by Tobin Smith
With Fox News there is a visceral tribal connection—especially for the Retro American viewers who are also living with their own set of other visceral traumas. One of the most profound ironies I discovered in researching this book is the true epidemic we suffer from today is not tribalism but the reverse—it’s the lack of tribal connection. Our caveman DNA and instincts drive us to be social, relational, connected tribal beings. When we are emotionally disconnected from too many human beings, it’s traumatizing.
Note: If you don’t believe Hari or me, take an hour and go visit a senior living facility. Not one of those fancy eight grand a month ones with twenty-five activities per day and an open bar and three gourmet meals and desserts per day. Go to a real one.
We are still animals with brains that are driven to connect—and Hari defines connection as “the feeling of oneness” with other people or tribes. We still need to belong to viscerally nurturing tribes, communal groups, or communities not for personal safety like our ancestors but for our psychological well-being. Hari’s decades of work in the fields of trauma and mental health tell him the root of almost everything we suffer through is actually a severed connection or lost oneness we never figured out how to repair.
Fox News tribal activation and validation programming is a very real and visceral way for self-identified conservatives to feel connection and oneness at a cultural and political tribal level. There in fact is no place on earth that a self-identified conservative can have the “experience of oneness” like Fox News, because Hari further defines experiencing oneness as “having shared experiences, relatable feelings, or similar ideas.”
Follow me here: If the biggest problem in most people’s lives (especially in Retro America) is unresolved trauma, and unresolved trauma is what creates a damaged ability in people to connect with others—that makes Fox News’s tribal activation and validation programming by definition a very real kind of psychological connective tissue for self-identified conservatives!
For people who feel like they are a card-carrying member of the right-wing political tribe, Fox News’s opinion programming is selling them the experience of digital oneness—and that is a hell of a lot better than none at all.
Boiled down beyond the bleach-blond hair and “Fox News Alert” crawl on the bottom of the screen, for self-identified conservative tribal members, Fox News is the experience of oneness Hari tells us we all desperately seek at a very core psychological level. Fox News opinion programming is, of course, 100 percent written, directed, and produced for people who (1) do share similar experiences (especially life in small city/rural America) and (2) have very relatable lives and feelings, and have by definition very similar political, cultural, and economic ideas and worldviews, and very likely share Retro America’s ideological religiosity and belief systems.
The other important concept I learned in researching this book is social and humanist psychologists tell us a very significant part of our mental health and well-being comes from the constant replenishment of our social capital. They define social capital as meaningful connections—the experience of oneness that flows from our membership and interactions in small intimate tribes or communities of family, friendships, our worship community, our work colleagues, and those who we connect with via our shared communal passions (hunting or golf buddies, tailgating crew, bridge clubs, or simply pals at our favorite local pub).
When we don’t have the true oneness of human connections—an abundance of these nurturing people, relationships, and tribes in our lives that help us overcome our traumas—we are driven by human nature to seek replacements where we can find them.
What is addictive about experiencing tribal oneness on Fox News? Is it the powerful brain chemicals that the righteous tribal victory release which make you feel literally high? Is it the connection of tribal oneness? Both?
Hari’s work explained to me like no other that the disease that fuels the addictive power of Fox News’s tribal identity and validation pornography—an addiction that is literally poisoning relationships for tens of millions of Americans—is not tribalism. The disease that fuels the attraction and addiction to Fox News tribal identity programming is a toxic mix of corrosive traumas that are unfortunately prevalent and widely shared today in America’s twenty-first century:
First, we have the widespread economic trauma incurred by the dysfunction of America’s twenty-first-century version of capitalism which no longer works for nearly two-thirds of America’s non-college-degreed working-class families as it did in the 1970s and ’80s.
Then we have the traumatic contempt for the “elites” who got bailed out of the Great Recession and made out like bandits in the recovery while the working class suffered the stunning economic trauma of foreclosed homes and ruined small businesses (BTW psychologists are united in declaring the emotion of contempt as the most corrosive human emotion, along with jealousy).
Perhaps the most powerful and corrosive trauma in America today is the traumatic disassembly of our social support fabric. These are the nurturing family, friends, and jobs moving away from the regions of America still based on past-their-shelf-life twentieth-century economics that in many ways resemble failed nation economies.
We also have the trauma of premature death of close family and friends that has come to many regions of still-twentieth-century America with declining life expectancy (regions which not coincidently overlap Fox News/Trump TV country).
And for the financially well-off business conservatives I call “country club Republicans,” there are the coincident unresolved rage-based traumas of “not recognizing their country anymore” and the conundrum of being repeatedly labeled a morally deficient “racist/homophobe/Islamaphobe/etc.” by their sworn tribal enemy the “socialist liberal idiots” who tells everyone they are the “party of tolerance” but in practice are only tolerant of people who share their social and cultural liberal worldview.
America has a boatload of unresolved fear and outrage based trauma. And all of the twenty-first-century traumas listed above collectively result in a true national epidemic of emotional disconnection and vastly depleted stores of mentally and spiritually nourishing social capital for America’s working- and middle-class conservatives.
This has driven many Fox News viewers to seek the self-reinforcing digital feedback loop pioneered by Fox News as a working man’s digital companion and “virtual connection,” replacing personal relationships gone forever.
The evidence of America’s running-on-empty social capital depletion phenomenon is unfortunately seen firsthand in Fox News’s America today. One clear unambiguous lesson from the elections of 2016 and 2018 is that President Trump and his fellow Republican candidates win in the zip codes where white voters feel they are losing their economic and social status.
Fox News is able to wage its tribalized political civil war on today’s nonstop digital battlefield and tap into these corrosive emotions not because tribalized politics or tribal warfare is going to make its one hundred million monthly users’ lives any better. Remember, a coping mechanism for dealing with unresolved trauma is just temporary and not a cure. As Senator Ben Sasse so correctly points out in Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal:
“If only we could vanquish those evil people waving a different banner, this thinking goes, we’d be on the road to national recovery. But nothing that happens in Washington is going to fix what’s wrong with America. It’s not that our battles over the Supreme Court, over issues like taxes and regulation and immigration don’t matter. They matter a lot. The problem is that our ever more ferocious political tribalism and mutual hatred don’t originate in politics, so politics isn’t going to heal them.” Our tribalism, Sasse concludes, “Has a deeper source in the disintegration of communities and loneliness.”
Ben Sasse is dead right. Fox News is more than happy to fill right-wing society’s void of meaningful connection and to provide faux shared tribal relationships. It’s happy to supplement the daily fear and rag
e fed trauma of dissolving household economics or lost identities. The truth is Foxism and Trumpism are both selling you the same thing: a digital tribal identity badge and a self-esteem building valued “social identity.”
The reason that tribal political activation and validation pornography works so incredibly powerfully is because it gives its viewers two things they desperately need: (1) someone to blame for their dissolving lifestyle or livelihood and (2) a way to rebuild some of their lost self-esteem and social capital with a powerful new social identity. And for many for whom “proud conservative” was their proud ID has come a new badge of honor—“proud Deplorable.”
Key Point: the awful truth in 2019 is this: for about 66 percent of Americans, traditional tribes and Industrial-Age skillsets that sustained and nurtured them in the past are both in collapse.
In addition, according to a large national survey of adults recently conducted by the health insurer Cigna and the market research firm Ipsos, a majority of Americans are now chronically lonely, based on the industry standard UCLA Loneliness Scale.
So there you have it. In a country with collapsing personal connections, depleting social capital reserves, and widespread unresolved economic trauma, in stepped Fox News with its weaponized brand of tribal identity activation and validation pornography. Fox News’s televangelists give right-wing tribalists a much-needed self-esteem booster shot and a welcome rest stop from their unresolved traumas. These tribal heroes viscerally connect with people desperately in need of feeling a part of something bigger than themselves. They provide a heaping side of tribal inclusion and identity superiority.
Psychologically . . . the Fox News Tribal Warfare Playbook is friggin’ brilliant. No one in the punditry or media I have read or met has really come to grips with why FNC’s hypnotic tribal identity activation is so psychologically powerful.
One answer I learned is FNC’s emotionally arousing tribal identity porn is as close to a meaningful “visceral oneness” as tens of millions of largely disconnected Americans running low on connection/high on trauma are going to get today. Senator Sasse gets it close when he says: “None of us wants to be left out. The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. . . . Even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections, at least our cable news tribes offer the common shared experience of getting to hate people together. As relational nomads, it’s far easier now to be together against something than for something. It’s not as fulfilling, but at least we’re not totally alone.”
At the very least (or unfortunately for many, the very most), what Fox News’s fear-and-hate based tribal identity activation and validation opinion programming offers its audience is the appearance or a digital construct of a shared oneness. It’s like sitting around a digital campfire of communal victimhood and sharing the ironically healing shared experience of communally hating the 40 percent of Americans who don’t belong to your tribe as a team sport (with a special place in traumatic hell for the liberal elites who created your economic trauma).
Too dark? Let me ask you this—do you live in a town or county that is economically failing? Do you live one or two paychecks or one illness/lost job away from moving in with your relatives? Can you write a rent check or car payment from your bank balance? Is your life expectancy 25 percent less than mine? Are your kids in a great school or college? Do you live behind a gate or a triple bolted front door?
I thought so.
Next question: Why so much communal shared hate of the socioeconomic elites/others? Today the answer is simple and has been staring us in the face for thirty years: Beginning in the early 1980s but accelerating in the twenty-first century, America has achieved a unique to the modern world status. We’ve created the world’s first working poverty class, now afflicting over 110 million Americans.
It’s only been since June 2018 that macroeconomic nerds like me have had state-by-state research available that confirms what most folks who live in the top 20 percent never see in their day-to-day latte/yoga/Amazon delivery cocoons: 40 million American households white, black, and brown (and over 110 million Americans) live today in “working poverty.”
America invented working poverty—we are the only modern economy to have it to this degree. These ALICE Households—Asset Light/Income Constrained/Employed—where total household income is above the poverty line but below the median $61,000, live in constant unresolved fear and rage trauma because they know that they are one car accident, layoff, or illness away from the street or a relative’s basement. America’s 110 million ALICE household members are economically traumatized on almost a daily or weekly basis.
You want to have an honest discussion about how widespread deeply toxic economic trauma is in America today? Let’s start with obvious—the 110 million members of these 40 million households sure could use a big ol’ self-esteem boost these days because their twentieth-century skillset in twenty-first-century knowledge-based capitalism is mostly not working for them like it used to.
They are also living 20 percent shorter lives, are much more likely to commit suicide or die of an overdose, and only 30 percent of their kids will make it to college.
Well then voila—for the white working poor enter Fox News’s socioeconomic blame and resentment porn content and hourly visual proof of the elite libtard culprits who they blame for causing the massive disintegration of the blue-collar middle class. Socioeconomic background is now the core basis for America’s divide in the twenty-first century—and Fox News has weaponized this socioeconomic division in spades.
You would think Fox News invented the term “elite” since it’s used a hundred times a day on air in their tribal blame and resentment porn performance art. In fact, it was the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam who first identified the top third and bottom two-thirds schism of America’s new twenty-first-century socioeconomics.
But starting from the 1980s to today, the introduction of a once-a-century economic transition from the post-World War II Industrial Age to the twenty-first century digital powered knowledge and information economy cleaved an even wider divide between the family structure, educational achievement, and economic prospects of this top third of American elites (to me better defined as the 33 percent of Americans over twenty-five with a college degree) and the bottom two-thirds of American households headed by non-college-degreed adults twenty-five and older.
Now I’m sorry to add to this toxic gumbo of traumatic economic events, but recent research by the Brookings Institute about the risk of the already precariously employed losing their blue-collar working-class jobs to automation and artificial intelligence in the Wall Street Journal paints an even bleaker near-term future. According to the Brookings Institute, “As technology drives people out of the middle class, economists say, it’s pushing them in one of two directions. Those with the right skills or education graduate into a new technological elite. Everyone else falls into the ranks of the “precariat”—the precariously employed, a workforce in low-wage jobs with few benefits or protections, where roles change frequently as technology transforms the nature of work.”
In a ghoulish way, more economic trauma (which leads to more familial trauma and less emotionally nourishing connective oneness) is music to the ears of Fox News. It’s guaranteed job security for their tribal activation/righteous validation televangelists too. “The economy has changed radically, but the American social model hasn’t,” says Mark Muro, an author of the Brookings report. “Coincident with all this automation is the erosion of government benefits that might make the precariousness of some of these positions more tolerable.”
Don’t shoot the messenger here—it was of course the Fox News fueled Republicans that voted to cut corporate taxes 40 percent and cut Medicaid and ACA benefits to the ALICE cohort that contains more white working-class households than any other ethnic/racial class.
Economic irony is a bitch, ain’t it? And the vic
ious circle of downward economic gravity spirals down. Social scientist Richard Florida of the University of Toronto puts a finer distinction on US socioeconomics today with his three categories of households: the “mobile” and the “rooted” one-third and the “stuck” which represents the bottom two-thirds. The mobile are those who can afford to move to areas with more opportunity; the rooted are those who have the means to move but choose to stay. The stuck are those who lack the resources or education to have these options—and other than winning the lottery they have no realistic choices to make. Guess what, sports fans—the members of the bottom two-thirds of America economically are literally stuck in declining economic regions, with declining life expectancy and declining prospects in general for what the upper one-third would consider the basic essentials of a self-actualizing middle-class lifestyle.
They are the two-thirds of America without a college degree, a valuable twenty-first-century skill, or a stable dual-income household. Odds are overwhelming that they do not reside in the prospering fifteen super urban regions of America that now account for nearly 70 percent of America’s $20 trillion annual GDP and 48 percent of its population.
My point? The upshot here is the vast majority of these ALICE households live in the same economically traumatized, at-risk 2,626 counties that voted Trump in 2016. The senior aged ones are the primary target audience for Fox News socioeconomic blame and resentment porn programming.
As mentioned, to understand the power of tribal activation porn, you have to think of people for a second as body comprised of different reservoirs of emotionally sustaining feelings and emotional draining trauma. Social psychologists tell me that for many Americans today, political group identity has become too large a part of their overall identity and self-esteem.