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I

Why This?

In which the author explains why he’s bothering—once again—to examine why half of America doesn’t talk to the other half and why neither side changes its opinion about anything almost ever.

I was already well into writing this book before I realized why I was writing it. It shouldn’t have taken that long. As the French say, the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. For the last seven or eight years I have been obsessed with one question above all, Why do so few people permanently change their views about political and social issues even in the face of literally earthshaking world events?

A corollary question is, Why do so many people return to their original views so determinedly, even if they have altered them for a short while? What is this pull that makes people go back to where they were, wrapping themselves in what they always thought as if it were a childhood security blanket?

Immediately after the terror murders in Paris in January 2015 at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market Hypercacher, historian Jeffrey Herf wrote this to inaugurate his blog for the Times of Israel:

I remember well that in the few months following 9/11, the American intellectual world, especially that of liberals and left-leaning people, was in a state of welcome confusion. The familiar denunciations of American “imperialism” and the habits of sympathy for “national liberation movements” that had emerged in the protest against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not fit the realities of September 11, 2001. . . . Sadly, the new thinking did not last long, or rather, it lasted but was supplanted by experts who told stories about a “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and about the need to avoid inflaming Muslims with public discussion of Islamism. Many decades of investment in the cultural capital of the conventional habits of left and right were proving too powerful to overcome.¹

How does this happen? Is it merely “human nature”? If so, what is it about human nature that makes us behave that way? What is the provenance of these “conventional habits” Herf speaks of, habits that lock us into tired ideologies and world views that preclude progress and change even as many adopt terminology that pretends to the opposite, proclaiming that they are the future, that they are “progressive”?

This is the enigma that has fascinated me for the better part of the last decade, after having undergone a political change of my own that began in the 1990s and accelerated after 9/11. This is not just an academic exercise because—at the tail end of a presidency of a man who is, at best, ambivalent about American Exceptionalism—we are at yet another turning point in Western Civilization and the history of the United States. This is the same politician who, at a fundraiser in 2008, famously accused his adversaries of being “bitter people, clinging to their guns or religion or an antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” But perhaps there was an element of projection in that accusation, because if there was any “clinging” going on, much of it was being done by Barack Obama and his adoring San Francisco audience of the time. And what they were really expressing and reinforcing, that is, clinging to, was not primarily their criticism of their opponents—that was secondary—but their own collective feelings of superiority to them. They were best. What they were expressing is a large part, most likely the dominant part, of the answer to the aforementioned enigma of why so few are able to change their views over a lifetime, and it is the subject of this book: moral narcissism.

But a second enigma occurred to me as I was yet deeper into the book. Why moral narcissism? What was its function, really? This made the experience of writing oddly similar to those I have had before, writing a series of mystery novels. It wasn’t until I came to the final chapters that I figured out why. As it so often did when I wrote detectives stories, the answer surprised me. Possibly it changed my life.