This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when
Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned
in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.
Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized
“states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities.
GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way
his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course,
Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he
started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.
Science, however, is catching up with the Republican’s
strategy, and showing us both how powerful it can be and also how to
defeat it.
Rob Henderson’s excellent Newsletter turned me onto the new book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham, who does a deep dive into the past 600,000 years of our species and its immediate predecessors.
Wrangham points out how violent our chimp cousins are: female chimps
are routinely beaten into submission before being raped and impregnated
by the most powerful of the male chimps. He notes, “One hundred percent
of wild adult female chimpanzees experience regular serious beatings
from males.”
The consequence of this is that over generations genes for
aggression have come to dominate that species; chimp society very much
operates along the lines Thomas Hobbes argued human society would
without “the iron fist of church or state.” Chimp life is nasty, brutish, and short.
But at some point in our prehistory, as humanity was evolving
into its modern form, we developed language. Using that new ability to
communicate, we developed complex societies.
Citing biologist Richard Alexander, Wrangham writes:
“In his 1979 Darwinism and Human Affairs,
Alexander argues that at some unknown point in our evolution, language
skills developed to the point where gossip became possible. Once that
happened, reputations would become important.
“Being known as a helpful individual would be expected to have a big
effect on someone’s success in life. Good behavior would be rewarded.
Virtue would become adaptive.”
For human societies to survive and prosper in the face of an
often-hostile natural world, cooperation became more important than
dominance. We left behind the violence of alpha male chimps and instead
embraced human teamwork and social harmony.
In my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, I
document how Native Americans had, at the time of first contact in the
15th through 17th centuries, shared with Europeans how they’d developed
highly democratic systems of governance. To a large extent, our
Constitution was based on things learned directly from native people.
As I showed from that era, and Wrangham does with
hunter/gatherer tribes across the world while examining anthropological
evidence of early humanity, psychopathic and hoarding alpha males were
consistently brought under control by the rules of human society itself.
Wrangham shows how, in multiple ancient and modern hunter/gatherer
societies, when what we’d today call sociopathic or psychopathic alpha
males would begin hoarding wealth or asserting dominance over others,
they were simply killed.
Over thousands of generations, he posits, this altered our gene pool
in a way that only a very small percentage of us — psychologists
estimate between one and five percent — still carry and can act out the
alpha male role in a way that involves high-level hoarding and social
dominance. We call them sociopaths, billionaire hoarders, and violent
psychopaths.
The good news is that they’re very much in the minority; the majority
of us are not psychopaths, and are deeply wired for cooperation and
social cohesion.
This evolutionary process, which I also document in American Democracy,
makes societies more stable, enhances a culture’s or nation’s chances
for survival in the face of crises, and improves the quality of life for
the largest number of members of a society.
But, as both Wrangham and I point out, when societies are taken over
by hoarding, violent, psychopathic men (Hitler, Saddam, Mussolini,
Putin, Trump, Iran’s Ayatollahs, etc.) they become top-heavy and
brittle, and thus more vulnerable to disruption by both external and
internal events (including the death of the leader).
While the evolutionary basis of this, which Wrangham brings to
us in his book, is new, the idea of a society or nation being most
resilient when it’s most democratic is not; it’s been the subject of
speculation, documentation, and scientific and social inquiry from the
time of Socrates through the Enlightenment and the creation of the
United States (as I detail in American Democracy).
What struck me from Wrangham’s book as most relevant to this
moment, though, was his assertion that we humans are, both genetically
and socially, vulnerable to psychopathic alpha males taking over when
they use one particular strategy to gain and hold power: identifying an
“other” who they can successfully characterize as a threat.
On the one hand, Wrangham points out how we’re capable of great
tenderness and compassion. In his book’s introduction, he writes:
“In short, a great oddity about humanity is our moral range, from
unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity. From a biological
perspective, such diversity presents an unsolved problem. If we evolved
to be good, why are we also so vile? Or if we evolved to be wicked, how
come we can also be so benign?”
The answer, in short, is that we’re tender and loving to our
own group, but perfectly willing to be astonishingly violent toward any
“other” group that we see as substantially different from us and believe
is a threat to us.
This, on the other hand, is a key part of preparing soldiers to fight
in wars and violate that core human imperative of not killing: First,
we must “other” the enemy. My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War
II straight out of high school in 1945, referred to Germans and
Japanese as “krauts” and “japs” to his dying days. Such a racist “other”
perspective was pounded into our soldiers throughout basic training,
just like veterans of George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern wars often refer
to Arab people as “ragheads” and other slurs.
This “othering” of members and supporters of violent dictatorships we
must go to war against is arguably a useful or even necessary tool to
prepare our young men and women to kill or be killed on the field of
battle.
Because it’s grounded in genetically-mediated survival
instincts and strategies as ancient as humanity, it’s relatively easy to
intentionally program into people, and, once they come to believe there
is a real threat from an “other,” very hard to defy. During both WWI
and WWII in America, for example, those who protested against those wars
were vilified, ostracized, and, in some cases, even imprisoned, all
with popular support for that separation from society.
It becomes particularly dangerous, though, when violent
psychopathic alpha males in a political leadership position turn that
same strategy against members of their own society, turning average
citizens into monsters. As Wrangham writes:
“The killers who committed genocide in World War II, Cambodia, and
Rwanda were caught up in societies where moral boundaries became
excessively crystallized. Yet most were not sadistic monsters or
ideological fanatics. They were unremarkable individuals who loved their
families and countrymen in conventional moral ways.
“When the anthropologist Alexander Hinton investigated the Cambodian
genocide of 1975–79, he met a man called Lor who had admitted to having
killed many men, women, and children. ‘I imagined Lor as a heinous
person who exuded evil from head to toe….I saw before me a poor farmer
in his late thirties, who greeted me with the broad smile and polite
manner that one so often encounters in Cambodia.’ The combination of
horror and ordinariness is routine.
“According to the anthropologists Alan Fiske and Tage Rai, ‘When
people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel…that
it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.’ Fiske and Rai
considered every type of violence they could think of, including
genocide, witch killings, lynchings, gang rapes, war rape, war killings,
homicides, revenge, hazing, and suicide.”
Like Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler used this “othering” strategy
against Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals so successfully that “good
Germans” largely went along with the Holocaust, often enthusiastically.
Stalin did the same against Ukrainians who were part of his Soviet
Union, starving to death over four million human beings — men women, and
children — in the Holodomor.
And now Donald Trump and his followers and enablers in the Republican
Party — and thirty or so almost certainly psychopathic alpha male
billionaires — are using this “othering” strategy against American
citizens and immigrants to gain and hold political power.
In doing so, they’re playing with the most deadly form of fire known to humanity.
Because our instinctual willingness — or even enthusiasm — for
dominating, destroying, and killing any “other” we see as a threat is
deeply rooted in our genetic code, it’s damn near impossible for people
who’ve been inculcated with a clear identification and deep fear of an
“other” to resist embracing forms of violence ranging from
discrimination to excessive policing and imprisonment to outright
extermination.
It’s so archetypal that it’s the essence and message of every Bruce
Willis-type movie: “Use violence to destroy the bad people.” As we watch
that story play out on the screen, and we cheer the murder of the bad
guys, we feel a release and exhilaration that keeps bringing people back
to the theater.
We didn’t “learn” to love this violence: it’s wired into our
DNA. All of us. We are all vulnerable to this type of emotional
manipulation.
Trump’s open embrace of rounding up 12 million “other” immigrants and
putting them into concentration camps prior to deportation seems
unspeakably cruel, but we forget the brutality of his family separations
and caging of young Hispanic children at our own peril.
He and his acolytes are fully capable of committing horrors like the
world sees in various places every few generations when an alpha male
psychopath uses “othering” to gain and hold wealth and political power.
In both Wrangham’s book and mine, we find the way to combat
this: shatter the “othering” meme by converting the “them” Republicans
identify (queer people, racial and religious minorities, “liberals,” and
women) into a massive, collectively diverse “us.”
This fracturing of the GOP “othering” efforts was hugely on display
last week during the Democratic National Convention, as people of all
races, religions, gender identities, and disabilities were featured as
part of a grand, collective “us.” Increasingly, we’re also seeing it in
our media, from commercials featuring queer and multiracial couples to
movies and TV programs with diverse casts.
To restore to our society the kind of resilient culture that
has helped humanity survive to this point, we must defeat Donald Trump,
JD Vance, and the psychopathic hoarder billionaires funding their
attempt to take over America.
We must stop their effort to convert us into a
fractured society with rich white Christian men in charge and everybody
else subservient for another generation or more. As President Dwight
Eisenhower warned in his prescient farewell address:
“…America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must
avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a
proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” He added: “We pray …
that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in
a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”
America defeated fascists who had used “othering” to seize
and assert power eighty years ago; they forced us to do it on the
battlefield. Here at home, we fought back against and thwarted the
psychopathic alpha male Robber Barons of the 1880-1930 era with
antitrust law, union organizing, and heavy taxation of the morbidly
rich.
Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a
collective and inclusive “us,” and to repudiate hate and “othering” as a
political strategy.
If successful, we’ll usher in a new and beautiful America, and a
grand example for the rest of the world. This could quite literally be a
positive turning point for humanity for generations.
If only enough of us show up at the polls this November, and then stay engaged for at least a few years thereafter. As Tim Walz said, “We can sleep when we’re dead.”
"The majority
of us are not psychopaths, and are deeply wired for cooperation and
social cohesion."
