Continued from page 28 own language from birth ’cause they heard it in utero. So you have to teach kids. They’re barbarians when they come to you. You have to teach them not to be barbarians. Part of my argument though is that because civil society is breaking down, what happens is we start sort of lining up into these different artificial communities, these abstractions. Identity politics, nationalism is a big one, populism, these groups that we want to belong to and you have these very disturbed kids called incels these days. Because it’s very easy to trick to coalition instinct. Militaries do it. Marines are taught to work together and protect the group. Sports teams have it. You don’t have to be related to someone to form this coalition instinct. There’s nothing wrong with the coalition instinct if its properly channeled. There’s nothing wrong with tribalism if it’s properly channeled. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things about human nature if people are civilized in the proper way. It’s when they’re not civilized in the proper way that they fall back on these kinds of things. That’s why you get street gangs or prison gangs, because we have an innate desire to be with a group, to protect our interests, to help us, to protect us. That’s why you get a lot of things like crony capitalism, that’s why you get aristocracy—[it] is this innate desire to form coalitions to protect your interests against everybody else. KIM: So what role then has that played in our current political situation in the election of Donald Trump. GOLDBERG: Sure. How much time do you have? Part of my argument is that when we watch entertainment, there’s a rational side of our brand that understands its just a movie or a TV show. KIM: Yes. GOLDBERG: But as Steven Pinker talks about in a couple of his books, there’s a bigger chunk of our brains that doesn’t understand that it’s entertainment. KIM: You really go after the movie Dead Poets Society. GOLDBERG: I do. So the morality of popular entertainment is very different then the morality of the people living in everyday life. We root for the hero to do terrible things to the villain. We encourage violence. I have a long list of movies where the hero
of the movie tortures somebody to get information out of them and the audience cheers it on. But we understand in normal life you’re not supposed to torture people. KIM: Some of us. GOLDBERG: Some of us, yeah. That’s different. That’s Tuesday night at The Commonwealth Club. So one of the things that’s happening in our culture is that we are retreating from institutions where we actually deal with real humans face to face. We’re going on Facebook, and we’re watching television and we’re watching politics as if it’s a form of entertainment. When we do that, the tribal mind starts kicking in and saying, “It’s us-versus-them, the other are bad, evil people. They’re not just wrong—they’re evil.” One of my favorite cartoons is from The New Yorker,, and its got two dogs drinking martinis at a bar. One dog says to the other “You know, it’s not good enough that dogs succeed. Cats must also fail.” And that’s what’s happening to our politics now. I talk to a lot of young conservatives and I have to tell them something is not justified just because it makes liberals sad. The argument that it’s good for Donald Trump to do X, solely because liberal tears are delicious, is not in and of itself a sufficient argument. But that’s sort of where we are. I call it in the book ecstatic schadenfreude; it’s this sort of reveling in the misfortune of others. That’s what you get when you’re not actually physically engaged in politics face to face with real human beings, but instead you’re just sort of dealing with these demonized avatars, who aren’t real representations of people. There’s an enormous amount of social science involved in this where it’s amazing; today partisan affiliation is more predictive of attitudes and behaviors than race, ethnicity or religion in a lot of cases. Which is sort of astounding. Forty years ago, if I asked you whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, I would have to ask you probably a follow-up question to find out if you were a liberal or a conservative. What we’ve had is this giant sorting where people are aligning themselves, often in virtual communities rather than real communities, with like-minded people who simply reinforce some of their worst instincts, and their worst attitudes and their worst bigotries against the other.
I was a Never-Trumper. Once he was elected I stopped calling myself that, because I thought for me the term had lost its meaning. I wasn’t going to endorse him, I wasn’t going to vote for him. And I’m not a member of the resistance. I praise Donald Trump when I think he gets things right. I criticize him when I think he gets things wrong. So I end up pissing everybody off. The way the resistance argues is sort of like, “Donald Trump puts salt on his french fries. Hitler put salt on his french fries.” I keep trying to explain to my left-wing friends, Donald Trump is not Hitler. Hitler could have repealed Obamacare. So [Trump is] a symptom of a lot of our problems, and he’s making some of our problems a lot worse, but he’s not the cause of them. These things are much more upstream from Washington.