Why we spend more time hating on heretics than we do on hating infidels

Why all the Warren/Sanders hate?

Imagine that the politicians Chester and Hubert agree that there is a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball. Chester thinks that little dogs are part of the squirrel conspiracy; Hubert thinks they aren’t. The squirrels would stir up as much shit as possible between Chester and Hubert about little dogs, an issue that is actually much less important than the squirrel issue.

Squirrels would create social media accounts promoting memes and snarky posts about how Hubert was nice to a little dog, about how Hubert supporters don’t have legitimate reasons for their support of him (they like him because he has a cool coat, he petted a puppy), but Chester supporters have good reasons for supporting Chester. Squirrels would work to create a wedge between Chester and Hubert supporters, since the political success of either of them would be disastrous for squirrels.

There are various ways of doing that, but everything the squirrels would do would involve keeping Chester and Hubert from working together. If Chester and Huber work together, regardless of the issue of the little dogs, the squirrels are toast.

A pro-squirrel media campaign in a balkanized media sphere would condemn Chester and Hubert as anti-squirrel in all the pro-squirrel media. What would the squirrels do in the anti-squirrel media world?

They would try to get a purity argument between Chester and Hubert, one that would keep them from working together.

That happened. In the early 19th century, Irish- and African-Americans had similar material interests—there was no social safety net, there was racism (Catholicism was framed as a race), and abusive working conditions for both groups. It would have been sensible for Irish- and African-Americans to work together, but they didn’t. They didn’t because—to make a complicated situation simple—Jacksonian Democrats (who needed a base of voters in a non-slaver state to support slavery) put a wedge between the Irish- and African-Americans, and that wedge was the ability to invite the Irish-Americans to believe themselves as essentially better and different from African Americans.

The original sin of political deliberation is that we reason from identity, rather than applying principles across identity. And the wedge enabled the Irish to feel good about themselves because they weren’t African. That’s also how the planter class in the South prevented unionization—segregation helped keep poor whites poor because it ensured they wouldn’t join forces with poor African Americans.

It makes perfect sense that people would create a wedge issue to keep potential allies apart, but why do we fall for it?

Sure, the squirrels would create memes intended to make Chester and Hubert supporters so angry with each other that they won’t collaborate, but why would Chester and Hubert supporters share the memes, posts, and links that help the squirrels?

We fall for it because people are always more worked up about heretics than infidels. In theory, we hate infidels more than heretics, but in practice, that isn’t what happens. It has to do with a cognitive bias about decision-making.

If we are faced with a decision between two pretty similar things, we are likely, once we’ve made the decision, to exaggerate the differences between the two in order to make us feel better about the decision we’ve made. Ambiguous decisions are more threatening to our sense of self than clear-cut ones because they are the ones we can get wrong. Our need to make ourselves feel that we’ve made the right decision means that we will not acknowledge that we were even unsure, let alone that the other option might be more or less equally good.

Our hostility toward infidels doesn’t raise any uncertainty; that we have chosen between two similar choices does. When people are presented with uncertainty, we have a tendency to retreat to purity and in-group loyalty. We pass along the memes planted by trolls because they tell us that our decision is entirely right, and that the solution is in-group purity. And that feels good.

What Trump needs, as he needed in 2016, is to get potential Dem voters to get into purity fights with one another. What his considerable Russian support is doing, as it did in 2016, is to persuade large numbers of potentially anti-Trump voters to stay home if they don’t get their candidate. And they way to do that is to make Dems angrier with each other than they are with Trump, and it’s happening through memes that say things like, “A friend says she supports Chester because Chester wears such a great sweater, but I support Hubert because he’ll give us all real protection against the squirrels.”

[Since I crawl around pro-Trump sites, I can say that is exactly their strategy there too—Dems support policies out of fee-fees but Trump supporters are interested in real solutions for real problems.]

The more that Hubert supporters share that meme, the more they help the squirrels.

I’m not saying that the differences between Hubert and Chester are trivial—they’re real, and they matter. And we should argue about those differences, instead of framing the other side as being irrational and corrupt. I’m saying that, whatever our differences, sharing memes about how awful the other is ensures that neither Hubert nor Chester will succeed.

Obviously I’m talking about Warren and Sanders, but I’m also not—I’m talking about all the other times that potential allies were and are deliberately wedged apart. We can disagree with each, and we can believe that other people are backing the wrong candidate, but we shouldn’t hate other people for voting differently from us.