Political Polarization: Part Three

Looking Out for Me and Mine

In this third newsletter on political polarization¹, I want to start with a fascinating chapter in Tom Nichol’s Our Own Worst Enemy. Nichols reports on research that political scientist Edward Banfield conducted in a small Italian village in the 1950s. Here is a telling paragraph:

Banfield created a term for this kind of civic disengagement, an academic mouthful that we will note in passing and then leave aside: amoral familism. Basically, it means a society in which people act in their own interest without regard to any moral code other than what they believe is best for them and their families. Civic involvement in such a society is a waste of time, a snare for suckers. In a place like Montegrano, Banfield observed, values greater than the self and the family are mostly irrelevant, because there is "no connection between abstract political principle," on the one hand, and "concrete behavior in the ordinary relationships" among the townspeople, on the other. It is a society in which people think that what's good for the family is the only real rule of politics, and ideas like "democracy of "socialism" or "communism" are mostly just so much noise (64).

Another telling quote comes a few pages later:

Rather than cooperate and endure any longer-term risk to their families, Banfield surmised, the villagers took what they could get in the near term and let the future be someone else’s problem (68).

Consider this quote when thinking about our inability to tackle Big Questions like Climate Change, Income Inequality, or Gun Safety. To return to my theme of the opening to this series; it’s a failure to pursue The General Welfare by focusing on the immediately local instead.

Nichols’ discussion of the Banfield research immediately reminded me of one of Robert Putnam’s books. In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Putnam reflects on social changes over the course of his lifetime. He reports on growing up in the 1950s in Port Clinton, Ohio and that while they knew about inequality there, people didn’t feel isolated by their social class standing. In his analysis, he comes to a striking conclusion: where in the 1950s the community might consider the new high school graduates as “our kids” (with a collective sense of “our”), fifty years later families with means seem particularly focused on the nuclear family as “our kids” (with a very narrow view of “our”).

In the former meaning of “our”, impacts of inequality based on class, gender, or marital status require some kind of response. In the latter meaning of “our”, these factors are irrelevant as long as OUR children are doing well. We might feel bad for those other kids, but will do little to ameliorate their situation.

Here’s a perverse outcome the results from this focus on local families: we want government to address the needs other kids (as long as it doesn’t interfere with MY kids!). Inequality is a problem in general but not in specific because my family is doing fine (which was my goal).

Last month, Derek Thompson had an intriguing article in The Atlantic. Titled “Everything is Terrible, but I’m Fine”, he documents a divergence between how people view their personal situation in contrast to their thoughts about The Economy.

Thompson suggests that constant news media coverage of how bad things are with inflation, supply chain issues, and gas prices encourages people to think the worst about economy in spite of what they see in their own family experience.

I’d argue that this is due to the loss of social capital that would have connected us to others. Those suburban homes are isolating. We don’t know enough about how others are managing and we simply assume the worst.²

Figuring out how to rebuild social capital in an age of angry social media posts is going to be a challenge. But it’s the only way to move away from “amoral familism”.

1. The first was on how our polarization as roots in our founding documents. The second was about how our political tribalism results in treating politics as a Game that must be won in contrast to the governing decisions that might improve our political lives.

2. Besides, the media keeps showing us images of gas prices in big cities in California, which are 50% higher than the actual media price of gas.