"It Shouldn't Have Been This Hard"

On Ideological Tribalism

Coming right of the gate with a link this week! 

It Shouldn’t Have Been This Hard by Darrell Owens

I often joke that the Youtube algorithm “radicalized” me by dumping me down the urbanism rabbit hole. The truth of the matter though, is that coming to understand urbanism gave me a different perspective that was essential in my de-radicalization from the far left.

“Gentrification” discourse has hovered in the background of my life for a long time. Coming from a housing-constrained metro like Portland, diving into the progressive political bubble of Oberlin, and then moving to New York City, I absorbed the progressive orthodoxy on the issue by osmosis. Then as I came to understand how low density zoning and parking mandates were causing a crushing housing shortage across all price levels, I came to see how blatantly wrong the progressive position was. My progressive tribe was not only willfully blind to smart policy, but was insistent in claiming that the people advocating for smart policies were nefarious and untrustworthy.

It’s apt that Darrell’s Substack is called “The Discourse Lounge,” because, what really “shouldn’t have been this hard” is the discourse. It should have been easier and faster for a winning political coalition to arrive at YIMBY conclusions through open, evidence-based debate. But we don’t have that kind of healthy discourse, because Americans take their political ideology to be their most fundamental tribal identity, and tribalism is the opposite of healthy discourse.

When our first tribal loyalty is to ideology, anyone who disagrees is the outgroup. If you think that the people who disagree with you are bad people, then you feel justified in dismissing all disagreement! When you identify with your policy beliefs, then arguments against your preferred policies are threats to your ego, and so your ego simply won’t let them in the door.

We should not look at ideology as an identity, but as a lens. People can look through all kinds of different lenses and come to brilliant or stupid conclusions. You should be curious to hear what people wearing different lenses from you are seeing that you’re not. Instead of being most trusting of people who wear the same lenses as you, you should be most trusting of people who’ve put together a more complete picture of the world by looking through a lot of different lenses. With this analogy, it should be fairly self-evident that you in fact have very little to gain from only listening to voices within your ideological bubble.

The problem is that there are extraordinary social barriers to adopting this approach. If social tribes are organized around the belief that disagreement with the party line is morally suspect, then they will use guilt and shame and ostracization to keep people from considering outside perspectives. If the other side is bad, then seriously considering the arguments of people who disagree with your side is a slippery slope to becoming a bad person, and you want to be a good person, don’t you?

Urbanism and YIMBYism have inherently been forced to build coalitions across the traditional left-right divide, but some lefty urbanists still like to try to make a controversy out of the fact that Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns is a conservative. These kinds of smears are a constant across all kinds of tribal lines. The Atlantic tries to smear Substack as a platform for Nazis in order to scare their readers away from independent media, and then various Substackers I enjoy reading counter-punch by saying The Atlantic is the epitome of elitism and snobbery. Or here in San Francisco, where the “progressives” (who are extremely nativist and averse to change) try to claim that San Francisco “moderates” (who are still quite progressive relative to the nationwide overton window) are basically Republicans.

There is a cognitive dissonance involved in admiring thinkers who regularly criticize each other. Good. Embrace the dissonance. If you’re not engaging with the ideas of people who disagree with each other, you’re not really thinking for yourself. You should not live in fear that exposure to bad ideas will turn you into a bad person. If the ideas are good enough to convince you, maybe they aren’t that bad. If they are not good enough to convince you, you nonetheless gain the ability to steelman counter-arguments to your position, and you gain empathy for the people who disagree with you and where they’re coming from.

This is the only path to healthy discourse. What has fundamentally made tackling housing issues ~harder than it should be~ is that people who hold faulty beliefs about the problem (gentrification theory of displacement), and advocate for counter-productive policy prescriptions (preventing new development), are overly confident that they are right, are unwilling to even consider arguments to the contrary, and cast moral aspersions against the other side in order to make it socially unfashionable to break from the party line (“white yuppies”/”tech bros”/“developer shills!”).

We all need to individually be more open to the possibility that we’re wrong, and we need to be socially more open to respectful disagreement among friends. Make debating fun again. To paraphrase Justin Trudeau: people who disagree with you aren’t your enemies. They’re your neighbors.

How Colleges Turned Pink by Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves’ work is a perfect example of how these “guilty by association” tendencies from the left are making it impossible to have healthy discourse around issues that badly need to be discussed. Reeves says in this piece on writing his book, Of Boys and Men, “I have been reluctant to write this book. I have lost count of the number of people who advised against it. In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking.” The problem is circular though: discussing men’s issues is seen as suspect because the only people who talk about men’s issues are misogynists. But it’s only misogynists talking about men’s issues because responsible actors keep their mouths shut out of fear of ostracization.

I desperately hope that in a generation, when discussing some of these issues boys are facing, we can apply the past tense in saying, “It shouldn’t have been this hard.” For now though, it is a very present-tense difficulty. When Richard Reeves takes on these issues, he’s forced to engage in the perpetual throat-clearing of clarifying he’s on the right team.

Telling boys that their suffering isn’t real is not going to win their votes. They see one tribe telling them to check their privilege, shut up, and do better; they see the other tribe taking them under their wing. No wonder we see young men shifting to the right. Refusing to talk about certain issues will not make them go away, and it is incredibly irresponsible for the left to cede entire issue areas to the right like this.

Why I am Christian again by James Taylor Foreman 

I found this whole piece fascinating—it is an excellent interweaving of personal narrative with an explanation of a theory of “levels of consciousness,” rising through tribalism to a more birds-eye view of various perspectives. This says so much of what I hope to have communicated above, but better.

Treating Every Meaningless Cultural Issue as a Racial Proxy War Helps No One by Freddie deBoer

Had to include one more last minute link—this one was just published this morning and it was too perfectly relevant to not include.