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Both tribes think the enemy is united while their own team is involved in constant internecine conflict. I think there is something to this, that both observations are half right, but that the apparent symmetry is merely a lack of distinction between where enforcement occurs, where the lines are drawn.
Trump demands absolute loyalty from his servants. His will is absolute. You may disagree, but nonetheless must carry out his commands. Even a whiff of disloyalty is punished swiftly with a removal from power. But people on the right are permitted to believe almost anything at all. There is no ideological coherence in the movement. Trump himself believes in almost nothing. Whore mongering pimps, psychopathic industrialists, and cultural Muslims will break bread with techno feudalists, orthodox Christians, and entho nationalists.
Democrats get absolutely no loyalty from their servants. Bernie Sanders can have his rally commandeered by random loud black women. Obama and Biden can be decried as war criminals for carrying out ordinary presidential duties. Biden can have his entire presidency undermined by professional staff who think they know better than him. He can have the entire blue team apparatus flagellate him for exercising the presidential pardon for his own son. But a New York Times journalist needs to put a five paragraph prostration that they totally don't hate trans people before an article suggesting that maybe the particular style of affirmative care currently used to treat dysphoria is causing patients some harm. A member in good standing on the left must believe all the right things and endorse them full-throatedly or they shall be forever removed from polite society.
The right demands submission of the will. The left demands submission of the self.
The inability to properly simulate the world as individual actors with different views and values even when they're allied together into groups is one major cause of this. Low mental processing skills + social pressure towards tribalism + an extremely complex mental simulation makes for easy failure. It's so complex that failure can happen sometimes even among smart people who otherwise understand the concept.
I call it "hivemindism" but I'm sure there's some more proper term out there. The tendency to treat groups as though they too were an individual leading to the Goomba fallacy. The tendency towards collective punishment cause the one in power can not understand (or can not be bothered to care about) the individuals within. The tendency to relying heavily on stereotypes and other cognitive shortcuts instead of taking each person as they are. The Chinese robber fallacy is a great example of this too, but it can also be something like "group is .2% more likely to be X" so they are actually more likely, but not enough that anything meaningfully changes either (like even if trans mass shooters were at higher rates, it would still be a pittance of trans people because mass shooters are extremely extremely rare.)
Some of this hivemindism is people doing it to themselves. Tribalistic idiots with low processing skills often seem to fail at understanding they too are individuals within their group, and this leads to things like being surprised when the "enemy list" expands to include them or being unable to accept that those Scottish criminals are in fact still True Scotsman even if they are a non criminal Scotmans. For instance the horde of internet commentators that always pops up during a political violence event to claim "that's not a liberal" or "that's not a conservative".
There are pockets of the internet still trying to claim that the Minnesota politician shooter was hired by Walz, or that Robinson is a conservative Republican or that the Nancy Pelosi attacker was a gay lover or other nonsense conspiracies because they simply can not fathom that out of millions of people, not every single one can be expected to be an angel.
And this poor reasoning is what leads to things like Trump pardoning literal cop beaters. It's easy to say that he must just support political violence if it's done in his name, but it's more likely the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies since the start simply can not fathom that some people who support him might be bad. He defaults to the conspiracy and false flags because there is no other explanation he can comprehend for why a supporter of his might have misbehaved.
Scott Alexander talked about this type of phenomenon over a decade ago https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/
And I agree with that, it is genuinely dumber than even ad hominem and yet ridiculously common.
Trump is incredibly petty and targets people with his hate and insults all the time for minor disagreements or push back and this has a genuine silencing effect. Like there's only a handful of Republican politicians who have pushed back openly on tariffs or stuff like his price controls and expansion of the executive power and and this is from the historic "free trade party" and "party of small government", and those politicians are mostly the libertarians like Rand Paul and the retiring ones like Tillis.
To extend this a little bit, though, if we're going to care about proper modeling, I think it's important to understand that there are forces pushing individuals towards tribalism besides idiocy.
I think there's this idea that tribalism is, basically, ancient grug-style lizard-brained thinking, and that in more recent and temperate times we've learned that trade and cooperation is better through the use of our ascended reasoning faculties, but due to the lizard hindbrain, or something, tribalism keeps rearing its ugly head.
However this story is mostly nonsense. About as far back as you can go in the historical record, you find that people were extremely well aware that trade and cooperation were extremely lucrative. Archeologists are continually surprised at the length and depth of ancient trade networks. The ability to model minds that have different values and priorities to search out modes of cooperation isn't a new innovation; it's a very old pattern of human behavior.
Tribalistic thinking exists because sometimes the other tribe actually does want to kill you.
And when this happens, switching over to a simplified model of "those guys are evil and want to kill me" is useful because modeling other minds requires a lot of cognitive bandwidth and your primary cognitive concern right now is to get and not get got.
Furthermore, switching back out from that model to a cooperate-trade-understand mentality as soon as you start winning and the other guys show up and say "we're not that different, you and I, don't all our mothers love us? This is all a misunderstanding, we just want to trade and live peaceably" is a profound failure to model other minds, because that's the oldest trick in the book and if you don't model the possibility that the other guy is actually evil and still wants to kill you and part of his evil murderous intent extends to "lying to you" you're a sucker.
Sometimes, tribalistic idiot types overfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, dismiss the possibility that it was all a big misunderstanding, and perpetuate conflict unnecessarily. Sometimes, ascended galaxy-brained intelligent times underfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, eagerly agree that it was all a big misunderstanding, and are promptly killed by their evil enemies.
The highest path of wisdom is to understand others so thoroughly that you can understand when the enemy actually wants to kill you and when they genuinely want to find the path to peace. But this means that the wise person sometimes sounds no different than the naive cooperators...and that sometimes he sounds no different than the idiotic tribalists.
Finally, I think this model suggests why sometimes really smart people seem to become tribal idiots (or naive cooperators). If you put a ton mental work into understanding the other side, it's easy to just sit on your laurels and turn your mind towards winning the war/seizing the peace. As you point out, "the other side" is almost always comprised of different groups, and it is almost always in flux. This means that an accurate understanding of the other side, or your own, if not updated, can quickly become woefully insufficient. But building and maintaining an accurate model is time-consuming work, and it's no surprise that many smart people do not have the time or inclination to do so.
I agree with most of this, but I think one of the primary failure modes of the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" line of reasoning is that, within a single modern day society, those other guys can't kill you. Nor can you kill them. At least not at any meaningful scale. This is where the lizard brain short circuits.
In prehistoric times (the times our brains are optimized for), once your group had decided another group was dangerous, you tried to kill them. And they tried to kill you. One side succeeded and then moved on. The loser was either dead, enslaved, or driven far away. Even a couple hundred years ago, intra-society tribal feuds could result in things like civil wars and pogroms. But in modern western societies, there is no such mechanism. Look at how bent out of shape society got after 2 people were killed by sectarian violence.
So we have two sides that have gone from grudging cooperation to full on "we need to fight, this is an enemy" mode. But no matter how hard you fight, the enemy is still there. You can pass laws and change policies, but the enemy is just sitting there watching, getting angrier and angrier. I don't know what a modern resolution to this type of schism looks like.
I mean - I agree that people overfit the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" model, but I absolutely don't agree that violence is a thing of the past.
Well, it can look like full-scale socio-cultural domination by one side by measures short of disorganized violence, until the other side is either decisively beaten or practically driven extinct or at least underground by social pressure and/or state action ("legitimate violence.") The Civil Rights Movement achieved this sort of victory (at least for a time - perhaps not for all time, however).
But I think modern western societies are fully capable of flipping to violence to resolve the problem instead. Ireland's independence was a successful use of this; less successful attempts, such as by Puerto Rican or Quebecois separatists, didn't manage to garner enough support and critical mass and are thus not really remembered as anything besides some low level terrorist violence.
Even in the case of Ireland, the violence just swayed opinion. It didn't actually kill off or pacify enough of the losing demographic to affect the outcome; that requires the "old" prehistoric type of violence. Iran's crackdown has been more in that vein than anything we do. Newer violence is mostly just a PR move.
The civil rights movement is interesting in that it was the starting point for this whole conflict. But I don't know if it tells us too much about how it ends. At the risk of dramatizing it a bit, the historical arc as I see it looks like this:
You start with a system that is pretty blatantly unfair (encoded in law, rigidly enforced etc) to the various groups that make up the current woke pantheon. You also have a rich, quickly advancing society (US circa 1960s) that has every reason to be optimistic about the future. In an environment like that, it's easy to convince the majority of people that it's only fair to make life better for those on the bottom rungs. People are generous when their bellies are full.
Then the organizations and institutions that were built around helping those groups end up winning. They achieve their goals. But careers have been built around this. Huge fund raising networks exist. Do you just set everything down and walk away when you're done? Of course not. You find new problems. Maybe not as big, but problems none the less.
Go through a few dozen iterations of that, and you end up where we are now. We aren't nearly as prosperous and optimistic anymore. These movements have taken on the characteristics of religions, complete with crazed zealots running around attacking non believers. In a situation like that, you suddenly get backlash. Small and isolated at first, and then suddenly huge. The wokes/SJWs try to fight back, expecting the same up-swell of support they got back in the 60s, but it's not there. Nobody under the age of 70 even remembers segregation. But we all remember not being able to get some perk because we don't tick the right intersectional boxes.
Religious zealots don't usually put down their scourges willingly. And religious beliefs are pretty hard to change if they've become the bedrock of one's morality. But the bulk of society is no longer willing to play along with the SJW fantasies about living in the 60s. Normally, the birth of a new religion has gone hand in hand with a violent struggle against whatever existing institutions it encountered. But if that's not able to happen....then what will?
While there absolutely were cases in the past that involved wholesale slaughter, my understanding is that a lot of "old" prehistoric type violence was also "a PR move," - often very ritualized and fairly safe, with focus on glory and not necessarily lethality. For instance, the point of "counting coup" was specifically not to kill the enemy. I don't really think it's correct to suggest that the "old" way of doing things was "high lethality" and we've slumped into a newer "low lethality" culture; rather I think the type of violence that occurs depends a lot on the specifics of a culture, situation, technology level, etc.
This I think is absolutely correct (and insightful).
See, I'm just not sure this hasn't happened. (I'm also not sure that's really correct of new religions but that's a different question.) The violence might involve more ritual, more PR, less violent, but I don't think it's correct to say that either the BLM-era protests or the recent anti-ICE protests were entirely nonviolent. And you can trace the violent strain in contemporary American left-wing thinking back further, at least to the extremely violent 1970s "Days of Rage" if not before.
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Quebecois separatists managed to get some major concessions from Canada to placate them, so I'd consider them at least partially successful. Not really aware of any major concessions to Puerto Rico though.
Thank you! I will admit to not being very familiar with all of that.
What I do find interesting about Ireland was how relatively little violence separatists had to engage in to succeed. There were relatively few deaths - it's been a while, but I seem to recall looking up the per capita homicide rate and finding that it was lower than in a major US metro area at the same time (although the IRA favored bombs, which tend to maim many more than they kill, so one could argue that looking at deaths is understating the violence.) If the Quebecois were able to get something meaningful that seems like another data point in that direction.
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