How to cleave the right in two

Recently Steven Crowder (who has lately come into controversy for many reasons) made fun of Mattel for releasing a Down syndrome Barbie. This, he seemed to think, was wokeness.

Many of his own followers were not convinced. They argued that a Down Syndrome Barbie might reduce the likelihood of fetuses with Down syndrome being aborted. Children with Down syndrome might be comforted by playing with this doll. For them, making this doll wasn’t wokeness, it was compassion.

This, I think, gets to a basic split between conservatives. There are conservatives who see wokeness as a weird, scary attack on what they hold dear including compassion, and there are conservatives who see wokeness as an excess of compassion. The problem with this Barbie, for many like Crowder, is precisely that it is too kind.

Two conservative types

Let me start with the caveat that in practice, everything is a mixture and a matter of degree- there are no perfect types- but…

There are, I think, two fundamental conservative types, let’s call them Andrew and Cedric (I use male names because increasingly this is a very gendered split- particularly among young people).

Andrew looks around the world and sees two often overlapping threats: chaos and mediocrity. There is a need for excellent men, men like himself, to impose order. The twin threats of the feeble, yet entitled weaklings, and the stronger, cunning destroyers who might organize the weak through their resentment, surround Andrew. These fights are eternal, we may be in a particular stage of decline now, but the strong must always make hard choices, that is part of what makes them strong. There’s a good chance he often fantasizes about killing a home invader. Sometimes he thinks it would be simpler if there’d just be some kind of apocalypse and strong men like himself would rise to the top. For Andrew, there’s far too much compassion these days.

Cedric looks around the world and things seem scary to him. Unlike Andrew he doesn’t see all of this stuff as an eternal struggle, rather he thinks something odd and specific is happening. Everything is changing so fast. Everyone he knows is normal, but there are so many odd people out there, and he’s heard frightening things about crime everywhere- on his television, on the internet, and from his friends (the Andrews of the world have done much to bring such ‘facts’ to his attention of course). He doesn’t want to think about what might happen if all this stuff keeps going. People seem so weird and crazy now, there are trans people, homeless people, people with strange hair dye, and immigrants with religions he’s heard dreadful things about. Other than maybe certain types of criminals he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone, he just wants things to go back to normal and he’s worried everything will fall apart and maybe something awful will happen- especially to his family.

I am not making excuses for Cedric. This isn’t about right or wrong, good or evil, it’s about strategy, and my view is that Cedric can be reached. It’s also my view we can do this without throwing a single group under the bus.

When I first showed this draft to someone, they had the impression that Cedric is a Lennie Small type figure- potentially loveable, but dumb. This is not true. I have known at least one Professor of Philosophy who I would call a Cedric. Cedric can be ferociously smart- while I think Cedric is thinking about things in the wrong way he’s not wrong that things are falling apart, he’s just not thinking about it right.

It’s useful, I think, to understand the difference between Andrew and Cedric in a couple of ways.

First of all are the concepts of Social Dominance Orientation versus Right Wing Authoritarianism. I won’t reiterate them here, but in essence, Andrew is high on SDO, Cedric is high on RWA.

The second thing is class structure. Cedric may very well identify with being a worker- with doing good honest work for society. Of course the large majority of people are workers, so Andrew is probably a worker too, but Andrew probably doesn’t “identify” with being a worker. He thinks of himself as a temporarily embarrassed entrepreneur, a soon to be rightwing youtuber, maybe a politician, something like that. This is not to say that Cedric has no dreams of making it rich, but for Andrew, it may be close to an obsession.

Another area, I think is, economic policy.

This chart gets shared around a lot:

I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but if it is accurate, I suspect a lot of people in the upper left quadrant- economically a bit to the ‘left’, socially to the right, are Cedrics . I suspect that their authoritarianism also has a somewhat different flavor to the flavor of the Andrews too. They do not delight in the exercise of power by the strong over the weak, they just want things to be ‘normal’ again.

Another key area of distinction is race. Neither Andrew nor Cedric are free of racial prejudices, but whereas Cedric is washed along by structural racism and things he’s heard Andrew saying, Andrew has probably privately done a lot of thinking about skull sizes, race and IQ and The Bell Curve. Andrew probably explicitly and consciously believes that some races are superior to others for biological reasons. Cedric, if the idea were put to him would probably reject it as racist. He does however talk about “those people” a lot.

A final distinction is religion. Cedric is not necessarily very good at being Christian, but there’s a good chance he sincerely buys into it- including the stuff about loving your neighbor, and your neighbor being everyone. Andrew detests this, regards it as weakness, and naturally wants to be a kind of classical pagan. However he conceals this, often even from himself, the resulting turmoil causes all sorts of interesting calamities within him and within his words.

Implications for action

The key is to talk to the Cedrics of the world, soothe their fears, and bring out their compassionate side. This is easier said than done. The first step, I think, is to create community. Media is often dominated by the Andrews of the world, and where media substitutes for community, Andrew, like a wormtongue, has the ear of Cedric.

Making industrial organizations- unions- a site of community is an ideal strategy in this regard. It moves the locus of political discussion from weird basement dwellers on the internet to cleaner air, focused on the clash of labor and capital- and frankly less paranoia and more normality.

On a more individual level, it’s important to distinguish between Andrew and Cedric, to know which one you’re talking with. When talking with a Cedric:

1. Give them the opportunity to express fears, and where there is overlap, validate those concerns.

2. Genuinely listen to what they say without judgement. Take them seriously.

3. You can do all of that without throwing single group of people under the bus. I know because I’ve done so. Let me give some examples from my life. In real life of course they didn’t happen as monologues, and didn’t sound this artificial (I’m just bad at writing dialogue.

“I don’t think people are trying to ban reading Shakespeare at University, but you’re one hundred percent right that people are often getting carried away with liberal moralism in academia. I think partly that’s just the usual weirdness of university, but partly it’s to the stress and pressure created through ruthless competition for a handful of spots- both in the university and outside it.”

“I agree there are a lot of homeless people these days, and that it’s depressing. I also agree that when people are yelling at thin air on the street that can be scary, particularly walking past them late at night. I think it’s even sadder and scarier for them. Cheaper housing prices do the most to reduce homelessness and on the mental health issue I’d say it’s exacerbated by a lack of beds. Our GDP is over 2.5x higher than it was in 1970, yet we’re always being told “we don’t have the money” for things like housing and mental health anymore- that makes no sense.”

The reason you don’t have to throw anyone under the bus is that fundamentally Cedric doesn’t want to hurt almost anyone. Fundamentally Cedric is not wrong that things are falling apart. It’s just a matter of giving him another way to process that. It’s easier said than done, to be sure, but if we could convince even ten percent of Cedrics….

The aim is not to be morally correct within yourself, isolated from the world, the aim is to advance the good in the world.