to the centre and to the people that don't really care about politics but have to turn up to the voting booth as opposed to party loyalists who are more engaged and the goal is more to get out your fans as opposed to get out the middle who would just have to turn up but otherwise don't care.
00:46:40
Speaker
That would be the one that that comes to mind for me terms of electoral politics. I'm told that Australians tend to have more moderate politics as a result of that. Because you're right, like the the people that show up to the the part ah the the primaries in the United States, is i want to say it's about 10% of voters. It's very small.
00:46:57
Speaker
They tend to be the really, really motivated voters, which means that they tend to be, if I'm a Democrat, I'm much more progressive than the average Democrat, let alone the average American. And if I'm a Republican, I'm much more conservative than the average Republican.
00:47:09
Speaker
So we've we've ended up facilitating through our electoral system a situation where we're artificially exacerbating how partisan and conservative or partisan and progressive our elected options are.
00:47:22
Speaker
So from my perspective as an independent, I am constantly having to choose between King Joffrey or Ramsey Bolton. Those are my options. And I always... I would either, I'm me being kind of libertarian leaning. I prefer to be a wild thing, but if not, I'd like to have a moderate and like Tyrion Lannister. I'd like, I'd like somebody kind of in the middle that can adjudicate these things.
00:47:40
Speaker
So that that's entirely possible. I, you know, I think I, I was very hostile to that. Well, when, when I first heard the i idea I've softened on it, I was hostile for two reasons. One, having worked for Congress and having been literally screamed at by thousands of constituents and I don't really relish the idea of going, Hey, if you don't know what you're talking about and you don't care, you still have to vote. Like that bit scares me a little bit. I am elitist in that sense.
00:48:07
Speaker
But where, oh, and then the other bit was the American psyche bit was like, don't make me do that thing. But an Australian friend of mine, he he kind of ripped the rug out from under it where he's like, well, do you think jury duty's anti-American?
00:48:18
Speaker
And I was like, no, I think jury duty's fine. And he's like, well, this is just jury duty on an electoral level. you're You're just like the exact same thing. It's sortition for electoral politics. And like, furthermore, in Australia, you're required to fill out the ballot. You're not actually required to vote.
00:48:31
Speaker
You could just give an empty ballot. So like, if you truly have an ideological problem with this, you all you have to do is participate at the polls. And I was like, okay, yeah, like at least ideologically, I've capitulated there where I'm like, I don't have a hostility to it on those grounds. If we were going to do it, I would say I'd only want to do it in the States if you paired it with other electoral reforms.
00:48:50
Speaker
I'd want to have open primaries and rank choice voting. Otherwise, I think we would very likely accidentally like hyperdrive demagoguery. Whereas if you had rank choice voting in the States, you'd actually have to convince voters to vote for me as opposed to how it is now, first past the polls of, listen, i know i know you think I'm an evil shitbag, but can we and all agree I'm not as bad as that guy?
00:49:12
Speaker
Which is how American politics works. It's like, listen, don't vote for me, vote against her. Whereas if you got rank choice voting, you actually have to come up with why you should vote for me. The argument, or one of the arguments against your first rationale for being against it, which is effectively, I don't want morons voting for on important political issues, is having compulsory voting acts as a way to inform the population.
00:49:37
Speaker
So you find that if you are forced to vote, there are more people who will at least develop a baseline understanding of what they're voting for, as opposed to if they don't have to vote. You still have idiots, but the idea is you have the the compulsory voting system, there are less idiots because they know they have to vote.
00:49:54
Speaker
I follow your logic. I got to say, I'm real worried about that gamble because i'm i'm I could see somebody like, like here's here's how Americans think. and that They're not, listen, they're not going to tell you this, Will, but I'm going to be straight with you. going be honest with you. So like, all right, polling wise, when you ask Americans, what kind of coffee do you like?
00:50:11
Speaker
Americans go, I like strong, robust black coffee. Then, We'll give Americans various coffees to try. Turns out, Will, we love weak, sweet coffee, but we like to think of ourselves like John Wayne.
00:50:27
Speaker
So there's a mismatch between what we want and what we want to want. I, being honest, will tell you, Will, I like weak drip gas station coffee. I like low quality, cheap coffee that I get from coffee ah from Costco or a gas station, but I'm aberrant. Most Americans are like, no, robust black coffee.
00:50:44
Speaker
So in the same way, having worked in in Congress before, Americans want to cut the government. We want a small government But we don't want that to involve cutting our shit.
00:50:58
Speaker
And also, we want more stuff, but we don't want to pay for it. So like if you can figure out how to word a thing, we're like, do you want more Social Security? Yeah. you want lower taxes? Yeah. So like if I'm a candidate and I'm just like, I'm for lower taxes and more Social Security benefits, most Americans are like, fuck, yeah, that sounds great. I'd love to have more Social Security and I should pay lower taxes.
00:51:16
Speaker
It was like, right. God damn it, guys. Ah, like I can't, I can't explain math on a, on a ballot. So again, I would be, I would be open to that. In fact, I, I would, I would, I would totally make that deal with you if it included ranked choice voting and open primaries. Ranked choice voting, I think probably people are familiar with. I know that there are variations of that that have been floated in the UK.
00:51:38
Speaker
ah we're We're basically, instead of just voting for one candidate, you rank them in order. So if if I, if I rank Tyrion Lannister as number one, and there's no way he's going to get that because he's in the Lib Dems.
00:51:49
Speaker
And I, I marked down Ramsey Bolton number two as, as the Tory, like, okay. So like, at least I can get him in there. Right. But, but i'm I'm not going to throw away my vote. I can't spoil it. That's how ranked choice voting works.
00:52:00
Speaker
That is the system in Australia. Oh, really? Great. Okay. We would call it preferential voting, but, but that's, that's the system. Yeah. i I think that that's a really, really smart way to do that because the, the, the system that we've got and in the UK, they've got, you, you get these very odd, odd artificial constructs where no, like a ah very, very few people actually like the person that they're voting for. Like you get this weird kind of like bizarrely anti-democratic artifact that comes out.
00:52:26
Speaker
The other one that I would do is open primary. So I have no idea how this works in Australia. Yeah. and you don't really have primaries in the United Kingdom. I know that they they started kind of doing that with the Tories, like within the party, but that you don't you don't historically have primaries at all with political parties in the UK. The local party just goes, well, John's a good salt.
00:52:44
Speaker
He's put in this time his Nominate him for Shrewsbury. we We don't do that in the States. We have we have primaries, right? but But the way it works, as you note, is that the party faithful will come out and vote and and they want to vote for the most conservative and most progressive guy.
00:52:59
Speaker
you You should be able to vote for whoever you want for. I don't want to change that. But what we've done in the United States is we've we've empowered political parties to be quasi-governmental gatekeepers. We use the Republican and Democratic parties as the...
00:53:13
Speaker
the introductory and gatekeeper functions of the ballot. yeah And that has all sorts of problems. So I would want to move to a caucus or something like that, open primaries. That is to say that like what I would do is just go, if you're running for governor of Oklahoma, you got to get 10,000 signatures that say that they want you to be on the ballot. And if you do that, you're on the ballot. Congratulations.
00:53:35
Speaker
we could We could fiddle with this. You can increase the number. you know you You could say it's that the top five people in in number of signatures they get. How about that? The top five people in terms of number of signatures, they're all on the ballot, and then you're just goingnna you're going to order them.
00:53:49
Speaker
The Republican Party, by the way, can totally endorse whoever it wants. You can have a primary in the Republicans, and they can pick whoever they want, but they don't get to restrict who shows up on the ballot ah in the same way that the teachers union can totally endorse, nominate whoever they want.
00:54:03
Speaker
and And if their guy's not on the ballot, then apparently the electorate doesn't want them to begin with. So i would if if we would if we would make those functional differences, I would i would bring in the obligatory voting at that point.
00:54:14
Speaker
So they're the the political reforms that may help. But I guess there's also a broader conversation around wider society and how do we engage with each other in a more healthy way?
00:54:27
Speaker
and know you've spoken to Peter Boghossian a few times. He's done a lot of work around how do you argue more effectively? How do you argue better? What are some principles or some ideas for how we reduce tribalism aside from the political reforms, but more around how we interact with each other as people?
00:54:45
Speaker
Right, right. Great. So we've already kind of talked about the macro stuff, at least what we could do in my country. I do think it would help somewhat. I don't think it's the the main factor. Again, I think it's technology. I think it's social media and TV, basically, that have kicked all of this into effect.
00:55:01
Speaker
I would do electroform on the interpersonal level, which is really the only thing that you and I can truly control. I'd say the main thing is being aware of it in yourself. To get stoic for a moment, I can't control you. i can't I can't make you do anything.
00:55:15
Speaker
All I can do is control my own actions, control my own speech, and to to some extent, try to be aware of my own thinking. And so on on our end, what we can do I think being aware of tribalism operating in us is important.
00:55:31
Speaker
I do not think by the way that I have purged myself of tribalism like a Vulcan in the Kalanar ritual. it is It is within me as it is within everybody. It doesn't go away. While we can't inoculate ourselves to it, we can become aware of it.
00:55:45
Speaker
And there are lots of cognitive blind spots that are worth being aware of. One that I'll just mention briefly because I was talking to a friend about it yesterday is very basic in-group, out-group bias. And this is kind of 101 psychology is my group is always going to appear to me to be ragtag, polyglot, miscellaneous, and holding itself together by the skin of its teeth.
00:56:09
Speaker
the out group is always going to appear to me to be a lot more monolithic and probably a lot more competent and cruel. So there's this, and it it makes sense just like, I know everybody in my group, so I know how unique everybody is. So whatever, in my political party, if I'm a Tory, i can go, well, there's wet Tories and there's dry Tories and there's there's these sort of and unreconstituted Thatcherites, but now there's this sort of like populist element And there's this kind of European blood and soil conservative that has very little to do with Edmund Burke.
00:56:41
Speaker
And I can go through and I can note all the different types of things, but I'm not going to know if I'm a Tory, I'm not going to have that same level of granular awareness of the labor movement of like, well, there's red labor and then there's there's Tony Blair and I'm done. That's it. I know there's Tony Blair and I know there's red labor and I'm kind of...
00:56:58
Speaker
But I'm confident that if if I were having this conversation with a bunch of labor people, they would be able to tell me all of the weird divisions in the labor movement. And they would look at the Tories and go, yeah, there's, well, there's Boris Johnson in their stature. That's pretty much it. And they would look at the Tories. And I promise you, because this what everybody thinks about the other political party, they would go, the problem is this.
00:57:20
Speaker
We're always infighting. us in the labor movement or us in the Tory party or the Republicans or the Democrats, we're always fighting each other and they all get with the program. They all lock arms and they get with the program.
00:57:32
Speaker
Everybody thinks that. Everybody thinks that. So there are things like that that i would that are in my book that I would advise people to be aware of just so you're not blundering into a cognitive trick.
00:57:46
Speaker
The other thing i would I would strongly advise people to do is, when possible, try to remove your ego from the equation. This is something that I get into trouble with. i i i bloviate for a living.
00:57:56
Speaker
So a lot of my livelihood and sense of self-esteem is bound up in my opinions, and it doesn't help me. For one thing, most of my opinions are not actually my opinions. They're opinions that I stole from Matt Ridley or some other guy.
00:58:09
Speaker
right It's it's so somebody that I read and I was like, that's that's fucking smart. I'm going to take that. and now i've i've you know but Jonathan Haidt is now me and I've brought that into my mind. So the the problem that is that that i we're we're discussing ideas and it becomes a proxy fight for whether or not I'm an idiot, which is not helpful to anybody. So like one of my friends I mentioned in my book, Brian Brushwood is masterful at this.
00:58:31
Speaker
If Brian Brushwood is arguing with somebody about a given topic, Rather than saying, I think X, which he does, he will say like, that's really interesting that you have that position. You know, I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley.
00:58:45
Speaker
And what he would say is insert thing that Brian thinks. Right. But he sort of like created this middle ground where you can now attack this idea. And by attacking this idea, you're not attacking me, Brian.
00:58:57
Speaker
I think that that's really helpful. And I would say like being able to, and this is something that I've straight up got from Peter Boghossian, who I mentioned in the book, i would I would flip that as well. So like I make a conscious effort when I'm talking to people that I disagree with to, I i won't lie to them, but that's manipulative, but fortunately I do think most people are pretty decent.
00:59:16
Speaker
When I'm arguing with somebody, I will try to slip in. I can tell it's important to me that you want to help people, or excuse me, I can tell it's important to you that you want to help people, or I can tell it's important to you that you're a good person. And what I'm communicating is, hey, this thing that we're arguing about is not a referendum on whether you're evil or not. I actually think you're a good person.
00:59:35
Speaker
And I think that, and this is true, by the way, I think that you and I are probably fighting about a methodology to achieve a thing we both want. Neither of us wants poor people to languish in the street. Neither of us wants people to be afraid.
00:59:47
Speaker
Neither of us wants people to have restricted rights. like We both probably want robust opportunity and health and freedom and security for all people involved. What we're arguing about is how to get there. We're we're arguing about the how, not the what, and that's fine.
01:00:01
Speaker
And so I want you to know, and I'm communicating that through that phrase. I can tell it's important to you to help people. I'm letting you know that this is not a referendum on whether I think you're bad or not. I already think you're good. So don't worry about that. We're just talking about the idea.
01:00:13
Speaker
One of the other things that's really subtle that kind of goes back to that shibboleth political accent thing that I that i took from Peter is... Trying to avoid saying you and start saying we when you're engaging in an argument.
01:00:26
Speaker
So, for example, let's say we're talking about Brexit and you are pro-Brexit and I am pro-Remain. And, uh, or, you know, how about, how about what we'll do?
01:00:37
Speaker
Cause I know Scotland really well. We're talking, you're, you're Scottish and you want to leave the UK and I'm Scottish and I want to, I want to stay in the UK. I'm tempted in this scenario to go, well, what do you do about the fact that we have like 200,000 net taxpayers and England subsidizes our whole socialist state?
01:00:54
Speaker
like how How are you going to get around that, pal? That sounds rather condescending and fighting. what What works better is I go, okay, first of all, that's interesting. Great phrase to use. If you can if you could adopt the phrase, that's interesting, instead of I disagree, that will get you a lot of lubrication socially.
01:01:10
Speaker
So that's interesting, Will. What do we do about the fact that we don't have that many net taxpayers? Like in England plays a lot of our a lot of our bills for us. What do we do about that?
01:01:21
Speaker
Because when i when I say, what do we do? I am implying that you and I are on the same team approaching this problem together. Whereas when I say you, it's like I'm pointing a finger at you. and and demanding that that you stick up for your dumb ass position. And then people react accordingly. So there's lots of, there's so a surprisingly large amount of tiny things that I think can lubricate your your social life when it comes to politics. And I'm happy to report I am much better at this than I was 10 years ago.
01:01:51
Speaker
Like 10 years ago, right before I started working on this book, I was like you know dropping friends on Facebook. I was blundering into arguments all the time. And I still get irritated as hell on a regular basis. But it's a lot rarer for me now to have truly apocalyptic social interactions ah in politics.
01:02:09
Speaker
One, i don't i don't I try not to argue online very much. I think it's a waste of time. But in terms of my my interpersonal relationships, I'm a lot better at being able to just talk to people about like why like what is motivating you here? What's what's the issue here? and And being able to communicate where I'm coming from. And by the end, like maybe we don't agree, but we kind of understand where we're coming from better. I think that that is an achievable goal.
01:02:30
Speaker
Well, that's interesting in the genuinely interesting sense, not in the I disagree with you sense, as is the book, Andrew. It really is a wonderful book. and And in addition to actually being a book for our times and being exceptionally well-researched and thought-provoking, it's very funny and very, very easy to read.
01:02:49
Speaker
I highly recommend everyone goes out and gets it. Thank you very much for carr for for writing it, and thank you for coming on the show today. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Will.