wHy aRE wE sO DiVideD?

It's really not that hard to understand, guys. But let me try with some cynical rambling.

Hey everyone. Life is busy. I’m currently belting out and chopping together the next episode of History Impossible (check out the History Impossible Instagram page to get a sense of what the story will be about), so you’ll have that in your ears in the near future. I’m also working on another essay here that’s become a bit of a beast, to the point that I might make it into a special episode of the podcast for supporters here and over on Patreon if I feel confident enough in it. I’m also finally getting deep into the research for the return of the Muslim Nazis series, which is, of course, intense (i.e. the subject matter, trying to understand the history of Yugoslavia, etc).

Anyway, despite all these things I’m currently working on (among other, life-related things I’ll be discussing in the intro to the next episode, so stay tuned), I got prodded into writing this shorter, off-the-cuff piece by various happenings in the news (the fascism-friendly Italian PM, the National Conservatism conference, the ongoing tiresome debates about gender identity and race…really all of the usual). So as much as one can enjoy such things, please enjoy!

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“[V]ery few of the speakers in Miami reached beyond stock complaints about censorship or calls for breaking up Big Tech monopolies to outline a specific plan for how to shift the economy away from its reliance on digital products and rebalance political power in the United States. That’s if they offered policy suggestions at all.”

This quote comes from a recent piece written by the phenomenal Katherine Dee over on the Daily Scroll. I can’t speak for Katherine, and would imagine she perhaps wouldn’t necessarily agree with the broad strokes I’m about to paint, but nevertheless, the piece is worth reading simply for being a great analysis of the National Conservatism movement and its conference. However, I think she’s tapping into something fundamental to the cliche-that-is-a-question-that-is-somehow-even-more-of-a-cliche “Why are Americans so divided?” Now of course, if you study history—namely American history—you know that this question, while being a fair and relevant one, belies the notion that this division is a new phenomenon. It’s not. We were just as divided 50 years ago and things were much, much more violent back then (see also: the excellent MartyrMade podcast series “God’s Socialist” for a great rundown on that). Divisions ran hot in the 1910s during the Great War on the very question of war, as well as the question of organized labor. Divisions were even hotter in the 1870s-1880s as America experienced one of its many populist backlashes (something I covered in History Impossible’s very first episode). And there was, you know, a literal civil war over the question of slavery and secession. And it goes back even further than that, alllllll the way back to the Federalist vs Anti-Federalist division of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Political division is not a bug in the American system; it’s a feature. And this is because I don’t believe it’s a political division at all: it’s a personality division.

Much has been studied and said about the notion of “political personalities.” There are multiple tests out there that essentially act like political zodiac charts (I’ve taken a lot of them; the results are never consistent). And this includes the kind of political personality measures I’m interested in, i.e. the correlation between actual personality theory (e.g. “The Big Five”) and political position of “progressive/liberal/leftist” and “conservative/reactionary/rightwing” (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll just keep referring to the characteristics as “progressive” and “conservative”). And as squishy as personality can be as far as sub-disciplines of psychology go, there is indeed biological evidence for there being such a thing as personality traits. For example, in 2009, DeYoung and other researchers looked at fMRI results and saw that those who scored highly on conscientiousness (one of the Big Five, which also includes agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness) showed greater volume in the lateral prefrontal cortex, a region in the brain known for impulse control and planning. So personality traits are real, and, as it turns out, measurable. And indeed, they also reflect in human behavior and motivation, including that of politics and ideological commitments. As Gerber and fellow researchers have noted, “The most consistent findings from this line of research are an association between openness to experience and [progressivism] and between conscientiousness and conservatism,” citing several different studies that have replicated such results.

But what, really, does this mean? And why does it matter to the question of political division in the United States? It means that the divisiveness we observe is indeed a feature, and not a bug, of American political life because of these fundamental differences of people, which ultimately affect their tastes in everything.

Let’s unpack this a little bit. As I see it, there is a lot of patterned behavior within dedicated conservatives and dedicated progressives. I’ve boiled it down to something that I hope concisely illustrates the fundamental political difference between the two camps: conservatives can be brilliant diagnosticians, while progressives can be brilliant prescribers. The problems start to arise when either of these groups try to engage in the other group’s strength (e.g. a progressive trying to diagnose a problem is probably going to miss the mark altogether, or a conservative trying to solve a problem is going to just regress to brute force), and when this starts to happen, that’s where the arrogance comes in and the circling of the drain begins.

Basically, to the core of their personality types, conservatives tend to really suck at coming up with new ideas. They're better at diagnosing deeper, philosophical problems, while the left is better at imagining creative solutions. The problem is the arrogance that comes from both positions. Conservative arrogance comes from the idea that the left “can't possibly” see the problems they speak of and this very quickly morphs into presumptions of malicious intent--i.e. that they “WON'T” see these problems, likely to some nefarious end. Progressive arrogance comes from the idea that the right “can't possibly” understand the complexity of their creative ideas and this very quickly morphs into, yes, presumptions of malicious intent as well--that they “WON'T” understand these creative solutions and that this is because they have nefarious motives.

When you presume intent like this, especially at scale, you can see the problems. But that presumption of intent isn’t really the problem; that’s a symptom. It’s a logical symptom of what I was describing above: when progressives and conservatives don’t stay in their lanes and think they can do the other groups’ jobs. Maybe there is/are a deeper cause(s) to this dynamic; honestly, I haven’t really done my diligence in exploring that possibility from a historical context. Part of me doesn’t want to because I both a.) don’t want to get sucked into a rabbit hole that takes me back to the Siege of Jerusalem, and b.) don’t think it accomplishes much except to provide fuel to finger pointing as to whose “fault” this is, which, at this point in the spiral where we find ourselves, will only accelerate the decline (and I can just hear left and right accelerationists popping wood as I write these words).

The point I’m making, I guess, is a pretty saccharine one and one that won’t resonate now because I think we’re past the point where it could have resonated. I mean, Dan Carlin was talking about how our problem is hating our neighbors years ago, and if he can’t make it resonate, who am I to try? But I spent the 30-45 minutes hammering this out so I might as well. We’re not going to just “come together.” That’s not happening. And because of that reality, I’m not going to waste oxygen wishing it would. However: I do think we need to get to a place where, however separated we are by values or—perhaps—literal boundaries, that progressives and conservatives realize how much, at the very core of their personalities, they actually need each other to produce a functioning society.

Just don’t ask me if I think we’ll ever get to that place without bloodshed. Because we all know how I am with cynicism.