Dissent, Consensus and Strong Groups

A few weeks back I read this article by David Brooks. Brooks is a conservative and he's saying Democrats have it all wrong in trying to imitate the conservatives' success. Democrats are trying to build a disciplined message machine, a cohesive party structured like a strong pyramid, to use use Bill Bradley's recent description of where the Democratic Party should go. Brooks says they've got conservatives wrong because conservatives "agree on almost nothing." He argues that the constant in-fighting is what made conservatives strong, because they "argued about the order of the universe, and how the social order should reflect the moral order," and as a result,

"Conservatives fell into the habit of being acutely conscious of their intellectual forebears and had big debates about public philosophy. That turned out to be important: nobody joins a movement because of admiration for its entitlement reform plan. People join up because they think that movement's views about human nature and society are true."

Liberals, he argues, have not had such a debate. He says liberals ought to strive not for message discipline, but for a "big debate about the things Thomas Paine, Herbert Croly, Isaiah Berlin, R. H. Tawney and John Dewey were writing about. I'd argue about human nature and the American character."

If you're a lefty, are you thinking, "huh?" Conservatives not agreeing on anything? The left ought to have more bickering and infighting? To most people on the left, this sounds like their entire political worldview inverted. Conservatives are the ones who are organized, on-message and share so many core, unquestioned assumptions about the way things ought to be. Liberals are the ones divided amongst themselves into different factions, movements and issue publics. Can he possibly be right?

What we're seeing here is a classic case of how group dynamics work. Think of any strong group you've ever been apart of. Other groups always seem monolithic and united, often united in how "bad" they are compared to your "good" group. When looking within your group, however, there's always dissension. There's jockeying for the dominant positions. There are people who don't quite fit in. There's debate over whether or not the group is heading in the right direction. But as soon as the debate shifts from within-group differences to group-to-group comparisons, the entire logic shifts. All of the sudden it's "us vs. them" and those internal differences fade into the background.

So which view is more genuine? Are there really such things as "groups" anyway? Of course. Within any group there have to be some core sources of cohesiveness. And as you expand outward to larger levels of subgroup and group conflicts, the same is true: never-ending levels of group-group antagonisms nested within larger group identities, themselves in opposition to some other group, etc. So Republicans bicker amongst themselves, but there are some shared things that cannot be questioned. Democrats bicker amongst themselves, but there are some shared things that cannot be questioned. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans bicker about some things, but there are other things that are shared by both parties and cannot safely be questioned by either party. The legitimacy of the two party system, corporate capitalism and American military dominance, to name just a few.

I think you'll find this rings true with almost any group experiences you've had, be it family, friends, sports teams, school cliques, fraternities/sororities, workplaces, religions or nation-states. Whenever group identities become the salient marker of "us vs. them" in a particular situation, within-group differences disappear. If they don't, then eventually either the dissenters will splinter off or the group as a whole will likely fall apart.

So David Brooks, looking within his own group, sees all the bickering and dissent. He doesn't see this in the other group though, attributing this to his belief that "modern liberalism was formed in government, not away from it." The left, on the other hand, sees oodles of disagreements amongs themselves, but sees a right that never asks the tough questions, gets along just fine and wins because they're so united. On the third hand, a radical, whether left or right, sees the areas of consensus between both dominant parties and rejects them. For the radical left, this can mean rejecting the legitimacy of corporate capitalism. To the radical right, this can mean rejecting all forms of ethnic and religious pluralism, for example. For radicals, neither the group identity of Republican or Democrat, nor the group identity of Loyal American Voter is a salient category. So for them, the "Republicans and the Democrats are two wings of the same party," and both parties become "the other."

None of this means that conservatives and liberals are equally divided, equally united and, therefore, equally organized and empowered to impact our country. Contrary to David Brooks, and respectful of the differences with the conservative movement, conservatives have done a much better job both of taking command of the shared assumptions that unite Republicans and also changing those that define the very terrain of American politics as a whole. But in order to understand how they've done so, it helps to understand how they've been able to take advantage of these group dynamics better than the left.

For example, the James Dobson's and Jerry Fallwell's of the world have a much different relationship with the Republican party than the leaders of the left. Dobson plays on the ambiguity of his connections to the Republican party and on the power of the voting bloc he leads brilliantly. For example, he's often very critical of Bush when Bush doesn't go far enough to please the Christian right, threatening that he'll advise Christians to stay home on election day if Bush doesn't do as he pleases. To the left, these conflicts are mostly invisible or perhaps viewed as just ploys by Dobson to enhance his own power or to establish a reputation as an "outsider" in Washington - and both are probably true, but that misses the mark about why it works so well. And as Thomas Franks points out so well, the most successful conservatives are those who can channel class-warfare rhetoric and ourtrage in cultural, not economic, terms and then moments later, at the flip of a switch, glide into Congress and vote for anti-worker, anti-environment, pro-rich policies without batting an eye. They're brilliantly pitting groups against one another. Convince every group whose support you need that "we" are the outsiders, the downtrodden, the oppressed and that those people over there are your oppressors and are the root of all your suffering. Once you whip people up into an irrational rage by tapping into our deepest group instincts, you can sneak in underneath the cover of the cultural warfare and enact all those policies that your group, the business elite, really want to see. "Oh, is Dobson upset at Bush again? Who cares! Keep the fundies mobilized in their frenzied state of percieved persecution and keep their eyes off of me while I vote for a law making it impossible for them to declare bankruptcy when they come down with cancer next year." As long as the salient group is "Good Christians" vs. "Atheists/Feminists/Liberals/Evildoers," then "Rich" vs. "Poor" is bound to fade into the background.

This also explains a puzzling fact about the public political discourse in our society: how our public discourse has become so divisive, inflammatory and dishonest at the exact same time that the fundamental questions about how our society is run and how power is distributed have virtually disappeared from the public landscape. The "Washington Consensus" is actually the term used around the world to describe the consensus over global economic policy over the last several decades. How can a nation said to be divided so harshly into "Red" and "Blue" poles simultaneously be the ring leader for the consensus over how the fundamental questions of power relations in politics and economics should be answered? I argue much of it is due to the clever balance of tension between group unities and group divisions.