‘Us and Them’

On polarization in our time, and all times.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

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Before Donald J. Trump and Trumpism, there was Patrick J. Buchanan and Buchananism. In 1995, William J. Bennett was talking with The New Yorker about Buchanan.

Bennett, you recall, had been a secretary of education under Reagan, and he was a leading light of what was then known as “neoconservatism.”

Buchanan, said Bennett, was “flirting” with fascism. He had a black-and-white view of the world: there were friends and there were enemies, period. “A real us-and-them kind of thing,” said Bennett.

When the article came out, The New Yorker had mistranscribed Bennett’s remark: “A real S & M kind of thing.”

Oops. This caused great hilarity among some of us.

We are definitely living in an us-and-them time. With social media—and the media at large—everyone is in his own “silo,” hearing his own point of view, to the exclusion of others. People worry about “polarization.”

This worrying can be overdone. A free society involves rough-and-tumble, and divisions will be sharp. I am of the school that says, “Beware calls for national unity. The callers may well mean, ‘Unify on my terms. Get with my program.’”

In a bracing essay, published a month ago, Simone Sepe put in a word for polarization—or at least the allowance of these sharp divisions. Sepe is a professor of law at the University of Toronto, and his essay was published by the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona.

The essay’s title? It borrows from a now-classic movie of 2007: There Will Be Blood.

All of Sepe’s essay should be read and pondered, but I will quote only the final words: “There will be polarization. There will be ideas. There will be blood.”

Sure—but let it not be too overflowing or too literal. (Sepe, needless to say, agrees with this.) Our society is cursed by violence, as we saw again a few days ago with another assassination attempt on President Trump.

In 2020, David French published a book called Divided We Fall. His working title had been The Great American Divorce. His subtitle is America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. His answer, in a word, is “pluralism”—a renewed appreciation of this important concept.

In the American house are many mansions, so to speak. But they all exist under one constitutional, liberal-democratic roof.

French highlights an academic paper that does nothing less than “explain America,” he says. That paper is “The Law of Group Polarization,” by Cass Sunstein, published in 1999. Its author was then at the University of Chicago Law School and since 2008 has been at Harvard Law.

In French’s summation, this is the law of group polarization: “When people of like mind gather, they tend to become more extreme.”

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Last week, I talked with Professor Sunstein in a podcast. We discussed a range of issues, including this old devil polarization, and its law.

In the 1990s, said Sunstein, he and collaborators studied jury behavior. They found that juries tended to be more outraged at corporate misconduct than their individual members were. In other words, the jury as a group was more outraged than its median member.

Sunstein went on to study political preferences among Coloradans. When left-of-center people got together to talk, they became more extreme, and the same happened on the right. Internal disagreements or nuances were muted; confidence increased (perhaps a misguided confidence).

A person on his own was more moderate than a person in a group—a person with his tribe.

When Sunstein was explaining all this to me, I thought, I swear, of Saeb Erekat, the longtime negotiator for the PLO. I encountered him one winter in Davos, where he spoke to a group of us journalists.

His fellow Palestinians in groups, he told us, would say to him, “Why are you bothering with these Israelis? Why are you even talking to them? Palestine is ours, from the river to the sea!”

But as individuals, when no one else was looking, they would scurry up to him and say, “Dr. Erekat, we are so tired of living like this. Can’t you bring us peace?”

Not to go all Charles Darwin on you, but tribalism is natural in man, and you can no more stop it than you can stop the tide. Some tribalism is healthful, I dare say. Think of sports rivalries, with their colors, fight songs, and war chants.

But even these rivalries can get out of hand. I have observed this in my home state of Michigan, with increasing enmity between Wolverines and Spartans.

Returning to politics, I think of a recurring phrase: “one of us.” Nixon used it. “Is he one of us?” he would ask. Tom Wicker published a biography of Nixon titled One of Us.

Margaret Thatcher used the phrase, too. There is a delicious anecdote about her (its veracity aside). Aides wanted her to draw on a sketch from Monty Python, the famous comedy troupe. Thatcher was not known for her knowledge of popular culture. She said, “Now, this Monty Python: is he one of us?”

Hugo Young published a biography of Thatcher: One of Us.

In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign aired a television ad that I considered ugly. It ended with the words, “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”

I myself used “one of us” for many years. I was on the board of a foundation that sought to promote diversity on college campuses by backing conservative programs on those campuses.

And by “conservative,” I mean, mainly, “liberal,” or “classical liberal.” We were interested in free markets, Great Books, Bach cantatas, and all that other square stuff.

The nature or success of a program often depends on a particular faculty member. And I would inquire of our board’s executive director: “Is he one of us?”

I blush a little, but only a little. We all have our affinities, including political affinities. If I have a tribe, it is Reagan conservatives, who could occupy about three teepees these days.

My usual line is, “We could hold our convention at a modest-sized Denny’s.”

But my greater tribe is the American republic, and my still greater tribe is liberal democracy, as in the Renew Democracy Initiative, whose publication you are reading.

I want us all to argue vehemently—even fight like hell—but “within institutional bounds,” as Simone Sepe says in his “there will be blood” essay. Under the roof of democracy, in the atmosphere of ordered liberty.

Have all the “us and them” you want—but remember that there is an ultimate “us” with common rights and a common home.

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