A Pullable Thread of the Social Fabric

Political polarization has been long increasing in the U.S., where it also seems unusually high for a rich nation. As one side has dominated the heights of tech, culture, media, law, and academia, and our urban centers of wealth, the other has felt neglected and dissed. So they elected Trump, at least partly knowing his faults, to send a clear signal of their unhappiness.

And so a key question has become: has electing Trump somewhat satisfied his supporters’ desire for recognition, or are they instead emboldened to demand more? This is closely related to the question: is the other side now inclined more toward appeasement, or toward doubling-down on the conflict? Had the other side given them Trump, that could be seen as appeasement, plausibly inducing more conciliation from the Trump side. But I expect Trump supporters now mostly see the other side as having offered little appeasement, and instead escalating the conflict. From which I weakly predict that polarization will get worse before it gets better.

My tweet summarizing my recent post on Two Types of Envy induced a hostile tweet storm, one that offers weak clues on future polarization. In the post I riffed on recent attention to “incel” complaints that they suffer a lack of sex, and noted that one could see this as a concern about sex inequality comparable to the concern others express regarding income inequality. I noted that while the two groups focus on different axes of inequality, they each organize to induce envy and identity with a deprived status, to hint at the possibility of violence, and to lobby for “redistribution”, meaning a change in the distribution along their axis. And I was struck by the puzzling lack of overlap between the two groups.

A few engaged this in a more appeasement-like mode, accepting that many people are unhappy and expressing a willingness to consider redistribution policies like better training, legalizing prostitution, targeted cash transfers, or stronger promotion of monogamy. But the vast majority were quite hostile, rude, and insulting, wishing terrible things upon me and saying they’d work to get me fired and arrested. Though I’ve repeatedly denied supporting any redistribution policies, for income or sex, most presumed that not only did I support sex redistribution, I instead supported raping women! Most who admitted I didn’t support rape demanded I provide a detailed redistribution plan to critique. And most who admitted that I wasn’t supporting any policy still called me evil for even comparing sex and income inequality.

Those who argue against redistributing income often complain of the direct coercion that distribution can involve, and say the poor are largely responsible for their own problems. Some even say the world would be better off if the poor just died and didn’t leave descendants. People arguing against sex redistribution made the same arguments. In addition, they said that this is all about men repressing women, that sex is about people while income is about things, that you can’t die from a lack of sex, and that no one really cares much about sex so complainers must really have other agendas. Some said sex inequality is impossible because sex isn’t a commodity, or that it exists but policy can’t influence it because feelings and personal choices are involved.

Most ancient societies had policies that influenced the distribution of sex. Some strongly promoted monogamy, and as a result reduced sex inequality. Which to me suggests that policy can in fact influence sex inequality, and that many people have cared about this kind of inequality. Even if the exact package of sex, romance, respect, etc. that people care about is complex and hard to define. You may think you have good moral arguments why such policies are bad. But as with income inequality, you should admit that people who feel envious and empowered to push policy may not be much influenced by your moral arguments.

Perhaps I’m too close to this to be a good judge, but the extremity and one-sidedness of this reaction seems to me more than typical in what are framed as left responses to right proposals, such as regarding immigration. And this weakly suggests to me that this issue could be an especially potent “loose thread” of our social fabric, that could be pulled toward our unraveling. This hasn’t yet been a big issue on the right, but were they to embrace it, the left seems even less likely than usual to seek compromise or offer appeasement. If so, a big question becomes: how inclined is the right today to embrace a cause just to pick a fight, just to show their defiance? Another is: how inclined is the left to go out of their way to goad the right into such a position to start a fight?