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DIALOGUE 1

Public anger and the energy of tribes

“Look at the anger, look at the fear”

NIGEL FARAGE

The parable of the angry folk singer

In the 1970s and 1980s, the British and Irish experienced local terrorism far more intense and frequent than anything the developed world has seen in the past 20 years. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) – a paramilitary organization seeking the unification of Ireland – declared themselves at war with the British state. The IRA killed 125 people in attacks in England, and over 1,500 people in Northern Ireland. Many more were wounded or maimed. Allegiance or opposition to the IRA split many families and neighbourhoods in the Catholic parts of Northern Ireland, and in some parts of the Republic.

Many years after the peace settlement and the IRA agreeing to disband, a denizen of Dublin went back there with a British colleague who loves Irish traditional music. So they went to a pub near St Stephen’s Green, where traditional bands always played. In the pub there were maybe 30 or 40 people drinking pints of Guinness and listening intently. Ninety per cent were tourists – Germans, Spaniards and Italians. Maybe more. There were also some lost-looking young women over on a bachelorette weekend, unconvinced by the fiddle, banjo and guitar players. Few locals were to be found in the audience. The band was great. They were playing both ballads and traditional dance music. But the lead singer looked pretty glum.

He had a great voice, but he was miserable. Inspired by a rather sombre number, he then launched, unexpectedly, into an intense political monologue. Although not angry, he was primed for it. Despite the past 20 years of peace, and an extraordinary economic boom in Ireland over that period, he began to talk about martyrs, hunger strikes, the oppressed Irish, and the fact that we “still have to free our country”. And with his spirits lifted by nostalgia for the era of terrorism, he announced that “The next song I’m going to sing is a rebel song . . .”. His references to past struggles – fictional and actual – against British rule were lost on his audience.

Peace had created a vacuum in this folk-singer’s life. He was pining for that old era of tribal antagonism. Not for violence, but for the meaning that the conflict gave to him. It gave depth to his music. And it gave him a place to belong and feel valued. The only people who showed up that day to listen to his music and his republican speeches were foreigners. But that tribalism is back, and we need to understand the anger that drives it.

MARK: Okay Eric, the theme of this first dialogue is public anger and the energy of tribes. The idea that anger can regulate tribes is something people are unlikely to be familiar with. How does it help us to understand what’s happening in politics today?

ERIC: Let’s start with sports fans. Our propensity to seek group identity, and the motivation it provides, is deep-rooted. Even if all we have in common is the colour of a shirt, we will seek group allegiance, fight for our identity, regulate and threaten dissenters. The “angry fan” craves to be taken seriously, and that is significant. One of the first things I did when we started thinking about anger was a very simple big data analysis using IBM’s Watson Analytics. I simply asked Watson to scan hundreds of thousands of news stories and sort those referencing “anger” into groups. The results confirmed public anger as an expression of moral outrage, but what really surprised me was the association with sports. Angry fans come up a lot.

Thinking about sports shows us how people enjoy tribalism – why else do we buy season tickets to watch teams that are rubbish? We pay money to be tribal. Sports fans also teach us that tribalism motivates: hard-core fans will travel to watch terrible games, in any weather, in locations that are difficult to get to. Once you are alert to the concept of an angry fan, why they are angry becomes clear. If you ever want to witness tribal anger, but can’t face a political rally, go to a football match.

Interestingly, angry fans are nearly always a minority. Evolution has not made all fans angry fans for a reason. They are a functional minority. They are loyal, committed, potentially violent and feel the tribal identity strongly.

Also, when you study the tribal identity of sports fans, you realize that there is a hierarchy of loyalty and the angry fan is very high in that ranking. Often he (and as the literature on anger shows us, it typically is a “he”) will regulate his own side. I have seen angry fans berating their own side for not chanting loudly enough, for not being committed enough. Their own players, managers and coaches are just as likely to be subjected to aggressive abuse – for insufficient commitment or for demonstrating a lack of group loyalty – at least as much as the opposing fans are. Indeed, some fans will even smash up large parts of their own city – and that’s when they win (see Eagles fans’ destruction of Philadelphia after Superbowl 2018). The angry fan regulates and reinforces tribal identity, which is an inherently political act.

Tribal identity and morality have one thing in common. Ethics and morality, the social codes that determine “the right thing to do”, are primarily aimed at protecting our collective interests. Societies thrive because we have ethical norms of behaviour that support our common goals. Ethical norms solve what social scientists call “collective action” problems, which arise when there is a conflict between the interests of the individual and those of the group. For example, it is in everyone’s interest to pay taxes, even though an individual would benefit if she doesn’t. We typically solve this problem with independent arbiters, regulation and the threat of sanction, which is the main reason we have a judicial system, law enforcement, and indeed governments.

But when corporations or rich individuals evade paying taxes – like in Iceland – we get angry. Anger carries the threat of retribution when an ethical norm is violated. It’s a way of saying, “stop doing that, or you’ll regret it”. The Icelanders reaction to the revelations of the “Panama Papers” was moral outrage. Their political elite appeared to believe that there was one rule for the many and another for them, the few. Violating that norm resulted in an anger that reshaped Icelandic politics. The ongoing unrest in France is motivated by the same emotion. We the people, in our common yellow jackets, against you, the cosmopolitan elites who tax us without representing us.

Now think about tribal identity more broadly. What is the social function of the tribe? It is very simple. Humans are much more successful operating in groups and being part of a group increases your odds of survival. But in a world of limited resources you need to decide who is in the group and who is not. We can’t survive on our own, but we can’t include everyone if resources are scarce. Our hardwiring to form groups is so profound that we will form tribes based on trivial differences – indeed, perhaps we always form them based on trivial differences.

In social psychology there is a very well established theory called the minimal group paradigm, which identifies that our predisposition to form groups can be based on completely superficial distinctions. In ancient Rome, for example, a chariot race that divided the city into different coloured teams produced riots that killed hundreds. Our propensity for group adherence is a universal, profound, and often imperceptible reflex. Little wonder then that it matters for our politics.

Now, not all groups should be seen as tribal. Tribal identity is a particularly deeply felt and existential form of group identity, which needs periodic enforcement and regulation in the same way that social norms do. Most of the time we are not focused on our tribal identity. We get on with our lives. In peaceful, prosperous times, tribal identity takes a back seat. But if we think we are threatened, if we think resources are becoming scarce, or if we are stressed – the minority of angry fans serves a function. They fire up the tribe for battle and keep everyone in line. Viewed through this lens, the parallels in contemporary global politics become clearer.

Current disputes over trade provide a good example. The great French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, said “In order to trade, man must first lay down his spear”. It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has chosen trade as his antagonism of choice. It is also not a coincidence that the British right-wing, which is intellectually pro-trade, engages in absurd contortions and denials of evidence to justify leaving the most profitable free trading bloc in the world – the European Union – in order to set up new trade deals with other tribes deemed preferable.

MARK: That all makes sense. So we have two types of public anger. We have moral outrage – a legitimate response to being ignored, a vocalizing of wrong-doing, and a call for redress and action. That is the anger we should be listening to and responding to. On the other side we have anger as a tribal energy that can be cynically harnessed and weaponized by opportunists. But in viewing both of these forms of anger as emotions that function to solve a collective action problem – to help us survive collectively – you risk making tribal anger seem benign. Is it?

ERIC: We need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and the cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends. Indeed, I would go much further. By focusing on tribal anger I think we can make the case that an alignment of the interests of the media and the global political elite is using this energy to motivate voters and win elections, and this is extremely dangerous. Tribal anger is after all only one step removed from tribal violence. The challenge for a non-violent politics is to get the message loud and clear about legitimate grievance, and then to respond with an alternative politics. Why? Because any alternative politics has to matter – it must be significant enough on an emotional level to create political identities independent of tribalism. Tribalism is not the only motivating political identity, but it is a powerful reflex when we are stressed and angry.

MARK: Let’s talk some more about this. Aren’t political identities always tribal? I’m left – you’re right, etc. Can we make a clear distinction between legitimate and tribal anger in our politics and economics, if everything is polarized and what’s “legitimate” depends on which side of the fence you sit on?

ERIC: Party politics is often described as “tribal”, but this is simplistic. Humans may be hardwired to form groups, but not all group identities are the same or equally motivating. Tribal identity, which has a tacit or explicit allusion to ethnicity, place or origin, is a very distinct way of aligning political orientation. Nationalism is the dominant modern form of political tribalism.

As our first parable alluded to earlier, I grew up with nationalism in Ireland. The constellation of political parties made little sense without reference to nationalism, because the Cold War legacy of a left-wing party on one side and a right-wing party on the other didn’t, and still doesn’t, really exist there. In Ireland, the party structure is a legacy of the 1922–23 civil war, which to a large extent reflected one’s degree of allegiance to one faction of the Irish tribe. This still influences voting patterns today. What’s instructive about the Irish example is that tribalism as a form of political motivation is powerful and enduring, and the political elite can and do use it to deflect us from their failings. Nationalism is a “political technology” that is everywhere used instrumentally by societal elites to secure their privileges. Whether it’s Modi in India, Trump in America, Orban in Hungary, or Johnson in the UK.

Growing up with tribal politics made me very aware of its pernicious features. At one extreme there is a tendency towards non-democratic violence, manifest in the Irish case in a bloody terrorist campaign. But tribal politics is destructive in another way. It hijacks genuine political debate and deflects us from the issues that really matter to people, like wages, housing, healthcare and education. Why worry about the influence of money in politics, or underinvestment in public services, when we can get vexed about Brexit and “the Wall” instead?⁸ That way the elites are kept secure and we can avoid dealing with the hard stuff.

Tribalism, which was exploited by the political elite very early on in the Irish case, is now being mobilized everywhere. Consider the Brexit debate in the UK. Whatever ones’ view on Brexit, EU membership was never the population’s primary concern, and yet it has overwhelmed the government and it obsesses the political classes. It paralysed the UK for over three years. It deflects while it inflames. It disguises what’s going on by blaming it on some other tribe. Tribalism today is being utilized by parts of the political class and a media under economic threat, to fill an identity-vacuum created by an anodyne and complacent political centre that has lost authority and the ability to motivate.

MARK: Explain why you think the political class is exploiting tribalism?

ERIC: I think there are two forces at work. First, politics has descended into the tactical mobilization of small minorities of the electorate in order to win elections. Close elections are decided by fractions of fractions. Second, there is a destructive symbiosis between the traditional media, which is under a relatively new but existential competitive threat from the internet, and the political classes of the developed world.

MARK: Please unpack those rather bold claims.

ERIC: It is a common mistake to think that democracy is majority rule. In the absence of a significant consensus, it rarely is. Majoritarian electoral systems are actually rule by minority, with protections, and the promise that “you get to try to win next time even if I win now”. A truly fair electoral system may not be possible when there is significant disagreement. We accept the outcome of an unfair process because we can’t think of a better way, and we collectively agree on the need for a peaceful transition of power.

We know from sports games that angry fans are a minority, and we know from research in political science that angry people are more likely to vote.⁹ Harnessing tribal anger to motivate a minority can then be a winning strategy. Consider the United States where around 60 per cent of the electorate has a strong partisan allegiance. They are also more likely to vote than those without party allegiance. But winning a presidential election is primarily about motivating a significant minority that is not already committed, and we know from existing research that anger does just that. This becomes crystal clear in electoral tactics.

Trump won in 2016 thanks to 80,000 votes in three states. Motivating an angry minority won him the presidency. Trump instinctively exploited the two forms of public anger we identified. First, he appealed to legitimate moral grievance in the Rust Belt, citing the neglect of manufacturing industries, infrastructure, and Midwest communities by coastal elites, and then without missing a beat he shifted to tribal anger with images of walls to keep out marauding criminalized immigrants, in districts where racial tensions were elevated or nascent.

MARK: This is far less novel than it appears – there are direct parallels in Ronald Reagan’s campaign strategies and Trump’s. In Reagan’s case the tribal focus was in Southern states and the nod was to racial violence, which he picked up in turn from Richard Nixon. Likewise, Trump’s “Tariff everyone” trade policy seems new, but people have forgotten the stealth trade war that Reagan fought in the 1980s against Japan, other Asian economies, and even the European car industry. We have been here before, but we forget that.

ERIC: In my view, beginning with the end of the Cold War, and accelerating through the crisis and crash of 2008, tribal anger has become a more pronounced and a much more global feature of political strategy. Much of what we are seeing is the cynical response by the political classes in developed countries to their loss of control over their economies and to the lack of a common political identity that they were unable to forge in the post-Cold War world. Tribalism is a motivating reflex to fill that vacuum, which is in turn amplified by a far more competitive mainstream media landscape and by social media.

The interaction between hysteria, stereotyping, fictitious enemies and fears, generated by the media, and among our online tribes, should not be underestimated.¹⁰ Fake news has economic roots in the mainstream media. We don’t talk enough about the incentives of politicians and the media, and how they align. Even in the case of Trump, who presents himself as at war with the media, there is a very clear symbiosis, and not just with Fox News. CNN would have less to talk about without Trump being in power. Similarly, no one really asks why the media developed an obsessive narrative around terrorism, Islam, and – in the UK at least – the stresses on public resources posed by immigration. I think a significant factor is that the mainstream media has faced its own existential economic threat over the same period that left-wing and right-wing identities failed. People like Trump give them constant copy.

MARK: This is an important point. Newspapers used to operate as semi-monopolies, with captive readerships. Yes, their proprietors had political goals, and they could influence and periodically determine elections. But they never had to fight for eyeballs. Even with the emergence of stable islands of readers built around paywalls, the shift in technology and the emergence of social media has brutally challenged these old media monopolies and confronted them with the reality of competition. The Sun newspaper in the UK used to sell over three million copies a day and determine elections. Now it’s down to a million a day while Facebook matters much more. Given this, what better way to motivate a readership than with stories of fear, terror and foreigners over-running your lands? When we consider the set of forces at work, it becomes clear why tribal anger has become an exploitable resource of segments of the political class. Indeed, recent research shows how much even mainstream centrist politicians have adopted the language of populist outrage. It works to win. But when we think about the consequences and risk they are running with this it is paramount that we combat it.

ERIC: Electoral tactics and the economic insecurity of the media have coalesced to give rise to a re-emergence of tribal anger. But why now? Although the use of tribal identity has often been latent, tangential or local, why has it suddenly emerged as a global strategy?

MARK: I’d like to have a crack at answering that. I think this re-emergence of tribal identity is a much more long-run process than most people think. If we divide the post-1945 world into two eras: the Cold War world of 1945–89 and the subsequent era of so-called “neoliberalism” – the period when we decided to privatize, deregulate, liberalize and integrate anything that was once national and protected – what is curious about the Cold War-era is the extent to which fervent, motivating political identities were grounded in the economic ideologies of left and right, and these were in turn deeply embedded in social and political institutions, such as political parties, trade unions, working men’s clubs, churches, and small business associations.

People in this period did not identify politically primarily based on tribal, ethnic and nationalist grounds, as they did in the Ireland that you grew up in. In most of the developed world, political identity during the Cold War years was grounded in what could legitimately be called an economic ideology – a collection of beliefs about the economy – concerning how it works, who owns what, who gets what, and why they do, or do not, deserve it. Whether you were pro-state, or pro-market, a clear set of beliefs about your economic interests, whether you were pro-business or pro-labour, was the name of the game. People also had a very clear sense of the real differences between political parties on fundamental issues of policy, and that their interests were being represented by one party and not the other. These ideologies motivated people to vote. Those identities were quite stable.

The post-Cold War shift to neoliberalism was not just a huge shift in economic organization, it also destroyed the political identities of a great many people, and not just the annoyed folk singer in our parable. Most people still trundled out to vote for “their” party after the Berlin Wall came down – Labour, the Social Democrats, the Democrats – but did it really matter anymore? The post-Cold War era was defined by a loss of political identity and the political disengagement of large parts of the population, especially by those most hurt by the economic changes of the period.¹¹

In the Blair, Schroder, Clinton, Obama, centrist era there simply were no strongly motivating political identities or competing ideologies. Everyone was assumed to believe in some variant of a market economy and to embrace a cosmopolitan individualism. If you did not, you were considered a relic, or worse, a nationalist. When those ideas went up in smoke in the financial crisis of 2008, politicians had to find something new, and they did. So much of what we see today is politicians attempting to fill the vacuum created by a discredited neoliberal consensus with a more motivating set of political identities.

ERIC: So this rise in tribal anger, and its exploitation by the media and the political class, is not a consequence of the financial crisis alone, or even the sources of legitimate moral outrage such as the neglect of the US Midwest or environmental degradation. It significantly precedes these phenomena, and it exists even in economies that have been far less economically stressed. The hollowing out of democracy, the corruption of the political classes, the seeming irrelevance of elections, the inability to prevent recessions, increases in wealth and income inequality, and rapid technological change, all matter. But these stresses are channeled in different ways in different countries due to the coincidence of interests between politicians’ need to motivate a minority to win elections and the legitimate grievances of those most affected. Modern tribalism has its origins in a loss of motivating political identity. The political classes have responded to the dilemma of how to get people out to vote in the absence of motivating ideas by reverting to tribalism.

I think the most instructive examples are to be found in central and eastern Europe. Why is it that the most successful cheerleaders of nationalist tribalism are to be found in places like Hungary and in Poland? These countries have two similar features, they were at the heart of the Cold-War victory of liberal, free-markets, and they are, relatively speaking, economic successes – they have had very strong real wage growth. Although Hungary was at the front line of the financial crisis in eastern Europe, Poland was one of the least affected countries in Europe. Since the crisis, both countries have seen big increases in living standards and a collapse in unemployment to historically low levels. But this has not hindered aggressive tribalism. Hungary’s President Orban is very explicit about his strategy. He says that he abandoned liberalism to win elections. Being anti-European, anti-immigrant, and sectarian, wins elections in Hungary. The moral case for freedom and free-markets made by this once youthful anti-communist is a distant dream.

MARK: Okay, so let me summarize and set up where we are going next. When we analyze anger in our politics – especially public anger – it is important to keep tribal anger and moral outrage distinct. The financial crisis, the brutal recession in its wake, the euro crisis, rising income and wealth inequality, and an abject failure of political representation, are at the core of our problems. They are and should be objects of moral rebuke. But while these factors motivate anger, and that anger finds its way into politics, this has to be separated from the energy of tribes and the cynical exploitation by politicians and the media of latent nationalistic identities to get elected and to sell copy – how they chose to fill the vacuum created by an anodyne, identity-free, political centrism. The former we can and should do something about, and the policies we shall discuss later are designed to do just that. The latter we should expose and disarm since they are more harmful than the grievances that they are a response to. Okay, so let’s turn to the lessons we can learn from legitimate anger?