A few months ago I went to see NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt speak in Seattle. Haidt, the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, is a fierce critic of the tribalism he sees increasing around us, which he thinks is inherent to the human condition. “The human mind,” he wrote in his book, “is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently.”
Haidt’s talk was held at the Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Capitol Hill, perhaps the deepest blue district in deep blue Seattle. The audience skewed older, as they tend to do at book readings and talks, and if I were stereotyping the crowd, I would say it was a lot of highly educated Hillary Clinton voters who have multiple NPR tote bags and subscriptions to the New Yorker (or maybe the Atlantic, where Haidt published his most famous piece). I doubt a soul at the temple that day supported Donald Trump, which was made abundantly clear when Haidt asked the audience if they could think of three things Trump has done right.
My mind immediately went blank. Trump, do something good? Not possible. From the lack of hands raised at Haidt’s question, I am guessing few people could think of many examples either.
I was reminded of this moment while reading a piece in ThinkProgress over the weekend. The piece, by Josh Israel, was about a campaign by Americans for Prosperity—“a right-wing tax-exempt dark money group bankrolled by petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch”—against state licencing programs for some business, specifically hair and nail salons. Israel opposes these reforms and favors licensing and training programs, which he compares to practicing medicine. He writes: “While it is likely true that people pay more to be treated by a neurologist who has actually been to medical school and demonstrated basic knowledge of how the nervous system works, it is unclear how public health would be improved by allowing anyone with a stethoscope and a dream to open a medical practice.”
But there is a Grand Canyon-sized gap between practicing medicine and doing hair or painting nails. Israel does make a valid point about Americans for Prosperity’s opposition to free college and vocational training (programs that would at least eliminate some of the financial barriers to workers entering these fields). But even if training were free, that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary, which is exactly why some states are eliminating training and licensing requirements from certain occupations.
Take Rhode Island, which recently became the 28th state to overturn a law requiring hair braiders to complete 1,500 hours of training for a skill that, as the bill’s Democratic sponsor said, is often "passed down from generation to generation” in black families. Not only is requiring licensing and training for braiding both expensive, time consuming, and unnecessary, it hasn’t been demonstrated to improve the safety or quality of the service.
Still, it’s not hard to see why Israel would reject the Americans for Prosperity argument. He makes it abundantly clear in his description of the group: They are funded by the Koch brothers, and because the Koch brothers are bad, any policy they endorse must be bad, too.
I see this all the time: “Koch-funded” becomes an easy synonym for evil. There is some irony here: In addition to conservative, free-market causes, Koch-funded organizations also include NPR, PBS, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York City Opera, and the United Negro College Fund, which accepted a $25 million grant from the Kochs in 2014. While these donations don’t negate all the bad shit the Kochs have done with their money, including actively opposing environmental regulations and climate change legislation, it does show that “Koch-funded” is more a convenient buzzword than an indication of a cause’s actual worth.
Israel’s piece illustrates the consequences to tribal thinking: The Koch brothers are in favor of deregulating nail salons, and the Kochs are bad; ergo, regulating nation salons is good, no matter the human cost.
ThinkProgress—which is funded by the Center for American Progress—is, in theory, the kind of media outlet you would think takes issues of economic justice seriously. And yet, Israel is so unable to see past his own political allegiances that he is arguing in favor of making life harder for workers at nail and hair salons. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in Reason, “Israel displays the worst sort of political tribalism, in which any policy or idea espoused by those considered enemies is automatically treated as suspect or even evil. If the Kochs support occupational licensing reform, the dictates of tribalism say that ThinkProgress cannot. The End.”
Israel is not unique. Tribal thinking is all across the political spectrum, and was especially apparent during the Obama administration, when Republicans in Congress stonewalled any and all legislation Obama endorsed, even when he supported policies conservatives generally like—for instance, deficit reduction. As former House Speaker John Boehner said of Obama's agenda in 2010, “We're going to do everything—and I mean everything we can do—to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” They could not give a win to the President, and so Congress got basically nothing done.
This level of tribalism is easy to understand. People are social animals, and we are influenced by the other people we know. You look to your left and your right and decide what you believe based on what the people around you are saying. But doing so is also a barrier to enacting positive policy changes in this country. It’s especially damaging when lawmakers embrace the us-versus-them narrative, but it’s damaging when members of the media and regular citizens do it, too. We would all be better off if we stopped basing our opinions on people and examine policies for their merits instead.
In an effort to combat this tribalism, and as painful as this exercise is for me, I’m going to retroactively answer Jonathan Haidt’s question: Yes, I can think of three things the Trump administration has done right. First, he signed a bipartisan package of criminal justice reforms that allocates funding for job training programs and led to the release of 3,100 inmates convicted mostly of non-violent drug offenses. That was one good thing.
And then there was Education Secretary Betsy Devos’s rollback of Title IX guidelines enacted under President Obama, guidelines that, in effect, denied students accused of sexual assault basic due process. Devos, and Trump, were widely criticized for these changes, but as attorney Jeannie Suk Gershon wrote in the New Yorker, while DeVos's proposal was hardly perfect, it would also "help to make schools’ processes for handling sexual misconduct fairer to all parties.” That was good, too.
As for a third thing, well, I’m once again drawing a blank. I try to be open-minded, but we're talking about Donald Trump. Still, even though the human mind is prepared for tribalism, as Haidt wrote, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to think beyond it.
