Joe Biden Needs To Cure America’s Label Obsession

Hatred thrives on simplicity

There’s a snippet from a 2013 interview which perfectly sums up the challenge Joe Biden faces in uniting America.

In the clip, Charlie Rose asks two well-known designers, Jony Ive and Marc Newson, to explain why they work so well together:

“I think in some ways that’s why we’re the close friends that we are,” says Jony. “We share the same view of the world and the same taste, and we relate to the same attributes or aspects of an object.”

There’s a brief pause, then Marc smiles.

“Most importantly,” he adds. “We really hate the same things.”

If there’s one thing that’s uniting Americans right now, it’s shared hatred.

Half the country (actually, a little over half, thank God), hates Donald Trump and everything associated with him. His supporters, the Republican Party, orange skin foundation, all of it.

The other half hates the first half just as much. They’re communists, they’re anti-freedom, they’re bringing gun restrictions, and none, they assume, are good people.

The numbers bear this out. Close to 50% of Americans believe the opposing party has “few or no” good ideas. Those who are most engaged with politics (even if that engagement is just binge-watching Fox News or doom-scrolling on Twitter) are most distrustful of the opposing party. Compromise is increasingly frowned upon, both parties are becoming more politically extreme, and worst of all, both sides feel as if they’re losing ground. As distrust and hatred ramps up, each side has come to see the other as an existential threat.

This isn’t just a political problem. America is tearing itself apart in the same way on issues of race, gender, sexuality, you name it. A few months ago, an ideological war broke out on Twitter about whether 2 + 2 = 5 (I swear I’m not making this up). Where shared hatred used to be reserved for important issues like whether New-York style pizza is better than Chicago style pizza, it’s now become a national pastime.

So what do we do about all of this? Well, here there’s good news. Because while hating people en-masse is fun, it takes work to maintain. In fact, whatever the topic, it requires the same process. And undoing this process, while it’s not easy, isn’t nearly as impossible as it might feel.

The essential step in hating an entire group of people is to simplify them. To boil them down to a set of characteristics which represent their worst members. It’s ridiculous to hate everybody who disagrees with you about the environment or social equality, but anybody with half a brain hates those weed-smoking, commie-loving Democrats. It’s hard to hate a diverse group of people who think differently about economic policy or personal responsibility, but what kind of monster doesn’t hate the gun-toting, race-baiting, Republicans?

When attacking the other side, it’s fair game to cite wrong-headed policies from a hundred years ago. It’s standard practice to criticise politicians who haven’t represented their party in decades. We hold the other side to behavioural and moral standards that our side breaks without even hint of cognitive dissonance. And we do all of this because we’ve stopped caring about what’s being done, just which side is doing it.

When you keep this up for long enough, the labels themselves do all the work. Just knowing that somebody is a Democrat or Republican (or better yet polar-opposites like “Left” and “Right”) removes the need to think about what they’re saying. If they’re on your side, they’re doing what’s best for the country. If they’re not, they’re trying to destroy it. Again, we can see this in action.

In a 2018 study, Lilliana Mason, at the University of Maryland, found that Conservatives are more likely to distrust self-identified Liberals, even if their views skew conservative, and to trust self-identified Conservatives, even if their views skew liberal. Data from the Perception Gap report, shows us that time and time again, Republicans and Democrats misjudge and misunderstand each other’s political views. “Inter-political” marriage (which was perfectly normal sixty years ago) has become as controversial and uncommon as interracial and interfaith marriage used to be.

All of this is an inevitable result of the instinct to surround ourselves with people who hate the same things. We don’t need to understand what the enemy thinks or believes. In fact, understanding only makes it harder to hate the other side at full force. If familiarity breeds contempt, it’s a lack of familiarity which breeds hatred. It’s the same mentality which fuels all the symptoms of bigotry.

Like all the best medicines, the cure is simultaneously bitter and undeniably good for us; To spend less time with those who hate the same things, and more time with those we think we hate.

Whilst writing about politics for the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to hundreds of people I’ve disagreed with. Some of them (both liberal and conservative) have been ill-informed, some were borderline hysterical, some of them had smart, valuable insights, and none of them were the monsters they’re made out to be. Almost everybody was willing to listen as long as I listened in return. None of their opinions was so simplistic that you could summarise them in a single word. And none of them wanted to destroy America or start a communist revolution or usher in a new era of racial oppression.

Are there people out there who do want these things? Sure. But they’re a tiny fringe that we willfully mistake for the whole. They’re the villains that we use to convince ourselves that our team is the good guys. They’re a symptom of how simplistically we’ve come to view the world and a cautionary tale about the dangers of doing so.

The lifeblood of hatred is the failure to take an honest look at the people you hate. It requires that you focus only on the worst in them and only on the best in yourself. Now that Joe Biden has taken office, his most important and challenging task is to help Americans see each other. Not just the shared hatred which Trump spent four years stoking, but the shared purpose which unites any country.

His job is to help Americans to see the variety beneath the political shorthand and to see the humans behind the labels. To remind everybody of the things they have in common. There’s no need to agree on everything, there’s no need for everybody to be friends, there’s not even any need to hate the same things. Biden just needs to remind all Americans that they love the same country.