Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty

Sarah Huckabee Sanders aces the loyalty test

“I’m amazed she would make a speech like that!  I know her! She’s a nice person! She has a sense of humor. . . .” That was the immediate reaction of Van Jones following Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7. Jones was participating in a CNN panel performing a postmortem on Biden’s speech and the morose rejoinder by Sanders. The rhetoric of Sanders, the newly elected governor of Arkansas, bore the imprint of Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” address seven years earlier.

The opening mood on the CNN panel was one of shock and head-shaking perplexity at the bizarre content and bellicose tone of Sanders’s speech, made especially dark by contrast with the upbeat tone of the address by Biden that preceded it. Sanders ran through the litany of right-wing victimology from the tyranny of a bloated federal government, to hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the Mexican border, to defunding the police, to transgender turpitude,  to disregard for the patriotic white working class, to the critique of institutional racism embodied in Critical Race Theory, and other “woke fantasies.” On behalf of victims of imagined religious oppression, she protested being told “every day” that “we must . . . partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship false idols.” Especially shocking was her disrespect toward President Biden, whom she called “the first man to surrender his Presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Whoa! This description of Biden was so ludicrous as to evoke ridicule, and sure enough gallons of ridicule were dumped on Sanders by the Left in the days to follow. The Left particularly skewered her use of “crazy” to characterize them. They, whose default assumption is that MAGA Republicans are the really crazy ones, rejoiced in the irony and wondered if it was unintentional. However, you must award Sanders points for turning the tables on the Left with their own weapon—Sanders is perfectly aware of how the Left disparages the Right as “crazy,” and is also aware that Fox News has been calling the Left “crazy” and “deranged” for years, and her use was deliberate. “Crazy liberals” is exactly the kind of red meat her target audience feasts upon.

I along with millions of other viewers was also surprised by the degree of extremism in the governor’s speech. The emphasis on  culture wars was no way to win over political moderates. But unlike Van Jones I am unencumbered by any personal relationship with her, and I was not perturbed by a contradiction between the private Sanders—presumably a nice person since Van Jones is nobody’s fool—and the public Sanders who had just delivered a scathing rebuke of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Her tone was consistent with the Sarah Huckabee Sanders I knew as Donald Trump’s former press secretary who had engaged in hostile sparring with journalists at confrontational White House briefings.

A sharp but calmly thoughtful critic, Van Jones may be the most even-handed and restrained of all commentators on cable television. Reflecting on his outburst of disappointment in Sanders, what immediately came to my mind was Jonathan Haidt’s book THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. A lot has changed since the book was published in 2012 (updated in 2013) in the wake of the rise of the Tea Party, at the time a mean-spirited but still sane group of hard Right conservatives. The Tea Party’s attacks were and are aimed at government overreach and coddling of free riders—traditional conservative complaints elevated to fever pitch and accompanied by rumblings about the Deep State. Their messaging was tainted with racism, a consequence of Obama becoming President. They targeted Obamacare as the pivotal economic issue (a gift to freeloaders), and questions about Obama’s birthplace, ethnicity, and religion formed a second prong of attack. But the skirmishes over culture between Obama and critics were tame by comparison with the culture wars of today.

We now have a situation where, thanks to Trump and the conspiracy theories flourishing under his leadership, culture wars share center stage with the usual staples of conservatism on the Right.  Still, many of Jonathan Haidt’s insights that he once applied to 2012 politics apply even more directly to today’s tribalism—tribalism of the intensity that drives the disjunction between the version of Sarah Huckabee Sanders known personally to Van Jones, and the version acting as the mouthpiece of MAGA Republicanism.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) speaks about The Righteous Mind. It’s 1-1/2 hours long; you can skip the first six  minutes of introduction; the rest is fascinating)

Haidt, who identifies himself as a moral psychologist (a psychologist who studies morals), attributes Left/Right political divisions to differences rooted in their “moral foundations.” The foundation most relevant to Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s speech is the Loyalty/Betrayal foundation—where loyalty is a virtue of far greater value to conservatives than to liberals. Loyalty strengthens cohesion within a tribe such as MAGA Republicans.  It was the loyalty displayed by Sanders in her speech that solidified her standing as a standard bearer of the MAGA flag. (Steve Bannon did grouse about her failure to use Trump’s name during the anecdote about going to Iraq; her choice may have been influenced by the 2022 midterms when Bannon’s big bet on Trumpism failed to play out.) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s giving Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the January 6 Committee’s video trove is as much demonstration of loyalty to the tribe as it is a gift to Tucker Carlson, as both men are quite capable of treachery in their personal relationships.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders attacks Joe Biden and the Democrats

Van Jones underestimated the extremity of loyalty in Sanders’s political character and thus his astonishment at her State of the Union address. When push comes to shove at a critical moment in the Republican tribe, loyalty shoves hard . There’s no better proof of this than the bizarre allegiance given by Trump acolytes to a serial liar who promised them better and cheaper health care in 2016 and went on as President to spend a good chunk of his political capital on tax cuts to the rich. Loyalty to Trump has evolved into cultism, which I imagine might be one of the salient issues in an updated edition of The Righteous Mind.

To come: Tribal Dynamics Part 2: Subversion. What Jonathan Haidt calls the Authority/Subversion foundation helps to understand the disunifying trends on the Right in 2023. Exhibit A is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s walking a wobbly line between governing and capitulating to the rabid and sometimes loony MAGA wing.

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Afterword

The Righteous Mind is the only book of Haidt’s that I have read, but his essays in The Atlantic and interviews on YouTube are always provocative and original; a liberal who is not afraid to go against the liberal party line, he is one of the most incisive analysts of culture, social relationships, and politics going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. If you have access to The Atlantic, I recommend his recent essay, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” the theme of which is the fracturing of modern American politics and culture in a cacophony of voices talking past each other.