The (Tribal) Politics of Character

 

Although it may not seem like it at times, politics is not in fact a form of masturbation—it is not intended to be a solo activity. One engages in politics through groups: tribes, if you will. That’s both the good news and the bad news.

Human beings naturally form groups because we are evolutionarily disposed to cooperation. But there’s a downside to this.

In a recent article titled, “Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized,”Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, remarked:

“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it.”

Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, put it more bluntly:

“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred, which is really sad.”

In last month’s post, I cited the work of Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose How Democracies Die puts the issue of out-group hatred in a political context. In particular, they noted that democracies fall apart when partisanship becomes polarization, with each side seeing the other(s) as an existential threat. Compromise is equated with defeat—worse, annihilation.

Where does such polarization, rather than mutual tolerance, come from? Citing from the same article as above, Lilliana Mason remarked:

“It’s feelings based. It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”

The term for this is “affective polarization,” a term coined by Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist:

“Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits.”

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Trinity Forum senior fellow Peter Wehner noted:

So-called affective polarization—in which citizens are more motivated by who they oppose than who they support—has increased more dramatically in America than in any other democracy. “Hatred—specifically, hatred of the other party—increasingly defines our politics,” Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong have written at FiveThirtyEight. My colleague Ron Brownstein has argued that the nation is “confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.”

How does this affective polarization express itself? A recent paper published in the journal Science argued that the three core ingredients of political sectarianism are “othering, aversion, and moralization.”

Othering denies your political opponents equal status as citizens—or even as human beings. Aversion dictates that you not only isolate yourself from your adversaries but dismiss or even ignore their beliefs. Moralization—providing an ethical justification for the othering and aversion—exonerates you from fault for actions that would otherwise seem hostile, irrational, or cowardly.

Fiction writers should guard against othering at all costs—all our characters should be granted the dignity, respect, and understanding they deserve. But that doesn’t mean we should not include characters in our stories who are guilty of it.

Either way, politics would appear to be a perfect subject for fiction due to the essential nature of conflict at its core. That conflict is not only at a fever pitch these days, it’s rooted in emotion and identity. What better grist for the fictional mill is there?

And yet a number of authors I know have been warned off writing about politics by agents, editor, and publishers.

The principal reason for this, I believe, is fear. Fear that either the author will succumb to their own “tribal truths,” inadvertently othering the characters who do not share those “truths,” making their portrayal, flat, clichéd, cartoonish, or worse. Or it’s a fear of the blowback from those whose politics differ from the author’s.

Good art is seldom if ever created from fear, though some of the greatest literature has been created in the attempt to address and overcome fear.

So in the interest of promoting good and even great literature, I set out identify some of the many groups to which your characters might politically identify.

I soon found myself in something that resembled both a zoo and a hall of mirrors.

The political spectrum seems to ever expand and fracture, with minor distinctions creating nominal divides, calling to mind Freud’s term, “the narcissism of minor differences.”

For example, I could discuss any of the following but chose not to—if you want to know more about them, go to the links provided:

Anarchism

Marxism (often referred to as Analytical Marxism in its current western form)

Socialism

Liberalism

Neoliberalism

Libertarianism

Conservatism

Neoconservatism

Fusionist Conservatism

Freedom Conservatism

I don’t mean to punt on declining to address these obviously relevant political inclinations or their various spinoffs. I just wanted to narrow things down to a manageable four for the sake of this post and the next few. And the four I chose, I believe, represent recognizably distinct ideologies, which are in direct conflict not just with each other but with some of those I just identified. The four:

Liberal Populism

Identitarian Progressivism

Nationalist Conservatism/Christian Nationalism

Nihilism

I’ll address those one at a time over the coming months, with Populist Liberalism discussed below.

First, however, I want to emphasize that in terms of characterization, the key issues regarding any group identification are:

• Why does the character believe they belong to this particular tribe?
• What are the rules for inclusion, why does the character agree with them, and how strong is that agreement? What might challenge or undermine it?
• How does the character’s allegiance to the group motivate conflict with members of other groups? Specifically, who does the character consider their out-group? Do they know anyone in that out-group? How do they know them, and do they have any interactions, or does your character demonstrate aversion to the out-group and its members? How does the character moralize their othering and aversion—how do they justify how they feel and what they do with respect to members of the out-group? What could happen to change that?
• What would it take for the character to leave the group, or to be expelled from it?

Belief is more than an idea drifting inside one’s head; a concept only becomes a belief when it inspires action. So one more crucial set of questions to consider:

• How does the character’s commitment to the group motivate them to act? What actions are expected of them? Which are demanded? What are the consequences of those actions? What are the consequences of not performing them? Does a failure to carry out an expected action lead to being shamed or mocked—or banished? Is non-compliance deemed a kind of treason (and dealt with accordingly), or are even more severe consequences possible?

These questions are equally valid if the group you’re writing about is a family, a circle of friends, a fraternity, a sorority, a sports team, a combat unit, a privately owned company, a corporation, the English Department at a liberal arts college, and so on. But for out purposes here today, we’ll focus on:

Liberal Populism

With echoes going back to the peasant rebellions of the Middle Ages and the slave revolts in ancient Rome, populism has been with this country almost from the beginning. You see it in the conflict between Jeffersonian “yeoman farmers” and the Federalist “financial elites.”

An excellent history of the movement, which has had both liberal and conservative expressions, can be found in Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion; he described the origins of the movement in the first half of the nineteenth century this way:

The embryonic populist rhetoric of antebellum America incorporated two different but not exclusive strains of vision and protest. First, there was the pietistic impulse issuing from the Protestant Reformation and continually revived by “great awakenings” that featured vivid emotional oratory, camp meetings, and the creation of new churches—all fueled by the belief in a personal God unmediated through spiritual authority … [I]t was every Christian’s duty to attack sinful behavior, especially when it received encouragement and sanction from the rich and haughty.

The second source was the secular faith of the Enlightenment.

Through the nineteenth century, the pietist and the rationalist coexisted in rhetoric, party politics, and coalitions of the discontented.

In parallel ways, they articulated four clusters of beliefs: about Americanism, the people, elites, and the need for mass movements.

The movement grew in power and reach in the years after the Civil War, when wealthy “robber barons” created a vastly unequal society. The alliances between pietists and secularists was always unstable, but they united in 1896 under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan, with the pietist wing represented by the Temperance Movement, the rationalist wing by the labor movement, with a third wing represented by farmers who felt betrayed by U.S. economic policy. When Bryan lost the election—the Republicans, sensing potential defeat, poured more money into the candidacy of William McKinley than any campaign had seen before—the populist movement split apart into its constituent elements.

Liberal Populism largely grew out of the labor movement, and under The New Deal it joined with farmers and Progressives (who believed in the importance of technical expertise in the development of policy) it formed the Roosevelt consensus and was a major voice in politics until the 1970s, when, in the words of Senate Budget Committee analyst Matt Stoller, the Democrats “killed their populist soul.”

Liberal populists remain committed to the working class and labor unions, in contrast to a Democratic Party that increasingly represents the interests of an educated, professional, technocratic “elite,” an elite that believes in a meritocracy that, in the populist view, has created a self-perpetuating, hereditary, professional class. (For an excellent critique of meritocracy in this context, see Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? You can also view a short video where he explains his ideas in the book, including the dignity of work, the importance of humility of those who “succeed,” the meaning of success itself, and how we can improve our civic life.)

One of the strongest voices within this movement is Thomas Frank, whose Listen, Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People is an excoriating critique of the Democratic Party and mainstream liberalism in its current form:

One final consequence of the ideology of professionalism is the liberal class’s obsessive pining for consensus. I  have already mentioned President Obama’s remarkable zeal for bipartisan agreement; as we shall see, this is not  his passion alone. Most of the Democratic leadership has shared these views for decades; for them, a great coming-together of the nation’s educated is the obvious objective of political work.

This obsession, so peculiar and yet so typical of our times, arises from professionals’ well-known disgust with partisanship and their faith in what they take to be apolitical solutions.

If only they could bring Washington’s best people together, they believe, they could enact their common-knowledge program.

But it doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it.

Two elements of current politics receive particular scorn from Frank: austerity (or the obsession with deficit-reduction) and globalization, which has resulted in the de-industrialization of working communities across the country:

This was the context in which the capital embarked on its years of deficit-reduction measures, each of them chasing the president’s dream of a “Grand Bargain” in which the war between the political parties would be forever resolved: the Spending Freeze, the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the Congressional “Supercommittee,” the “fiscal cliff” that was reached when the Supercommittee failed, the Sequester of 2013, and so on. They were, each of them, the product of a self-assured culture of D.C. professionalism that Paul Krugman has lampooned with the phrase, “very serious people.” “Serious” is exactly the right word. One of the timeless characteristics of rule-by-experts is the belief that informed and “serious” people know the answers to our problems, and that ideology and politics are pointless distractions keeping us from putting solutions in place…

Some of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood”…

Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.

This approach accepts that conflict is inevitable in a complex society, and politics is the peaceful means of attempting to resolve such conflict.Unity in this view is not merely chimerical, it’s a false god.

This underscores the degree to which this form of populism conforms to its predecessors in identifying two distinct and irreconcilable groups: the “people” versus the “elites.” Or more generally: “us” versus “them.” Its acceptance of and even embrace of conflict is baked in.

As noted above, however, populism is not restricted to the left. Right-wing populism has cohered around nationalist conservatism (Project 2025) and Christian nationalism, which I’ll address in a subsequent post.

On a side note, far too little fiction outside the crime genre is currently being written by working class writers or from a working-class perspective. Two notable exceptions: Bonnie Jo Campbell and Donald Roy Pollock. If you can recommend any others, please do so in a comment.

Returning to our concern regarding how to use such a group designation in creating our characters, let’s revisit the questions listed above with specific regard to liberal populism:

• Why does the characters consider herself a liberal populist? Does she even use this term to describe herself, or does she identify more strongly with her union, her blue collar family, her working-class community?
• How deeply does allegiance to the tribe define the character’s identity? Take away that allegiance, how does the character feel about herself? What other group might she turn to (if they’re willing to accept her)?
• What are the “rules” for inclusion (for example, a belief that working people have been systematically disadvantaged due to decisions favoring the wealthy and the professional class)? What experiences in their life prompted this view—the closing of local industries that provided a living wage for them, their family, their neighbors? The decline of living standards in their community? The arrogance or mistreatment at the hands of doctors, lawyers, bankers, or other professionals?
• How strong is their commitment to the beliefs of the group? Does it provoke political action on the one hand, despair or resentment on the other?
• How does the character’s allegiance to this cause motivate conflict with members of other groups? Who do they regard as their out-group, and do they consider them competitors, opponents, adversaries, or enemies? How far will they go to defend their cause or fight that other group or groups?
• Do they know anyone in that out-group? How do they know them, and do they have any interactions, or does your character demonstrate aversion to the out-group and its members? How does the character moralize their othering and aversion—how do they justify how they feel and what they do with respect to members of the out-group? What could happen to change that?
• What would it take for the character to abandon the cause, or to be expelled from the group by the other members? What would that look like? How would it be done?
• How does the character’s commitment to the group motivate them to act? What actions are expected, which are demanded—walking a picket line? Standing outside the local grocery store soliciting signatures on a petition? Volunteering for a food bank? Sabotage? Violence? Murder? (Recently an American citizen remarked that if his candidate for President does not win this November, “blood will run knee-deep in the streets.”) What would prompt them to choose one act over another? What are the consequences of following through or not? What are the least severe consequences? What are the most severe?

Try to define the group(s) to which your character(s) belong? Ask the bulleted questions of them. What do you learn about them you didn’t already know?

Do your characters come from a working-class community that would likely find fellow travelers in the liberal populist camp?

To what extent would you feel comfortable writing about a liberal populist character? How close is that belief system to your own? How would you guard against othering those outside that circle?