What's Behind Tribalism in America?

Show Transcript

Mike Anderson: Tribalism in America

[00:00:00] Bob Gatty: Tribalism in America must end because it threatens our existence as a society. That's the view of our guest today, author and historian Michael C. Anderson, and we're going to talk about why the political left and the political right are so different. 

[00:00:17] Michael's an IT consultant by trade with a PhD in information science. He's just published his fourth book on the subject titled Twilight of the American Experiment- without moral balance, our republic will fail. Michael, hey, thanks for joining us on the Lean to the Left podcast. 

[00:00:38] Michael C. Anderson: Thank you, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here. 

[00:00:40] Bob Gatty: Hey, tell us why tribalism in America threatens our society.

[00:00:46] Michael C. Anderson: The main problem is that because the country's gone tribal, and almost everyone to the right, left of center has entered their tribe, the tribes don't communicate. And because they don't communicate, the society, American society is fractured, and government can't make any progress because there's no consensus on how it should move forward.

[00:01:14] Bob Gatty: Okay. It's easy to understand how people can have differing views about social issues, but why is there so much rancor today between the left and 

[00:01:26] Michael C. Anderson: the right? 

[00:01:27] It all comes down to one of the main subjects that I write about in all my books, and that's political morality. Political morality is the application of personal morality to politics.

[00:01:42] So it reflects the behavioral beliefs and tendencies of individuals when they look at government action. These differences are genetic, partly genetic, and date back to a time before human beings existed. When man was migrating and encountered heterogeneous environments and had difficulty adapting to the availability of food supply.

[00:02:15] And so there was a behavioral adaptation created that separated two groups. One group was open interested in making decisions. and experiencing new things. The other group was worried about risk, like tradition, and preferred the status quo. As you can see, those definitions are describing liberals versus conservatives.

[00:02:50] Bob Gatty: Why is it that tribalism in America threatens our society, Michael? 

[00:02:55] Michael C. Anderson: Again government can't move forward without a consensus among the public on how it should move forward. That's the problem. 

[00:03:05] Bob Gatty: Yeah. Okay. To what extent must the news media shoulder some of the blame for all of this? 

[00:03:13] Michael C. Anderson: Among all the media sources, I would start the blame game with social media because social media has probably had a greater impact on human communications than any other type in history.

[00:03:27] The problem is that social media being an open platform allows anyone to get their 15 minutes of fame by posting comments or stories or opinions on the social media. The media itself attracts outliers who have, dangerous points of view and are inflammatory when they express themselves.

[00:03:58] What makes that even worse is the fact that the media companies look at the number of eyeballs that are, or, yeah, eyeballs that are reading the content that they present. And the crazier the presentation, the more eyeballs it gets. So it actually is beneficial to the media companies to have controversial information posted.

[00:04:25] Bob Gatty: All right. That's social media. How about the mainstream media? 

[00:04:29] Michael C. Anderson: Mainstream media is slightly biased to the left. They're, obviously Fox News isn't, but the rest of the major information outlets are slightly tilted toward the left. I don't see that's a huge problem.

[00:04:47] Although when you're looking at the news or. listening to the news, you can detect some bias. That's just, I think, an artifact of the fact that most journalists these days lean toward the left because they're trained in universities who lean toward the left.

[00:05:05] Bob Gatty: Yeah, do you, do you not think that, the new reporters cover

[00:05:12] incidents that occur developments that occur. They see the they see what's going on in this world. They see how politicians are responding or not responding. All of that forms their views and how they, I think influences how they handle covering the news. Do you agree with that?

[00:05:38] Michael C. Anderson: Yeah. Journalism has changed a lot over the past 50 years. I think one of the big events that changed it was Watergate because that got a lot of people interested in investigative journalism as a career. Yeah. But journalists, another thing that's important that's changed is journalists, I think, used to be pretty tight with the First Amendment.

[00:06:02] And they wanted to do research and discover information about stories and present them in a unbiased way. Lately though, and if you, I have looked at some polls and I think it's something north of 50 percent of journalists feel like it's not their responsibility to present an unbiased view.

[00:06:28] Bob Gatty: That's that's remarkable. I, I was trained as a journalist back in. Back in the day and it just upsets me. It's, it upsets me to see how some of the main media outlets handle articles. It really does. And I feel like there's not, there's not this proper sourcing that needs to be done in also many cases.

[00:06:59] At any rate let's talk a little bit about your book, Twilight of the American Experiment. Why do you use the word twilight? 

[00:07:08] Michael C. Anderson: Because what I'm presenting there is the risk to the future of the United States unless we get back to moral balance. Because the moral, the morality in our country is not balanced now, it's controlled by the left, basically.

[00:07:24] Through universities and the media, and of course they control the culture narrative. And there's a bias on the left, and there's a need to get more balance between the left and the right. Part of the reason for that is Biden's surprising pact with the progressives to support their agenda when he had been a 40 year moderate.

[00:07:48] Traditional Democrats are the kind of people who have more balanced views and are used to thinking that they have to compromise or negotiate or reach consensus with the right in order to move forward, the progressives are more fanatical and don't really care to make any concessions.

[00:08:11] Bob Gatty: You're throwing the blame on progressives, but what about the right wing crazies that are out there in the media? 

[00:08:19] Michael C. Anderson: They're just as bad. I'm not, I'm a moderate. I'm not an ideologue. I like to stay away from ideology because to me, ideology is a trap. If you become a right wing authoritarian or something, you're trapped in a ideology that Forces you to follow all its rules.

[00:08:43] I, there's no question that the radical right is like the radical left and behavior, I just don't think they get as much press maybe. So it, you don't read as much about them and you hear from the progressives a lot more, so that just gives the impression that. It causes reaction against the progressives because they're in your face.

[00:09:12] And so I'm not saying, I'm not accusing the progressives of being crazier than those on the right. I'm just saying that part of the problem is the balance in moral point of view. 

[00:09:24] Bob Gatty: Okay. I just want to make sure that we had a balance. 

[00:09:27] Michael C. Anderson: Yeah, let me elaborate on that for a second because I don't, Republicans are equally to blame for this.

[00:09:35] It's not all on one side. It takes consensus to move forward, as I said, and the Republicans have a very different personality and I'll separate conservatives from Republicans because you can be a conservative and not be a Republican, which I, is the bucket I fall into. But the left is more open and interested in change and desires equality and they're attracted to government programs that help the needy.

[00:10:08] The right is... It has other moral priorities. The right likes prefers loyalty and authority. They believe that the hierarchy is the right way for humans to organize. They like tradition and the status quo, so they don't like things that in their mind ruin their traditions. They're each right and they're each wrong for their own reasons.

[00:10:37] They're just different. And as I meant to say, neither is right and neither is wrong, but that means that they have to work together to move us forward. 

[00:10:48] Bob Gatty: Okay now your title includes the words, Without moral balance, our republic will fail. What are you talking about? Moral 

[00:10:55] Michael C. Anderson: balance? What do you mean

[00:10:56] about political morality?

[00:10:57] So what I'm saying is the left control of higher ed and the media gives them a bigger megaphone than the right has. The right, needs to have a bigger megaphone than they do have, and they have to be more balanced themselves. The Republican party is very fractured and unfortunately the individual ideologies of the member groups are more important to them than unity. So the fact that they can't unify is a significant obstacle to political progress also. 

[00:11:35] Bob Gatty: Okay. Now you write on your website that our political system is polarized and ideology is giving a higher priority than the needs of the American people. What's behind that trend?

[00:11:52] Michael C. Anderson: One of the things behind that is the fact that, and you, I'm sure you can say you've noticed this yourself, in the past 30 years, everything has become political in our society. In 1990, Everything wasn't political. New ideas that started in higher education were published as papers and reviewed and validated before they made it into the public.

[00:12:19] Now they're published you can publish a very inflammatory academic article and it gets into somebody's newspaper the next day. Everything is politicized, which means everything offends one side or the other, which exacerbates tribalism. 

[00:12:41] Bob Gatty: Okay. Now, I'm just wondering how the, how you believe, if you believe the Trump presidency added to this polarization. 

[00:12:54] Michael C. Anderson: I think there's no doubt it added to it because Trump is a polar by polarizing individual. It's very unfortunate to me for the conservative side that they don't have another candidate. And the whole country is forced into choosing between Biden and Trump in 2024, probably because it looks like they'll both be nominated.

[00:13:19] I think that's an unfortunate choice. And what it really means is nothing's going to get done until 2028 when the deck gets cleared and we get some new younger blood as candidates, and we can get by this, all this polarization. 

[00:13:37] Bob Gatty: You think it will require yet another four years? 

[00:13:42] Michael C. Anderson: If Trump's elected, he's going to be attacked for four years.

[00:13:45] If Biden's elected, it's probably going to be the same on both sides. And what you're leading to Bob is the question of what stops tribalism and there's maybe a couple of three or three reasons why that might happen. One is an event that unites the whole country, something like 9 11, which I certainly hope doesn't happen, but it would take the country uniting to make people forget about tribalism. The other thing that could happen is people get tired of it because there's so much fighting. I'm to the point of not reading social media anymore. I do a fair amount on Twitter and it's just all polarizing stuff that's on there.

[00:14:34] Bob Gatty: Oh, it is. It's just awful. It is. 

[00:14:37] Michael C. Anderson: You get un undated all day, every day and it just, it's wearing, it just, it's tiring.

[00:14:44] You wanna get away from it. That's why I don't watch the news on TV. I read the headlines on the internet because I don't want to get, I want to control how much content I'm exposed to. 

[00:14:57] Bob Gatty: Yeah. I used to be a I was a journalist for many years, so I was a news junkie and every news show I would watch every day and it just consumed it. When I go to bed now, I listen to music. I, you know the hell with the news? I, yeah. I'm like you I read it on the internet. I have favorite news outlets that I go to, that I trust. That's the other thing. I was at dinner the other day, the other night and one of the guests at dinner asked me, knowing that I have this podcast, asked me, what news media do I trust?

[00:15:36] And he went on to say that he doesn't know who to trust. And I think that's a prevailing view. Do you? Do you agree with 

[00:15:45] Michael C. Anderson: that? Absolutely. I consider myself lucky because I have an academic background, so I'm trained in trying to find the truth. So if I'm going to write about something, I'm going to look for multiple resources to support it, including views from both sides.

[00:16:03] But the public, if You look back to 20 years or something and maybe that was the time that you were a journalist If you watch the news, I mean you watch Walter Cronkite, for example, because you trusted him, right? So or somebody else because you trusted them more and that trust really has been eroded to the point where You don't know where the truth lies and I'm very concerned about teenagers because they spend their whole time on social media and get inundated with, people who have created fame out of uniqueness, and they have millions of followers and, maybe proponents for crazy ideas, but because they're followed, people believe what they say. 

[00:16:53] Bob Gatty: Exactly. Now you have oh, I wanted to ask you, you have a book that you wrote in 2019, Tribalism, the Curse of the 21st Century America. So that indicates to me that you were ahead of the curve back in, what, four years ago, you were writing about this tribalism.

[00:17:14] So it's not a new phenomenon, right? 

[00:17:17] Michael C. Anderson: No, I would say, it's hard to pinpoint when it started. It may have started with Obama or it may have started late in the Bush years with the dissatisfaction with. the Afghan and the Iraq war and going back even further, and this will be familiar territory for you.

[00:17:37] You remember how the Congress used to have many moderates in both houses, and those moderates served the role of being mediators between the right and left, right? So a lot of work got done by the moderates and they served a valuable purpose. In the 90s, they all left the field. So because they left, there are only ideologues left.

[00:18:02] And of course the, those ideologues represent the public because the people who are elected by the public. So they're a reflection of the public, but it's tribal. 

[00:18:15] Bob Gatty: Yeah, that's for sure. Now you have two books, one published in 2017 that focuses on progressives and the other in 2021 that focuses on conservatives.

[00:18:30] Each examines the influence of genetics on the left and right of the political spectrum. Can you summarize the key points? 

[00:18:40] Michael C. Anderson: As I said a few minutes ago the right and left are different because their personalities are different, liking new things versus status quo, et cetera.

[00:18:49] And this is not only documented in psychological studies, but believe it or not, the right and left have different brains. They, there is a part of the brain that conservatives have that Handles the fight or flight situation called the amygdala and conservatives have a larger one than liberals do.

[00:19:15] On the other hand, liberals have a part of the brain that handles complex decision making that's more developed than conservatives have. And we don't know whether these brain differences are due to the fact that they're conservative and liberal, or they're conservative and liberal because their brains are different.

[00:19:33] But the point is, it's that, that significant to see the differences between the two. So my first book is basically about the way progressives behaved, and most notably discussing the progressive era, which ran from about 1880 to 1910 or 15, which was probably the most important accomplishments accomplishment of the progressives ever, because they took on political corruption and exploitation of the workers by the industrial revolution, and they fought to get those things fixed, And they were able to fix many of them.

[00:20:16] So that was a tremendous accomplishment and one of the great accomplishments of American history. The third book about the conservative gene basically talks about conservative's behavior. The story there is that conservatives have never really had an ideology of their own. They basically, their idea, their point of view of the world is basically built on the status quo and traditions and not liking change.

[00:20:49] That isn't much of a ideology, that's basically a reaction to society. But when Bill Buckley was prominent in the fifties and sixties, he actually built for a while the conservative ideology where he united libertarians traditional conservatives, and some disaffected anti communists into one single ideology, and that got Reagan elected. But then, the right, the conservative ideology eventually broke up into factions, and so that's where we are today. But the left has the ideology of wanting equality, the right has the ideology, has no ideology other than preserving the status quo, basically.

[00:21:41] I'm talking about from a personality standpoint. 

[00:21:43] Bob Gatty: A minute ago we were talking about the origin of all of this. I've often thought that the election of Barack Obama, while hailed as a real achievement and advancement, The election of our first African American president that caused a lot of the hard rancor among conservatives that is manifested today.

[00:22:14] Do you agree with 

[00:22:14] Michael C. Anderson: that? Yes. Yeah. I think I mean that the Obama election did not have as much of an impact as the Trump election, because the problem with Trump is he's irreverent and he's a bully. People like him can be very successful in business because you can bully people and then, and give, and get caught, get a lower price on your contracts and all that.

[00:22:39] But that doesn't, you have to have decorum in the presidency. And he has no decorum. He's very divisive. He allows extremists on the right to appear to be supported by him because he doesn't say much against them. And so his election was a significantly bigger problem than the Obama election to me.

[00:23:08] Yeah I agree 

[00:23:09] Bob Gatty: with that. It just seemed like a lot of people were angered and they held, they had to hold that in. And then after Trump got elected, they were able to feel as though they were allowed to express some of the views that they were holding within themselves. Yep. I Saw that with, I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, seven years ago.

[00:23:38] And I was out with a bunch of guys and it was the day after the Trump, the day after Trump was elected. And a bunch of them were talking about it and the conversation was essentially now we can say and do whatever we want because he does it. Yeah. Basically talking about racist issues is where that was.

[00:24:05] Michael C. Anderson: Yeah. One other thing I want to mention it, Bob, is this piece of the electorate who lives and dies for Trump and it's an amazing phenomena. These are middle class white men, typically they're not in unions, but they're a disaffected group who has no representation because they used to be represented by the Democrats and then the Democrats abandoned them.

[00:24:35] So they had nobody and they got stuck to Trump. So one of the reasons his Poll numbers are always so high is because they never waver. And if there were some way for one of the parties to capture that group, obviously it would make a big difference, but they feel they're isolated with no representation.

[00:25:01] They hear all this stuff about the mean white man, who's a bigot and privileged white men stuff. And they feel attacked basically, but he doesn't attack them, so he's an attractive candidate. 

[00:25:18] Bob Gatty: Yeah. It just astounds me how people can vote against their own interests. When it comes to supporting Donald Trump. Here in South Carolina where I live there's a lot of poverty. You go out, I live in the tourist area of Myrtle Beach, but you go away from here into the countryside and rusty old house trailers, rusty old pickup trucks and Trump signs out front. And to me, it just makes no sense.

[00:25:51] Yeah, because that guy is not protecting them. He doesn't give a crap about him, right? 

[00:25:57] Michael C. Anderson: I mean it we could get off on a little bit of tangent here Bob because we could talk about How effective either party is it taking care of the American people true? I'm writing a fifth book and the title is going to be America's counterfeit democracy Because I'm going to talk about the fact that the interests of the wealthy and the corporations drive the government in the United States and not the people.

[00:26:29] Bob Gatty: That is really interesting. When will it be ready? I 

[00:26:34] Michael C. Anderson: hope next summer it's about summer. Yeah, more than half done now, and I hope to finish it or have it out by next summer, late summer. 

[00:26:46] Bob Gatty: Excellent. Let me know when you do, and I'd like to have you back on to talk about it. Sure. Now, in 2019, you have a book, Tribalism and the Curse of the 21st Century America.

[00:27:01] You write that the left and right have to start talking again civilly. So the country can move forward by consensus rather than swinging back and forth from one ideology

[00:27:12] to another. Can you elaborate a little bit more about that? 

[00:27:17] Michael C. Anderson: I mentioned a few minutes ago how the Congress now is idealized and there are no moderates in the middle. Yes. Obviously, that reflects the public. But, when you look at, if you look at the spectrum of political views from the progressives on the left to the radical, radicals on the right of conservatism there's actually multiple groups there.

[00:27:44] Yeah. It's not just two groups. Obviously, we all know that they're independent voters in between, and the independent voters don't have a ideology, so they decide every four years which party they prefer based on their interests. The left basically has three groups. It has the progressives on the left, then it has liberals, and then it, there's an active liberal group and a passive liberal group.

[00:28:14] The active liberal group is active in politics and the passive liberal group believes in liberal ideas, but isn't as active in voting. But to me, the traditional liberals hold the key to trying to solve tribalism, because we don't hear anything from them because the progressives have the megaphone. And if you do polling and you ask traditional Democrats how they feel about tribalism, they say they don't like it, and they would be open to compromising with the right about issues that are important to the American people.

[00:28:54] One of the things that's important to me is, or to talk about, is how, what an important role traditional Democrats tribalism by being mediators and starting a dialogue with the conservatives that can be fruitful. 

[00:29:13] Bob Gatty: Okay. I wanted to ask you where people can find your books, but before I do, is there anything else you'd like to add to the discussion?

[00:29:21] Michael C. Anderson: No, I think I think you've been good at pointing to all the critical points that I write about, and so I think we're good. Okay, 

[00:29:30] Bob Gatty: good. Where can people find your books? What, Amazon? 

[00:29:34] Michael C. Anderson: Yep, they're all on Amazon, but I have a author website that's very easy to find. It's mikeandersons. com, mikeandersonsbooks.

[00:29:43] com. Anderson with an S at the end books. com and all my books are there and their links to Amazon from there. Okay. And there are reviews of all my books and then other information that might be useful to the reader there. I have a blog also and I write about political issues there. 

[00:30:04] Bob Gatty: Yeah, check out his website.

[00:30:05] It's a very nice website. Very informative, easy to navigate. And Michael, I really thank you so much for being with us. On the lean to the lead podcast. 

[00:30:17] Michael C. Anderson: Okay. Thank you for inviting me. I had a very enjoyable conversation. 

[00:30:21]