THE HIDDEN TRIBES
‘EXHAUSTED MAJORITY’ OF AMERICANS WANT TO GET ALONG, EXHAUSTIVE STUDY FINDS
As Donald Trump’s America continues what looks like a dizzying free fall into a dystopian grudge match pitting Democrats against Republicans, hinterland nativists against coastal cosmopolitans, and routine street brawls between the rightist Patriot Prayer gang and the window-smashing anarchoblackshirts of Antifa, it’s tempting to latch on to anything that looks like good tidings.
The ugly culture-war polarization that has enfeebled the United States has not made too much of a mark in Canada. At least not yet. So there’s that. But there’s something else. On some of the gnarliest points of contention, Canadians are not nearly as different from Americans as we might boast, and the good news is Americans are not nearly as dyspeptic and furious with one another as they seem.
You’d never know it from the cable news networks or the Facebook silos and Twitter mobs, and it might come as a bit of a surprise even if you pay close attention to the mainstays of American legacy journalism. But almost all of the shouting going on is confined to a minority of the whitest, wealthiest and best-educated Americans, of the “left” and the “right,” and their preoccupations, anxieties and excitements animate only about 14 per cent of the American political spectrum, at the extremes.
That’s one of the more striking findings in The Hidden Tribes of America, a project of Our Common Ground, a multidisciplinary project that brought together a team of academics with a range of civil society groups, educators, religious leaders and business organizations. Hidden Tribes is an analysis of 8,000 in-depth survey responses, six focus groups and 30 interviews across the seven “hidden tribe” population segments.
The project numbercrunched its way through all the popular boxing arenas, including immigration, “white privilege,” racism, feminism, climate change, guns, Islam, “political correctness,” health care, law enforcement, and similarly touchy subjects. The bad news: roughly one in four respondents said the differences between Americans are too great for them to work together anymore. Nevertheless, apart from the loudest noisemakers — the eight per cent from the “progressive activists” tribe and the six per cent the study classifies as “devoted conservatives” — almost everybody else is willing to listen to opposing viewpoints and to compromise.
The extremes of both left and right tend to demonize their enemies, believe their own propaganda and see little cause to distinguish selfserving facts from opinions. In between are “traditional conservatives,” who make up 19 per cent of Americans. They’re as hard-nosed as their “devoted” fellow travellers, but just not as engaged, and not nearly as intense. The “politically disengaged,” at 26 per cent, is the largest of the seven tribes. They’re distrustful and tend towards conspiracy theories, and they’re patriotic but pessimistic about progress.
Along with the politically disengaged, the remaining three — traditional liberals (11 per cent) passive liberals (15 per cent) and moderates (15 per cent) — make up what the Hidden Tribes authors describe as the “exhausted majority.” This crowd differs deeply within itself on any number of issues, but they’re united in one important respect. “They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.”
Overall, there are some surprising points of unity across the American political spectrum. Eighty per cent of respondents said political correctness is a problem — that “political correctness has gone too far.” That’s a view shared by liberals, moderates and conservatives, and 82 per cent of respondents overall said the same about hate speech in America. It’s a problem.
Two years ago, an Angus Reid survey found that a majority of Canadians, too — 76 per cent — agreed with the statement “political correctness has gone too far,” and the result wasn’t overly weighted by the over-55 crowd. Two-thirds of millennials said so too. Eight in 10 Americans say racism is a serious problem in the United States — but 85 per cent also say that race should not be taken into consideration in college admissions. In Canada, a 2017 Ipsos poll found that only about half of Canadians saw racism as a serious problem, down from 69 per cent in 1992.
Across the board in the Hidden Tribes survey, there was far greater disagreement between the tribes at the “wings” on issues related to women’s rights and sexual assault than the discrepancies on these issues between the views of men and women within the tribes. This would be expected. Unexpectedly, nearly half of Americans (47 per cent) say the rights of immigrants are “more protected than the rights of American citizens.” This weird view is held by 53 per cent of white respondents, and by about a third of Asian-Americans, blacks and HispanicAmericans.
In August, the Angus Reid Institute encountered a similarly unfavourable attitude among Canadians — 49 per cent of respondents wanted a reduction in the federal government’s target of 310,000 immigrants for 2018, up from 36 per cent who said so in 2014. A major concern among Canadians is that some immigrants are not integrating properly — a view largely shared by foreign-born Canadians and Canadians by birth.
A big difference: Americans are split down the middle on whether immigration is good for the United States in “helping sectors of our economy to be more successful and competitive,” while an Environics poll last month found 76 per cent of Canadians say that immigration has a “positive impact” on the economy. A reasonable explanation for the difference is simply that Canada’s immigration policy places a heavy emphasis on prospective immigrants’ employability.
Say what you like about Americans and their alleged xenophobia. At least they’re not French. Recent polling shows that only 18 per cent of French respondents agreed that immigration is good for the country. And say what you like about Trump, but he’s not the author of American polarization. He’s an ugly product of it.
In 2014, six years into Barack Obama’s presidency, the Pew Research Center found that partisan animosity and ideological division had sunk to a 20-year low, with nine out of 10 Republicans moving to the right of the median Democrat and nine of 10 Democrats tacking to the left of the median Republican, a state of affairs that now seems normal.
As for whether Trumpist ethnonationalism could ever take off in Canada, the odds seem slim. Canada has entrenched multiculturalism as a national virtue. One in five Canadians are foreign-born. And while the Liberals certainly pioneered multicultural policy and went on to master the art of harvesting the “ethnic vote,” by the 2015 federal election the Conservatives had won a higher share of the vote among immigrants than among the Canadians former prime minister Stephen Harper once described as the “old stock” variety.
But in politics, perception can create its own reality, and in the United States, polarization has become profitable. “Media executives have realized that they can drive clicks, likes, and views, and make money for themselves and their shareholders, by providing people with the most strident opinions,” the Hidden Tribes authors explain. “All this can make entertaining television and viral social media content. But it is distorting how we see each other, fracturing our society, and adding to distortions in our political system that give undue weight to the most extreme views.”
THE EXTREMES TEND TO DEMONIZE THEIR ENEMIES.