A Deeper Dive on Tribalism: On the Eve of the 2024 U.S. Election
My mother came to visit me in Cambridge during my first semester in graduate school. I was a newly inscribed Red Sox fan. It was October 1975, and the World Series was in full swing.
Mom was always game. She would play in gin rummy tournaments in Las Vegas — and place in the money. She kept a table in the front at Ruth’s Chris where, the paperwork done, she would play long sessions against various challengers. Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans Mafia, once brought his nephew in to make his bones. She skunked him. So what happened, I once asked her. Well, he was slow to pay. So, I called Carlos and he sent a man over with a paper sack with $50,000.
Mom with Angelo Trosclair who rode Tudor Tambourine in the New Orleans Handicap
Nota bene: apparently Mom had Carlos Marcello’s number in her Rolodex.
The first licensed woman Thoroughbred trainer in Louisiana, her 4-year-old Tudor Tambourine would win the 1977 New Orleans Handicap, longest shot ever to win the Fair Grounds’ most prestigious race. It paid $75 to win. The Dom Perignon at Ruth’s Chris Steak House would flow long into the night.
So the challenge of buying scalped tickets to the World Series didn’t require a second thought. We sat together far out in left field and perhaps it was our body English that kept catcher Carlton Fisk’s home run over the Green Monster from going foul. Well, maybe Pudge helped.
For the next 6 years my devotion to the Sox almost matched my dedication to my literary studies. So of course, I was listening to the Sunday afternoon game 3 years later that would determine the American League East season. The Red Sox managed to tie the Yankee’s season record 99–63 (.611), and I ran down to Yawkey Way to buy two tickets.
And so yes, Mom was game and flew up the next day for the tiebreaker.
I won’t linger over the stunning, heart-breaking, blooped homerun by the diminutive second baseman Bucky Dent that decided the game. Dent would finish his career with only 40 homeruns. The Yankees went on to win the series in seven games against, you guessed it, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bucky Dent was MVP. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
Breakdowns
What lingers in memory from that day in Fenway is the moment when, the Yankees at bat, Mom asked what the fans were chanting. When tens of thousands of fans chant YANKEES SUCK, YANKEES SUCK it can come out a bit muffled. But I think what stumped her was the incongruity. Mom wasn’t fazed by such language. I once overheard her say about a business deal, I think I’m getting screwed and at least like to get kissed when I’m screwed. But such language was not then part of public discourse.
I mark that moment at Fenway as the beginning of the breakdown in American civility.
Since then, the breakdown has come a long way. Newt Gingrich would follow 20 years later. Steve Bannon and Trump broke through all guardrails twenty years after that. Now members of Congress won’t be caught dead speaking to one another, let alone work together on much-needed compromises.
Political discourse now echoes the darkest moments before the Civil War. If we haven’t seen an event on the Senate floor like the 1856 caning of Charles Sumner, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, the January 6th perpetrators did far worse in order to storm the Senate Chamber.
Call it Trump Derangement Syndrome if you must but count me among the less surprised at the metaphoric caning of Mookie Betts in the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Yankees fan Austin Capobianco grabbed Betts’s glove with both hands and pulled the ball out. Capobianco’s friend, John Peter, grabbed Betts’s non-glove hand.
Sign of the times? You bet.
Disentangling Tribalism
As a member still of the Red Sox tribe, I was unsurprised that Yankee fans were the perps. I too am part of the problem.
How do we overcome this tribalism? How do we learn to listen across no man’s land?
Sleepless two nights before the election, I turned to my usual late-night soporific: podcasts.
But I happened to turn on This American Life which was rebroadcasting an episode of Question Everything. with Brian Reed: “Can Journalism Save a Marriage?” The subject: a news outlet that addresses our all-time low trust in news.
The episode involved the difficulties a couple, Dick and Emily Newton from Orange County, CA, had been having for the last 20 of their 24 years of marriage. They fell in love singing hymns together in the choir at church. (No joke).
For many years only Emily was politically engaged. Slowly, Dick began to read Breitbart and watch Fox News. Emily read the Times and WaPo and The Atlantic. Though both identified as Republican, neither wanted to read what their spouse wanted to share.
Things worsened. Dick was persuaded by Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2000 Mules which premiered at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Alleging that thousands of so-called mules illegally cast ballots in the 2020 election swinging it for Joe Biden, the documentary was pulled from distribution by Salem Media Group who apologized to an Atlanta man for false claims in the film that he’d illegally cast the ballots of others.
Dick’s view of the “stolen election” was unperturbed. Emily didn’t bite that poison apple.
Things got so bad in their marriage they decided that to cut through the knot they needed to find an impartial news source.
They found a daily newsletter called Tangle written by Isaac Saul.
Presenting himself as both “a skeptic and an open minded individual,” every day Saul discusses a single topic. He summarizes two or three articles from left and right sources then offers “Isaac’s Take.”
Tangle differs from other news sources in its tone and approach. Claims that seem more persuasive, Saul doesn’t just write them off. He assesses them seriously and presents them seriously. Saul goes out of his way to filter out loaded language (trigger words). Rather than “aliens” or “illegal immigrants,” Saul speaks of “unauthorized migrants.” Rather than burying his mistakes, when needed the daily newsletter starts with corrections and explains how he got things wrong.
Transparency characterizes “Isaac’s Take” too. Saul makes no hollow claim to that will-o’-the-wisp, objectivity. He’s nobody’s shill but he brings to the table the personal emotions that shape his “take.” In rebutting the false claims that FEMA did not do its job in the North Carolina recovery, Saul writes:
I do care about our information ecosystem. I care about reliable, accurate information being shared widely. I also care about the North Carolinians in danger right now.
Not just because they’re Americans and it’s a state I love, but also because my mom, my aunt, my brother and his family, my sister-in-law and my niece, they all live in North Carolina. So the horrors we’re all witnessing on the news hit close to home. Here’s the truth though.
Biden and Harris have actually pulled every lever federal executives can in a situation like this.
Saul is just as direct about the largest issue in the election. In “An Honest Look at 2000 Mules, The New Stolen Election Theory,” Saul makes the case that the 2020 election was not stolen. Dick finally came around.
About a third of Saul’s readers say that they’re on the left, a third on the right, and the last third are either center or independent.
Clearly the tribes have not reunited but Dick and Emily have mended their relationship. Emily reports that “Dick and I can now agree on more, or disagree based on the same information, at least.” Dick no longer feels he’s walking on eggshells. “Now,” Emily reports, “although he might be reading a different page than me at the time, but it’s generally the same hymn book.” Which chimes well with how they met.
But it is perhaps a sign of Tangle’s evenhandedness, that Dick, who likes Trump’s policies — notwithstanding the unstolen election — is voting Republican.
For the record, I’m pretty sure Mom would be casting her third vote for Trump. Here’s hoping it would have proved, for once, a losing bet.
