Fairness rooted in tribal identity

I want to talk about the recent vandalism of statues honoring Christopher Columbus in Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk and Middletown. Before I do, I want to introduce you to an idea you may not be familiar with. It’s called the moral foundations theory.

The moral foundations theory was developed by social psychologists to explain the moral underpinnings of human behavior. It has evolved into a fascinating explanation for differences in political ideology. Why do conservatives believe what they do? Why do liberals? The moral foundations theory attempts to answer these questions.

There are at least five moral foundations, but I’m going to focus on just one: loyalty. Loyalty is strongly associated with the identity of the group you belong to — or the “in-group.” Many people perceive the world entirely through a lens of in-group loyalty.

For instance: When in-group loyalists accuse reporters of bias, they are not accusing reporters of bias. They are accusing reporters of not being in the in-group. The reporter’s reporting can be dismissed solely on the perception that the reporter is not part of the in-group. If the reporter is not part of the in-group, they doubt her ability to be fair.

Conservative people tend to be more receptive to appeals to ingroup loyalty than liberals do. For this reason, conservatives tend to view fairness as benefiting exclusively the in-group, not the outgroup. Liberals, on the other hands, tend to view fairness as needing to apply equally to everyone for the term to have any meaning.

This is why Laura Ingraham, the Fox News commentator who strongly supports Donald Trump, can accuse Hollywood of being a place where having “an Oscar dangling in the background” is license to commit sexual assault, even though the president has admitted to a similar crime for a similar reason. This may seem like rank hypocrisy, and it is, but to Ingraham and in-group loyalists, it make sense. Fairness isn’t democratic. Instead, it’s rooted in tribal identity.

Fairness isn’t the only value subordinate to tribal identity. So is civil discourse, the heart of political participation in a democracy. Why debate policies if politics can be understood as a matter of loyalty? Why bother debating how to remember a 14th century Italian explorer if the answer lies in the difference between us and them? Personally, I get it.

Some people don’t like our honoring Columbus, because in doing so, we honor crimes against humanity. (Columbus committed atrocities against the native people he met in the Caribbean; there is substance to the anti-fascist’s complaint). Hearst Connecticut Media quoted Scott Crow, a former antifa organizer, saying: “You figure that Columbus has a legacy of slavery and a legacy of domination. Do we want people to go into parks and revere statues of mass murderers or do we want to put up statues of people who actually did good things?”

But I get something else: antifascist groups claiming responsibility for vandalizing statues in four Connecticut towns over the weekend are not engaging in a political debate. They are in a real sense attacking political debate itself. In other words, they are demagoguing.

It sounds strange to say antifascists have something in common with conservatives, but it should not in light of moral foundations theory. Just as conservatives tend to subordinate democratic principles to in-group loyalty, so do anti-fascists. Put another way, anti-fascist are against fascism and white supremacy. That’s good. They are also against democracy. That’s bad. We should not tolerate it.

Fortunately, we don’t. A tolerant society must defend itself against intolerance even if doing so requires acts of intolerance. That isn’t hypocrisy. As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, it’s a paradox. Antifa operates outside the law. If and when it comes in, it can help elect public officials to take down Columbus statues or aggressively lobby incumbents to do the same. Of course, in participating in civil discourse, anti-fascists would have to abandon their anti-democratic tendencies. Consequently, they’d stop being what they are.

If only that were the case with some conservatives. What do we do about a president who said Wednesday that it’s “disgusting the press is able to write whatever it wants to write.” That’s demagoguery: don’t attack ideas; attack the deliberation of ideas. What can be done?

I don’t know more than anymore else, but I know this:

The answer is not more demagoguery.

Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media