Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Trump is as much an opportunist as a tribalist; he won the presidency by having an intuitive, instinctive grasp of how to inflame and exploit our tribal divide. His base is therefore more fanatically loyal and his policy views even more, shall we say, flexible than Clinton’s. His recent dealings with the Democratic congressional leadership have flummoxed party leaders and disrupted our political storytelling. That’s something worth celebrating. His new openness to trade legislating DACA in return for stronger immigration enforcement is especially good news. If Trump is right that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him, he’s surely uniquely capable of cutting deals with the Democrats while keeping much of the Republican base in line (and kneecapping Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell). Two new polls back this up. Rasmussen found that 72 percent of Republican voters support Trump’s working with Democrats; YouGov found that Republicans backed Trump’s deal with Schumer and Pelosi by 62 to 18 percent.

  The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide? Maybe it’s no longer a complete fantasy that they might even find a compromise that reforms the Affordable Care Act while allowing Trump to claim he replaced it—and use that as a model for further collaboration. But if Democratic leaders choose to de-escalate our tribal war rather than to destroy their political nemesis, would their base revolt?

  Or maybe we can just reassure ourselves that our tribalism is mainly a function of the older generation’s racial and cultural panic and we will slowly move through and past it. Maybe Trump’s victory is just one last hurrah of an older, whiter American identity that we can outlast without a cathartic crisis or conflict. One trouble with this hopefulness is that “whiteness” is a subjective term. It’s possible that more Latinos will identify as white in the future, as other immigrant minorities have over time, thereby maintaining our tribal balance. It’s also possible that our ethnic and cultural divide could very much worsen in the meantime, especially as the demise of the old white majority becomes closer to statistical reality. White Christians are panicked and paranoid about religious freedom now. How will they feel when vastly more secular and multiracial generations come to power? And if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

  Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this—globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism—will weaken. The rhetorical extremes have already been pushed further than most of us thought possible only a couple of years ago, and the rival camps are even more hermetically sealed. In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

  As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality. I don’t mean individualism. Nothing is more conducive to tribalism than a sea of disconnected, atomized individuals searching for some broader tribe to belong to. I mean valuing the unique human being—distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered. That we expanded the space for this to flourish is one of the greatest achievements of the West.

  Perhaps I’m biased because I’m an individual by default. I’m gay but Catholic, conservative but independent, a Brit but American, religious but secular. What tribe would ever have me? I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

  And, at some point, we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was. In Colombia earlier this month, as a fragile peace agreement met public opposition, Pope Francis insisted that grudges be left behind: “All of us are necessary to create and form a society. This isn’t just done with the ‘pure-blooded’ ones, but rather with everyone. And here is where the greatness of the country lies, in that there is room for all and all are important.” If societies scarred by recent domestic terrorism can aim at this, why should it be so impossible for us?

  But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either-or rather than a complicated both-and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

  Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry, and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear. Equally, many minorities and women face genuine blocks to their advancement because of subtle and unsubtle bias, and it is not mere victim mongering. We also don’t have to deny African American agency in order to account for the historic patterns of injustice that still haunt an entire community. We need to recall that most immigrants are simply seeking a better life, but also that a country that cannot control its borders is not a country at all. We’re rightly concerned that religious faith can easily lead to intolerance, but we needn’t conclude that having faith is a pathology. We need not renounce our cosmopolitanism to reengage and respect those in rural America, and we don’t have to abandon our patriotism to see that the urban mix is also integral to what it means to be an American today. The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

  All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy—if we really want to keep it.

  Kaepernick’s Message Is Getting Lost—Along with the Facts on Race and Police Violence

  September 29, 2017 | NEW YORK magazine

  In all the NFL kerfuffle, we’ve lost sight, it seems to me, of precisely why Colin Kaepernick and now many others have been kneeling. He’s not kneeling because he’s unpatriotic; he’s kneeling because he is patriotic, and he wants his country to live up to its ideals. In his words: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” His core issue seems to be police interaction
with black men, especially shootings. His teammate, Eric Reid, wrote an op-ed on Monday where he elaborated:

  In early 2016, I began paying attention to reports about the incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police. The posts on social media deeply disturbed me, but one in particular brought me to tears: the killing of Alton Sterling in my hometown Baton Rouge, La. This could have happened to any of my family members who still live in the area.

  Let’s unpack Reid’s concern at “the incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police.” My colleague Eric Levitz this week put a number on it: “We live in a country where police gun down 1,000 unarmed, disproportionately black citizens on an annual basis.” He gets that number from the recent Washington Post attempt to nail down specific data on how common this is. But he falls understandably into the trap that many of us do. Thanks to numerous horrifying videos, and some horrible cases, like those of Philando Castile and Eric Garner, we have come to assume that unarmed black men are being gunned down in large numbers. But the Washington Post data do not, in fact, back that idea up.

  The Post has indeed found that there’s a strikingly consistent number of fatal police shootings each year: close to one thousand people of all races. But that figure includes the armed and the unarmed. Fatal police shootings of the unarmed—the issue Kaepernick and Reid cite—are far fewer. In the first six months of this year, for example, The Post found a total of twenty-seven fatal shootings of unarmed people, of which black men constituted seven. Yes, you read that right: seven. There are 22 million black men in America. If an African American man is not armed, the chance that he will be killed by the police in any recent year is 0.00006 percent. If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.

  In other policy areas, left-liberals tend to agree with me on this general logic. They usually insist on not confusing an anecdote for solid data. They point out, for example, the infinitesimal chance that you will be killed by a terrorist in order to puncture the compelling and emotional narrative that we are a nation under siege by jihadists. They note that the public’s view that crime has been rising is, in fact, a fiction drummed up by Trump—and they cite the kind of data I just provided to prove it. But when it comes to race and police shootings, the data take second place to emotion. This is not bad faith on the part of left-liberals. It’s rooted in an admirable concern about a vital topic—the use of violence by the state against citizens. And I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president’s response. But on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality.

  How about looking at all such deaths, armed and unarmed, and the context for them? One avenue for understanding what’s going on is to ask a national sample of citizens, black and white, about their interactions with police. A Cornell PhD student, Philippe Lemoine, has dug into exactly that: by examining the data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is testimony from black people themselves, not the police; it’s far less tainted than self-serving police records.

  It’s a big survey—around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African Americans. And it provides one answer (although not definitive) to some obvious questions. First off, are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lemoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men. The data also separate out those with multiple encounters. According to Lemoine, black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year—but it’s not a huge difference.

  On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (1 percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing. If you restrict it to physical violence, the data are worse: of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men. (For force likely to cause physical injury, i.e., extreme force, however, the ratio is actually better: 0.39 percent for white men compared with 0.46 percent of black men.)

  What do we make of this data? I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men and, narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare. (Recall that the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)

  Is “rare” a fair judgment? It’s certainly a subjective one, and I do not know how I would feel if there were a 0.5 percent chance that any time I encountered a cop I could be subjected to physical violence, as opposed to the 0.2 percent chance that I, as a white man, experience. What makes it worse for black men, of course, is something called history, in which any violence by the state rightly comes with immensely more emotional and political resonance—and geography. Police violence may be rare across the entire country, but it is concentrated in urban pockets, where the atmosphere is therefore more fearful—and there’s a natural tendency to extrapolate from that context.

  Specific horrifying incidents—like Alton Sterling’s death—operate in our psyches the way 9/11 does. It understandably terrified Eric Reid—but also distorted his assessment of the actual risk that one of his family members could suffer the same fate. It’s true, too, that the huge racial discrepancy in the prison population affects our judgment. You could also argue that lynching was statistically very rare in the past, but it instilled a real terror that belied this real fact. The problem with this analogy, however, is that we’re not talking about extralegal lynchings by civilians, in the context of slavery or segregation or state-imposed discrimination. We’re talking about instantaneous decisions by cops, often in contexts where their own lives are at stake as well. Their perspective—and many of these cops are also African American—matters as well.

  This is the balance we have to strike. We can and should honor the spirit of the protests. But we cannot allow ourselves to let emotion, however justified, overwhelm reality. To give the impression that police are gunning down black men in America solely because they are black is a dangerous exaggeration that undermines the vital work of the police. It’s also a profound indictment of a nation that America, in this respect, simply doesn’t deserve.

  We All Live on Campus Now

  February 9, 2018 | NEW YORK magazine

  Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term “microaggressions” without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet; the campus Title IX sex tribunals where, under the Obama administration, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the absence of a “reasonable doubt” could ruin a young man’s life and future are just a product of a hothouse environment. And I can sometimes get carried away.

  The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite univer
sities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges—your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression—will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

  And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit—as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege”—is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment—untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights—are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.

  Polarization has made this worse—because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism, and because on the right, white identity politics has overwhelmed moderate conservatism. And Trump plays a critical role. His crude, bigoted version of identity politics seems to require an equal and opposite reaction. And I completely understand this impulse. Living in this period is to experience a daily, even hourly, psychological hazing from the bigot-in-chief. And when this white straight man revels in his torment of those unlike him—and does so with utter impunity among his supporters—there’s a huge temptation to respond in kind. A president who has long treated women, in his words, “like shit,” and bragged about it, is enough to provoke rage in any decent person. But anger is rarely a good frame of mind to pursue the imperatives of reason, let alone to defend the norms of liberal democracy.