 |
| Migrant mother, California. Dorothea Lange/FSA, 1936. |
I've been living with this picture for a very long time. A lot of people have. It is one of the most famous pictures to come out of the Farm Security Administration's photo project during the 1930's. Florence Thompson, the subject of this portrait, was born in the old Indian Territory of Oklahoma to Cherokee parents in 1903. She survived the Great Depression and died in 1983.
The image is famous because the face says it all: What comes next?
I can't believe it, but we're actually facing another one of those times. And, frankly, things don't look very good.
Recently my son suggested I read a book by one of his college chums, Lilliana Mason, who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. And so I read the book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and I almost wish I hadn't. (Earlier this year she also published an op-ed in the New York Times. To see it, click here.) The book analyzes the stovepipes that we Americans have frozen ourselves into, and answers some questions that I have had for some time. The answers are not encouraging.
But first some background.
What's Been Going On
For several decades now, many smart people have been wondering about the Republican base. Their leadership kept pulling the old bait-and-switch trick on them - offer one thing, then deliver another. And in the next election, the same people would go to the polls and vote again for the Republicans.
Under Trump, the ground has shifted somewhat, but the basic dynamic remains the same. A very small group of people at the top are trying to turn their base, and the whole country, into a herd of peons, ruled by a small and increasingly closed elite.
The idea of a middle-class society, the idea of social mobility, the idea of a career open to talent - all these are to be replaced by an economic, political, and social profile similar to that of medieval France or a modern banana republic.
So why does the Republican base keep voting for this program? Why the visceral hatred for Obamacare, even as they sign up in droves? Why do they vote so enthusiastically against their own self-interest? Why do they vote for their own degradation?
The Answer
According to Mason, the basic answer is very simple. And I must say she has convinced me. Mason suggests that many, many people in America see life as a football game. The main goal, and really the only goal, is to win. People want their team to win.
Mason starts her story back in the time after World War II, when researchers performed a number of experiments that had disturbing results.
Robbers Cave
Flashback to the summer of 1954 and the Robbers Cave State Park in Latimer County, Oklahoma. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif is holding a special summer camp for 22 fifth-graders. All are from Oklahoma City, but none of them know any of the others. All are white, protestant, middle-class boys, and beyond that they have been screened to be psychologically as close to identical as possible.
Sherif and his coworkers divide the boys into two teams of equal size, and, for the first week of the three-week camp session, they are kept apart. In fact, they don't even know of the other team's existence.
In the second week the two teams, called the Eagles and the Rattlers, are brought together for a baseball game, and the trash talk starts immediately. Things go downhill from there, with raids on the other team's cabin. Fist fights start to break out, and boys start to collect good throwing rocks.
As Mason puts it, "By the end of the second week, twenty-two highly similar boys who had met only two weeks before had formed two nearly warring tribes, with only the gentle nudge of isolation and competition to encourage them." (Mason, page 2.)
In the final days of camp, the researchers tried to reverse this process with a number of what we would now call team-building exercises - in this case, trying to get two teams to act as one. Among other things, the researchers shut off the water supply to the camp, and all the children had to work together to figure out what was wrong and restore the water supply. "After these exercises, the boys remained partial to their own teams, but they did agree to ride home in the same bus at the end of camp. Prior to the exercises, both teams had refused to share a bus with the others." (Mason, p. 134.)
Lord of the Flies
If you're thinking that the Robbers Cave experiment sounds a lot like a scientific version of Lord of the Flies, you are not alone. However, it seems unlikely that there was any cross-influence. Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, the same year the Robbers Cave experiment took place. They are contemporary, and both clearly living in the shadow of World War II, but I'm prepared to think they came to similar places by different paths.
Ingroups and Outgroups
"Humans are hardwired to cling to social groups," as Mason puts it (p. 9). In the 1960s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel decided to test this concept. In one experiment, he made up two notional groups; the experimental subject was assigned to one of the groups. However, there was no conflict between groups, no difference in values. And there were no actual people in the groups. Except for the subject, who had been assigned to one of the nonexistent groups. How non-confrontational can you get?
The subject was then given a choice on how to allocate money between the two groups. Either both groups could receive the maximum amount, or the subject's group (the ingroup) could receive less than the maximum and the other group (the outgroup) would receive even less than the ingroup. Again and again, in many variations of this experiment, the subject chose the second alternative. Winning was more important than prosperity.
Civilization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
One of the purposes of civilization is to tame some of these instincts. This of course involves the leaders of a society actually being interested in preserving civilization.
It's easy enough to point out flaws in the demagogue's world. For starters, life is not like a football game. Football is a zero-sum game, with one winner and one loser. +1 -1 = 0. Civilized life is largely composed of non-zero-sum games. +1 +1 = 2.
Here's an example. I have no idea how to change the oil in my car. I take it to my dealership, which employs a small army of mechanics. One of them changes the oil. I pay the cashier. So my car has fresh oil, and the dealership has a little more money than it did before I showed up. You don't exactly have the drama of a Superbowl, but I prefer it when oil changes are not exciting.
The Last 30 Years
Unfortunately, over the last 30 years or so, the idea of looking for win-wins, as they are sometimes called, has been displaced in our political life by the search for conflict. And we have found it.
Mason chronicles this process with about 100 pages of impressive original research. Her statistical analysis of data primarily from the American National Election Studies, which have been analyzing presidential elections since 1948, confirms our rising ire and progressive retreat into tribal groups.
Sorting
At the base of this process is a phenomenon that Mason calls sorting. She notes that we all have a variety of identities. Membership in a political party is only one of these identities. Race and ethnicity, sex, religion, favorite sports, smoker/non-smoker, pre-existing medical condition - it's a very long list.
What happens when all of the people in a group share most or all of their identities? It's not pretty.
As Mason puts it (p. 19), "Imagine how much more intense the Robbers Cave conflict would have been had the Rattlers all been Catholic, northern, and white, while the Eagles were Protestants, southern, and black."
This intensity, based on the sorting of identities between the two groups, reinforces the focus on winning. Fast-forward to American politics today: "All of the political arguments over taxes, welfare, abortion, compassion, responsibility, and the ACA are built on a base of automatic and primal feelings that compel partisans to believe that their group is right, regardless of the content of the discussion." (P. 50.)
Winning becomes everything; the issues themselves become relatively trivial.
Misleading Polls
Naturally, in such an environment, polling on particular issues can become quite misleading. Take the legislative fiasco that occurred in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings. It looked for a while like some meaningful gun control reforms would get through the Congress. One poll showed "83 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans personally supported a law expanding background checks." (P. 54.) And then - nothing happened.
Writes Mason (also p. 54), "when it came to the moment of public partisan competition, party victory trumped preferred policy for many Republicans. Party affiliation today means that a partisan cares a great deal about one party being the winner. Policy results come second."
What Comes Next?
As I noted at the outset, Mason is not sanguine about finding a way out of this mess. Neither am I.
Those who follow demographic trends - or just walk down a street in a city like Philadelphia - can easily see that it's not a white Christian country. Frankly it never was. Florence Thompson, pictured at the top of this story, was not Scotch-Irish. She was Cherokee.
But that doesn't mean that we will not be ruled by a closed oligarchy of white Christian men.
The idea that the country's wealthy business interests will desert the Republicans and possibly (aping Ross Perot) try to start a third party is, to my mind, unrealistic. The business interests in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adapted pretty readily to Hitler and Mussolini (at least in the beginning), and the same already seems to be happening here.
I did come up with two glimmers of hope. I traded a number of very cordial emails with Professor Mason, and I asked her about these potential rays of light.
First, the Democrats ran hard on healthcare in the midterm elections, and it seems the issue contributed to their success. I asked Professor Mason whether she thought this might be a sign of returning civilization, or whether it was simply a matter of the Dems using healthcare (an extremely emotional issue) to mobilize their base.
Her response: "My most recent thoughts are actually pointing toward policy-based campaigning working better for Dems than Reps. Because the average policy attitudes of the American electorate are liberal (but a majority call themselves conservative), policy-based appeals should work well for Dems. The GOP, on the other hand, is incentivized to fall back onto identity-based appeals because their policies are less popular."
Here's my other possible point of light. I think the great move to the suburbs after World War II was a disaster on many levels, not least because it tended to isolate people from others who weren't just like them. (Mason talks a bit about the suburbs on pages 41-42.) Now, however, many people are moving back to the city and even rubbing elbows with people (gasp) who aren't just like them. And, as the recent election showed, even the suburbs around Philadelphia are changing.
Professor Mason threw some cold water on this one: "Re-urbanization might be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does generate more community-oriented influences. On the other hand, it further centralizes Democratic voters in smaller and more dense geographical areas. This makes the 'natural' GOP advantage in the Senate and electoral college even bigger."
Is there anything out there that can be big enough, and come soon enough, to head off our move to a two-class society, with a very small elite at the top, a large group of powerless poor people at the bottom, and no middle class in the middle? I don't know.
Just before the recent election, Mason gave a very interesting interview to WNYC. To listen to it, click here.
See also Fascism, Life on the Farm, Mr. Piketty's Book, Rugged Individualism From Daniel Boone to Barack Obama, Unsustainable Income Inequality.
No comments:
Post a Comment