EZRA KLEIN AND MINDFULNESS
Over the last week I have read Ezra Klein’s Why Are We So Polarized? It is his attempt to understand why in the last three elections, in spite of all the momentous events that have happened the votes in very demographics have remained almost the same. Trump won narrowly, Biden won narrowly, Trump won narrowly. It is almost as if the huge events like the storming of the capitol or a near assassination or accusations of lawlessness hadn’t happened. Once people committed to one tribe or the other, MAGA or the Democrats, nothing could persuade them to change. He lists all the reasons that I have already been coming up with for myself. A major reason that I have felt for the red/blue divide is that what I feel are the traditional American values— white supremacy, male domination, religious fundamentalism, distrust of immigrating foreigners, no deviation from heterosexuality, feelings of patriotism and American exceptionalism, freedom from government interference—are MAGA values and identity that are being threatened. The shift from these traditional American values are changing fastest in the cities and more slowly in rural areas threatening rural voters who are holding fast to them. The way I personally make sense of this is that I feel that the world has changed enormously through technology, almost dizzyingly, during my lifetime and my parents which stretches all the way back to the arrival of electricity and the automobile and all forms of communication and transportation and warfare over the last century and a half. Everything has turned upside down again and again, certainly during the last 40 years of the transformations in every area of life through the computer. This change has disrupted traditional economies and seems to be speeding up. Traditional America economics, as well as traditional economics everywhere in the world has made some people very well off and left others behind. And of course with this has come a shift in demographics with the USA shifting from a white to a multicolored majority. This analysis is what makes the most sense to me. And Ezra Klein lists all these factors. This analysis leaves me with a sense of helplessness. Out of control change, particularly technological change and new scientific discoveries gives me the feeling that rapid change is beyond our control, no one is responsible, and that the threats to many people will only get worse.
But in my thinking I have left out Ezra Klein’s major point and that is that the overall driving polarizing forces is tribalism. When threatened by outside threats humans tend to band together to protect themselves. And in banding together we naturally bend our personal values to fit the values of the group. We give up our independent experience and join in a kind of group think. In many countries there are a number of political tribes all vying with each other. But in the United States under the way our governance was set up by the founding fathers, we have become a two party system. You have to choose one party or the other or be irrelevant. In the past, from the time of the civil war, our two parties have been broad coalitions, this was especially true of the Dixiecrat south and the northern liberals who banded together in the Democratic Party to protect each of their vital interests, segregation in the South and liberal populism in the north.
But with the civil rights movement of the 60’s the Democratic Party rejected racism and became a party of liberalism and openness to all marginalized groups and the Republican Party became the party of big business and traditional American cultural values including white supremacy. And when this happened polarization became more and more intense with each side perceiving the other as a threat.
And the more extreme each party became the more of a threat they became to the other party. The divide was made even more stark by the primary system of choosing candidates in which only the most fired up parts of each party voted meaning that politicians had to become more and more extreme in order to survive.
Ezra Klein says all of this much better than I do, so if you want to get the straight dope, read him. But I am only summarizing him the best I can, probably misunderstanding him at times, to get to the point he makes about which I have never given much thought. And that is the degree to which the natural tendency of humans to group together to the point that the group determines what we think rather than deciding ourselves means that as the tensions between the two sides gets more and more intense we naturally narrow our values and our perspectives to fit into our group.
I have experienced this in my own life. Growing up during the Second World War in the USA (my family left for India when I was 9) I hated the Krauts and the Japs who were the embodiment of evil and who needed to be destroyed. It didn’t bother me that hundreds of thousands of Japanese ordinary civilians were seared by an atomic blast or that countless German women and children were firebombed. And yet 15 years later I discovered German families that were wonderful people and married a German and felt as comfortable in Germany as in the United States.
At the end of the book Klein tries to think of ways in which we in the United States could lessen polarization to the point that we could listen to each other and work together to solve problems. He suggests some structural changes such as eliminating the electoral college and increasing the size of the Supreme Court and the way justices are chosen. But the point that struck me the most his suggestion that one way out was mindfulness. By mindfulness he means letting go of polarization and quietly examining the various tribes that each of us individually belongs to. He suggests that we individually broaden our sense of our own identities by thinking of all the different tribes in which we belong, instead of confining our identity to one of the other of the political parties. So for myself, and only for myself since we are all so different, I’m going to think for the next few days about the different tribes that I have belonged to and belong to. Because in each of these groups it isn’t red/blue that is important. Somehow this is a way to realize that being a liberal in the Democratic Party is not the only righteous path to follow. There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Once we realize that we are each a mix of individual identities we will start to be less polarized. That is one of Klein’s major points and I am going to try it out by each day wondering about a different group that I have belonged to.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 