Trump as Fargroup – David Friedman’s Substack

My view of the election is “a plague on both houses.” Kamala Harris is an extreme representative of an ideology I have opposed for most of my life. Donald Trump has three major positions on two of them, immigration and trade, and he actually does a worse job than his opponent. While I have some sympathy for his positions on the third—I have opposed interventionist foreign policy for over fifty years now—I do not trust him to be able to implement a consistent and competent alternative. His disinterest in whether what he says is true, extreme even for a politician, is insulting to me.

That’s my intellectual view of the matter. It’s not my emotional view. When I read news stories and observe their effects on my feelings, I find myself reacting like a Trump party member. Poll results that look good for him make me happy; poll results that look bad for him make me sad. Reports of outrageous statements by Trump or Vance I ignore—I don’t expect them to tell the truth. Reports of demagoguery by Harris or Waltz arouse feelings of outrage. If Harris wins, I’ll be disappointed. If Trump wins, I’ll be relieved, at least until the first outrageous thing he does.

The explanation for my inconsistent response is given by Scott Alexander in “I can tolerate everything except the outgroup,” one of the best of his many fine essays. In it he points out that a person’s outgroup, the group toward whom he feels and expresses strong negative opinions, is usually not made up of people who are geographically and intellectually distant from him, but of people who are close to him. The Nazi outgroup was not their Japanese allies or the Chinese the Japanese were fighting; it was German Jews, people with the same language and, in most respects, the same appearance and culture. The outgroup of American leftists is not Muslim fundamentalists, but American conservatives.

Conservatives have doubts about gay marriage. Muslim fundamentalists see homosexual intercourse as a capital crime. American conservatives want their schools to be more tolerant of creationism. Muslim fundamentalists want their schools to teach the truth of Islam. And yet when conservatives criticize Muslims, leftists defend them. When Muslims kill Jews and Jews respond by killing Muslims, it is the Muslims who support American leftists, the Jews they blame — even though Israelis have far more in common, ideologically and culturally, with American leftists than Palestinians do.

We think of groups that are close to us in Near Mode, judging them on their merits as useful allies or dangerous enemies. We think of more distant groups in Far Mode—usually exoticizing them. Sometimes it’s positive exoticization of the Noble Savage variety (so broadly construed that our treatment of Tibetans counts as an example of the trope). Other times it’s negative exoticization, treating them as cartoonish stereotypes of evil who are more funny or fascinating than repulsive. Take Genghis Khan—he was objectively one of the most evil people of all time, killing millions, but because we think of him in Far Mode he becomes fascinating or even perversely admirable—“wow, that was one impressively bloodthirsty warlord.” (Scott Alexander, “Post-partisanship is hyper-partisanship“)

Conservatives are the left’s outgroup, Muslims their fargroup. The fargroup can be ignored; large parts of the world are more sexist and racist than any part of America, but invisible to progressives campaigning against sexism and racism. The fargroup can even be supported, at least when the outgroup attacks it. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Muslim fundamentalists. Hamas.

Kamala Harris is an American leftist. American leftists are my outgroup. Trump and Vance are American populists. I disagree with their positions, in some cases more than I disagree with the positions of American leftists, but I have nothing against them, just as I have nothing against devout Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Black Muslims or Christian Science believers.

Trump and his movement are my fargroup. They are being attacked by my outgroup. The enemy of my enemy….

In an earlier post, I wrote that “Biden may be a decent human being” before describing him as “clearly corrupt.” A commenter wrote that he had trouble reconciling those two statements. That got me thinking about what makes me consider someone a decent human being. The answer I came up with is that I judge someone as a human being based on how they treat their ingroup. Treating their outgroup, their enemies, decently is more than you can reasonably expect.

Imagine a mafia don in his interactions with his own people. When one of them is murdered or sentenced to a long prison term, he makes sure that the man’s wife is supported and his children are taken care of. When the son of a loyal lieutenant gets into trouble with the police, the don uses his contacts to help him out of trouble. When the don makes promises to his people, he keeps them. He may be a murderer, directly or by second-hand evidence, but he is a decent man.

A real-life example is George Washington Plunkitt:

What you learn to do to keep your hold on your district is to go directly to the poor families and help them in whatever way they need help. I have a set system for this. For instance, if there is a fire on Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenues, at any time of the day or night, I am usually there with a couple of my district leaders as soon as the fire trucks arrive. If a family is burned, I do not ask them whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I do not refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide that they deserved help when they were starving. I simply give them quarters, buy them clothes if their clothes are burned, and patch them up until they are up and running again. It is philanthropy, but it is also politics—very good politics. Who knows how many votes I will get if I have a fire like that? The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhood than the rich have in their neighborhood. When there is a family in my district in need, I know it before the charities do, and I and my men are the first on the scene. I have a special corps to seek out such cases. The result is that the poor look up to George W. Plunkitt as a father, and come to him in trouble—and remember him on election day. (William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 6)

Plunkitt was corrupt—he boasted of holding four public offices at once and being paid for three of them. But he was, at least by his own description, a decent man.

As I write this, very civilized people are flying above me and trying to kill me.

They feel no animosity towards me as an individual, and I have no animosity towards them. They are “only doing their duty,” as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are good-natured, law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in their private lives. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never lose any sleep over it.” (George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” 1940.)

How is it possible that a man who does his best to help someone in need, to comfort a crying child, someone who is honest and honorable in his dealings, is also ready to plunder innocent strangers, to kill wounded enemies, to burn crops and barns? How can a man, apart from war, behave well to some strangers and badly to others, depending on race, religion, accent, nationality?

The answer, I think, is that we have (at least) three behavioral patterns for interacting with others that are hardwired into our brains: ingroup, outgroup, fargroup. The ingroup can be as close as immediate relatives, as broad as anyone who is not an enemy.

A society with high trust is a society in which a stranger automatically belongs to one’s own group and is treated as such.

“You come from the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is honor enough to lift up the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.” (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)

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