The Least Worst Way To End America's Polarized Conflict
Pick Your Poison
“Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.”
— Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustus
Americans are in a pickle. No, the other pickle. The one we get into when we beat “the bad guys” out there and find a new enemy lurking among us.
We’re back here again because the human brain will — absent active redirection — divide the world into us and them categories1. Out-groups get painted with the graded brush of mild to complete dehumanization while ingroups get a pass on their flaws. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.
Dehumanized individuals are treated the same today as they were in 1930s Germany and among the hardscrabble tribes at humanity’s dawn 200,000 years ago — we want them gone.
We’ll happily dehumanize external threats and enjoy the resulting fruit of internal harmony. But if no existential external threats remain, we dehumanize an internal part of our coalition and polarize against it. This pattern is a historical constant. It just keeps happening.
So what are our options for getting out of this mess?
How To “Win” A Polarized Internal Conflict
1) Convince the Other Side They’re Wrong and You’re Right.
Hard to pull off. We’ve had no success at it in the US’s current polarization round.
Idea wars are rarely won by words and logic alone. One side is usually discredited by outside circumstances, as happened in Mexico’s civil war. But reality’s intervention is often long in coming.
2) Expel or Slaughter the Other Side.
It’s worked countless times. The Holocaust. The Trail of Tears. Hadrian’s mass slaughter of the Jews. The Qing dynasty’s extermination of the Dzungar. The Soviet Union’s Great Purge.
Disappearing people works, but it’s messy, immoral, tends to lead to poor economic and cultural outcomes, and no one in America will go there (yet). But even when you get away with it, a new internal enemy often waits in the wings.
Some of today’s least polarized, most stable liberal democracies are either very small, homogenous, or both. And look what happened to the once-placid politics of Denmark and Netherlands after immigrants flooded their countries — they haven’t been this polarized for 75 years.
Diversity is a superpower, but it’s also divisive, and there’s a reason why many tyrants prosecute minorities when nothing stands in their way.
3) Create a Police State. Limit Free Speech and Rights.
This is Russia and China’s perennial tactic, and it works. They have a good track record of keeping sprawling nations of diverse peoples together.
If you centralize power and destroy “inefficient” competing power blocks (the courts, regional governments), most discordant voices self-censor out of fear. Send a few to the Gulag every year and the rest will get the message.
History’s greatest tyrants were impassioned enemies of decentralization for this reason. In Mein Kampf, Hitler has a chapter-long rant against “states rights,” in Germany. He denounced the “impotence” of countries constrained by decentralization, and was happy to win the “struggle between federalism and centralization.”
We know how that turned out.
There’s a price to pay for police state stability, however — their dynamism and happiness are sapped.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 19th century2, “…the Chinese have peace without happiness, industry without improvement, stability without strength, and public order without public morality. The condition of society is always tolerable, never excellent.”
This Chinese status quo hasn’t changed dramatically in the last two centuries. They’ve shed their emperor and stagnant economic system, but they’re still ruled from an all-powerful center that silences dissenting voices. They spend as much money staffing their police state as they do arming their military. Not an efficient use of resources.
4) Civil War or Peaceful Secession.
Bring them in line or let them go. Either way, the outgroup is gone, or at least suppressed.
The US beat slavery in our Civil War, but it cost us 800,000 soldiers and civilians. None of us are eager to repeat this tragedy. But we’d be foolish to ignore that our civil war “worked,” and will thus be a model for some.
The US emerged from the Civil War with a new swagger, shaking off century-old internal and external doubts over its ability to endure.
5) A New Unifying Existential Threat or Project Emerges
No existential threats appear on the horizon. But fate likes to throw curveballs. No one expected 9/11 would give the Regan coalition a new lease on life, for instance. We should keep our eyes open.
But what of national projects?
When they speak to the zeitgeist they can unify a fractious people.
Manifest destiny, for all its flaws and immorality, refocused the US after the Civil War like nothing else could. Disaffected veterans went west to battle nature with dreams of empire in their hearts. It gave them purpose. It made former Confederates think of themselves as Americans again.
European cathedrals served a similar purpose. A staggering number of two-bit medieval towns have one. Their construction halted in times of war and disaster, when people were already unified against external threats. But humans also need to wage peace if they’re to avoid nihilism and internal polarization. Cathedrals gave them that. They labored on buildings they’d never see completed, planning on the scale of generations.
I don’t know what the modern version of a cathedral is. I don’t see another version of manifest destiny that wouldn’t outrage anyone with a moral sense.
Many have suggested space colonization and becoming an interstellar species, but I meet few regular people who want to leave earth or work toward an interstellar future.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on national projects that could unify America.
6) Change The Culture and Our Norms
I don’t discount this possibility, utopian as it sounds. It’s happened before in America and it could happen again. I’ll be discussing the psychology and science of this sort of change in future articles. But even if we started today, the change would take decades. Which brings me to…
7) Find a Way to Put Up With Each Other.
“For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.”
― Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers No. 1
We all know the horrors of war and conflict. We have to do everything we can to hold our country together. Holding for another generation might buy us time for a unifying event to bring us back together. Can we hold that long? I think we can.
There’s a lot of research on what holds countries together, and the US is already in a decent position to survive its polarization. But with some tweaks to our government, we could be much more resilient.
In my next article, I’ll discuss how.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.