Observations on America’s social divisions

Another fascinating New York Times article, First They Fought About Masks. Then Over the Soul of the City., tries to get at the roots of what has torn American society apart and made its politics enraged and toxic. This article argues that considering cognitive and social factors are the best means to try to understand what has broken us so badly. This is one of the best articles I can recall for understanding what has happened to us.

In Enid, Okla., pandemic politics prompted a fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American? Whose version of the country will prevail?

ENID, Okla. — On a hot night in July, the first summer of the pandemic, Jonathan Waddell, a city commissioner in Enid, Okla., sat staring out at a rowdy audience dressed in red. They were in the third hour of public comments on a proposed mask mandate, and Mr. Waddell, a retired Air Force sergeant who supported it, was feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

He had noticed something was different when he drove up in his truck. The parking lot was full, and people wearing red were getting out of their cars greeting one another, looking a bit like players on a sports team. As the meeting began, he realized that they opposed the mandate. It was almost everybody in the room.

The meeting was unlike any he had ever attended. One woman cried and said wearing a mask made her feel like she did when she was raped at 17. Another read the Lord’s Prayer and said the word “agenda” at the top of the meeting schedule seemed suspicious. A man quoted Patrick Henry and handed out copies of the Constitution.

“The line is being drawn, folks,” said a man in jeans and a red T-shirt. He said the people in the audience “had been shouted down for the last 20 years, and they’re finally here to draw a line, and I think they’re saying, ‘We’ve had enough.’”

At the end of the night, the mask mandate failed, and the audience erupted in cheers. But for Mr. Waddell, who had spent seven years making Enid his home, it was only the beginning. He remembers driving home and watching his mirrors to make sure no one was following him. He called his father, a former police officer, and told him what had happened. He said that people were talking about masks, but that it felt like something else. What, exactly, he did not know.

“I said, ‘This is honestly just crazy, Dad, and I’m not sure where it goes from here.’”

From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House. But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

Social scientists who study conflict say the only way to understand it — and to begin to get out of it — is to look at the powerful currents of human emotions that are the real drivers. They include the fear of not belonging, the sting of humiliation, a sense of threat — real or perceived — and the strong pull of group behavior.

Some of these feelings were already coursing through American society, triggered by rapid cultural, technological, demographic and economic change. Then came the pandemic, plunging Americans into uncertainty and loneliness, an emotion that scientists have found causes people to see danger where there is none.

Add to all of that leaders who stoke the conflict, and disagreements over the simplest things can become almost sectarian. 

In Enid, both sides in the mask debate believed they were standing up for what was right. Both cared deeply for their city — and their country — and believed that, in their own way, they were working to save it. And it all started as an argument over a simple piece of cloth.

Eran Halperin, a social psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who studies emotions in conflict, said that people in intractable fights often do not remember how they started but that they are perpetuated by a sense of group threat. One’s group — for example, American or Christian — is an extension of oneself, and people can become very defensive when it — or its status in a hierarchy — changes.

“If my American identity is an important part of who I am, and suddenly there’s a serious threat to that, in some ways that means I don’t know who I am anymore,” he said. “It’s an attack on the very core of how I see myself, of how I understand myself.”  

In the end, both sides could agree on one thing: The fight was not really over masks.

Mr. Waddell thought it had to do with fear. He said America is in a moment when the people who ran things from the beginning — mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly male — are now having to share control. Their story about America is being challenged. New versions are becoming mainstream, and that, he believes, is threatening.  

“You don’t just get to be the sole solitary voice in terms of what we do here, what we teach here, what we show on television here,” he said. “You don’t get to do it anymore. That’s where the fight is.”  

“We’re going to have an explosion,” he said. “Whether it’s literal or figurative. It’s going to be bad.”

The NYT article notes that Halperin sees the emotions in this American conflict about as intense as those between Israelis and Palestinians. He argues that in the US, both sides had high expectations of each other, so it was a shock when “those who were part of us, suddenly do something so counter to our values.”

One of the people in Enid was radicalized by going online and found content that led to to believe that the federal government was misleading the American people about COVID for the benefit of unknown interests. She commented “I don’t like to be played the fool. And I felt like they were counting on us — us being the general population — on being the fool.” It is frustrating that the NYT article did not specify what sources she relied on to become radicalized. One can only assume it was mostly propaganda and lies sources like the Republican Party, Fox News and Qanon or other online sources that deceived and unhinged this woman.

Reasoning like that is essentially impossible to deal with rationally. She hates mask wearing and knows someone or something is playing her for the fool. IMO, the most likely culprits playing her for the fool are the sources that deceived and unhinged her in the first place.

 

In addition to her devout Christian belief, concerns about teaching race history in public schools, increases in non-white residents and social acceptance of homosexuality, another and important part of this woman's emotional responses came from people who criticized those who refused to accept masks. On Facebook, she felt pro-mask people held her in contempt and ridiculed her. She set up an anti-mask account to spread her beliefs that masks are socialist tyranny or whatever bad thing(s) she sees them as. She concluded the pro-mask people felt superior and wanted to humiliate her. One pro-masker said he hoped she would get COVID and die. And right there, the response of the opposition, is a major social-moral factor that polarizing politics has been instrumental in causing. 

Two issues and my personal rants about them

Microaggression warning: I'm going to level some nasty criticisms here

(please usher small children out of the room)

But that raises a point that I have been struggling with all along, but the concern is fading. On the one hand, people who radicalize on the basis of divisive disinformation, irrational emotional manipulation and often crackpot motivated reasoning, e.g., QAnon style crackpottery, are not neutral players. Just look at their flawed rationales, things like “masks don’t work,” “anti-COVID vaccine are socialist tyranny” and other crackpottery. That is flat out wrong and just plain crazy.

Their behaviors have real world impacts on other people. In the case of COVID, their refusal to treat it as a public health issue because cynical propagandists have politicized it and radicalized them, is (1) literally killing or injuring thousands of people, including themselves, and (2) arguably causing significant avoidable economic damage. Their exercise of what they see as their sacred, inviolate liberty to fight COVID “tyranny” has major adverse consequences, whether they like it or believe it or not. The empirical evidence is indisputable.

I and many others have have been criticized for pointing out that people with "anti-COVID belief" mindsets deserve criticism precisely because they undeniably are avoidably hurting and killing others. Such criticism probably does make some or most of the anti-COVID crowd feel put upon, humiliated or ridiculed. But by God, the criticisms of some of us are made in good faith, based on empirical facts and sound reasoning. People who make good faith criticisms cannot be responsible for the feelings of adults with false beliefs that cause them to hurt others. 

I see this as another case where the forces that use divisive disinformation, which I firmly consider to be authoritarian (mostly fascist in the US), is intolerant of criticism and seeks to neutralize the forces of truth and reason, which is mostly inherently democratic and anti-authoritarian. Why the hell should people arguing in good faith on the basis of facts and sound reason be shut up in the name of not wanting to make deceived and manipulated people feel bad about being criticized? 

The rise of political incorrectness: People like me who argue in good faith do not say that unmasked or unvaccinated people deserve or should get COVID and get sick or die. That is bad faith criticism and I criticize it. Yeah, some people level bad faith criticisms like that. But that raises another personal frustration with the limits that bad faith forces have put on good faith forces. Specifically, the deceived and manipulated tend to be among those who bitterly criticized pre-Trump politics as too politically correct. Most or nearly all of the anti-politically correct crowd found it refreshing to hear someone politically incorrect who had the guts to “tell it like it is.” They liked it even if there was some rudeness, crudeness, lies and/or arrogant, contemptuous bullshit in it. Those forces are the ones who destroyed restraining political correctness norms. So political incorrectness with its meanness and insult is acceptable now. 

Therefore, just how bad faith are criticisms like “I hope you get COVID and die”? That’s what used to be called politically incorrect. But now, is it politically acceptable or not? If the shoe was on the other foot, would most of the anti-PC crowd restrain themselves? I very much doubt it. They were the ones who liked the fresh air of crude bluntness. It sure as hell is not my fault, or people like me, that the American radical right, Trump and their divisive propaganda Leviathan obliterated political correctness and did it proudly. 

So, how much of our precious, already stretched-thin sympathy should we have for that poor anti-mask woman in Enid, OK? She felt humiliated, ridiculed and held in contempt on Facebook. She fears things like non-White residents, homosexuals and the tyranny of masks. Who’s fault is this? There arguably is a lot of truth in the saying, what goes around, comes around. 

Where this comes from: What prompted this outburst is personal frustration and the end of my patience and sympathy for adults who should know better. In my opinion, these people insist on acting to the detriment of American democracy and society for insufficient or literally no good reasons. Many of them appear to think and act like children. They need to grow up and accept what comes comes their way, including inconvenient facts and truths, and sometimes even harsh criticism.

Propaganda and disinformation-driven, i.e., irrational, White fear and anger really do seem to be key drivers of what has torn American society apart. The White vision going forward looks to be mostly a toxic mix of Fundamentalist Christian nationalism and harsh, socially unconscious, laissez faire capitalism (~neoliberalism). It does look like we’re probably going to have an explosion, unless someone can figure a way to defuse this.

Or, are my analyses and criticisms over the top, politically incorrect, logically flawed or otherwise wrong?