The Heart Of Political & Party Discourse – The Truths Behind Red Vs. Blue Polarization, Radicalism, and The American Voting System-Part 1-
The security footage and the live stream that recorded the shooting are chilling. On the Oregonian's website, you can see the still frame image of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described anti-fascist, pulling his gun. He's hiding in the alcove just inside the parking garage after sundown; drawing is 380 pistol watching Trump supporters walk past; Trump supporters who had been wearing Patriot baseball caps, a Vancouver-based far-right group known for getting into brawls with left winger's and attending proud boy rallies. Chandler Pappas, one of the Patriot members, claims he heard some of the crowd coordinate the attack. He alleges someone shouted to the shooter, “we got a couple of them right here! Pull it out. Pull it out!” alerting Michael.
They caught the conservatives on foot after the caravan of Trump pickup trucks spraying black life matters protesters with paintballs and mace had moved on. Whether it was coordinated or not, Michael stepped out from behind the men. He aimed the gun at the Trump supporters and waited for them to turn around. Chandler and Aaron Danielson face their attacker, and if you pause the video at the right moment, you can see Aaron draw his can of bear spray. There are two quick shots - one bullet hits a can of mace exploding in a white cloud and the other bullet goes through Aaron's chest. Aaron stumbles back, walks a few steps, and collapses in front of the oncoming car.
Until this moment, whenever two strangers met in Portland to kill each other over wearing red or blue, it was gang beef between Bloods and Crips. Aaron 'Jay' Danielson’s murder marks the first of several in a year of political killings - a string of gun homicides that were totally unique to this area of politics; an area where two strangers would meet on the street, draw their guns, and spill blood. And the media doesn't immediately dismiss it with disdain and condemnation of a gang killing because political killings are unique. Political killings are good for ratings.
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Joe: Political cards on the table, I was a registered Republican until 2016. I belonged to a conservative Debate Club for about half a decade where we respectfully argued individual policies - that way we never attack somebody's favorite Justice or Senator. But after 2016, The Debate Club fell apart. Nobody wanted to discuss solutions or hypothetical laws to replace our failing policies. People started repeating what they heard on the news, which is never a solution…just attacks. Conservatives owning the Libs, and Liberals shouting ‘how dare you’ at Conservatives. We got the feeling it wasn't okay to talk policy. Instead, toeing the party line became more important than analyzing the issues themselves. If another party runs on medical coverage, well then, who cares about the abysmal state of the medical system, you vote their ass down because the party is more important than the policy. This isn't a Republican problem. In the last two midterms, Democrats have used existential dread as a way to motivate voters to come to the polls. They wait for something scary to happen, like the leaked abortion draft, and then they use that to remind you that you should have voted Democrat more often.
In short, both sides keep pressing the moral outrage button. Both political parties want to scare us into voting for their side, but they're using the other half of the nation to bring us to the voting booth, and you can't ring the town alarm every election and every midterm and not expect us to be scared or angry all the time. So, that's what our myths are about. Is it healthy for our personal development to be in a political party, especially if they're using moral outrage as a tool?
Myth One - How do we allow ourselves to get all whipped up into such a frenzy? What is it about moral outrage that is so addictive?
Joe: When we started this podcast, Todd and I didn't talk about it at first until we got a couple of episodes in, but we decided to keep this podcast a-political; we don't pick sides. I still think that was the right choice, by the way. I don't regret that. Why do you try to remain a-political?
Todd: I believe that politics has become more of a business and a sport. I think of it as character, values, and alignment. You believe everything that your politician believes, so I think it was the right thing to do.
Joe: That's a good way to put it. I think the reason why I like to remain a-political as a podcast is because I have values that haven't really changed in a long time and politicians change their messaging depending on the year. And I know that people grow, you're supposed to change what you believe and how your values sync up. But honestly, politicians will change their values if their state demands it for them to get elected. And the parties will generally support that; they will shift their values. There's a great example of Michelle Obama. She was supporting reform for how we advertise food. She went after the Food and Drug Lobby and was like, we're putting sugar and salt in absolutely everything. And then she got a nice paycheck from Kraft Foods or some Lobby, and then she changed that message to exercise. And her base supported it.
Todd: I think that's one of the problems with the election when Trump got in. Just got so nasty. There were breakups of friends and families, and it became a thing where you have to believe everything they said was right and everything the other opposed was wrong. Exactly. And I just don't agree with that.
Joe: Our Debate Club used to be a marketplace of ideas, and it was mostly Conservatives, a couple of Liberals here and there and we would come, and we would talk about strictly the policy. But in 2016, if you didn't agree with your party's policy, then you were out. They would literally be kicked out of the club. And so, it became a system where we no longer want to find the best way to run things. We only wanted to support what our party said. I don't know if I've told you this, but I don't look at any one politician and say that's my champion. I look at their policies. I don't stick with a person because they're my color - that's like a sports team. To remind everybody, I am a registered non-party. I don't belong to Republicans or Democrats, but I want to give a shout-out to a friend of the podcast and a listener - Sheila LaChance. She contacted us after the episode about covid, and she noticed that most of my sources for that episode were Liberal sources and I sent an email back and I was like, yep. Usually, on the podcast, we go with about 60/40. We will pull from what we call a media bias chart. And we will try to sprinkle in both Conservative and Liberal demographics we get from Gallup polls and sources that are hard to be biased. We do sometimes use Washington Post or New York Times, but generally speaking, we try to pull from the middle of the chart.
Todd: Sheila caught Joe’s shenanigans and called him out on it. And we appreciate that.
Joe: Many times, the reason why we skew a bit Liberal in our sources is that they come from colleges. And as we kind of know, a lot of colleges are Liberal nowadays; the majority of college educators and the majority of the colleges putting out really good studies also come from Liberal minds. So, when we do that, we try to make sure it's a study that is based on something that would be non-politically motivated. Like when we talk about dating metrics or self-improvement or self-awareness, those are really hard to have a political opinion on. This is not me being a political party apologizer; it's the opposite. I think picking a political party is foolish, and we're going to get into the history of political parties and how some of our nation's founders believed in parties. George Washington had a couple of very scathing things to say about polarizing our nation with a two-party system. I will admit right off, I am really into ranked voting, which last year started catching on in a couple of States. So, on this episode, because I believe so hard in not picking a side, Todd will be keeping this on the rails.
Todd: Someday Joe is going to become a cult leader.
Let's get straight to it. And again, we're going to get into the next episode of how much protesting Portlanders do. It's our hobby. We do it every weekend. If you go downtown and you don't see somebody protesting something. To remind everybody, this case we are discussing wasn't totally random; this guy was playing the shooting, and he pulled his gun before. And we didn't start that way. We lost Republicans and Moderates in 2006. Our state was 36% Republican, which was enough to get people in local offices, especially if you are on the East part of Oregon. We're very blue in the city, and we're very red when you get five miles anywhere else. They're both radical, both extreme. It used to be that we were better represented on both sides. In 2006, 36% were Republican and now it's like 24%. Speaking of supporting your sports team, getting riled up enough to go pull a gun, it becomes a much bigger story.
Myth Two - FDR used to hold Fireside Chats to unite us and Teddy Roosevelt talked about how the most important part of politics is realizing we're all American. So, what the hell changed? Why is there so much money to be made by keeping us polarized?
My question to you is, do you think this polarization is good for us? Do you think moral outrage on some level is good? In a primal sense, I think that it kind of gives you social standing within your group, maybe gives you some strength, and gives you some social power. It usually means you read the newspaper and you kept up with politics, and you had a lot of good information and then you pick sides. But then you passively absorb outrageous stuff on Facebook, and you think that you are knowledgeable and say calling the President an idiot makes you put your monocle back in. If we are in a tribe of 40 humans in the early era of man were coming out of the cave and see another tribe across the valley you at war with, it would be a good thing to be able to turn to our tribe and be like, they are hunting all of our mammoths, you should be outraged.
There's a YouTuber that makes videos that are very, very instructional. They are non-political. They're mostly about neurology and how information spreads; his name is CGP Gray, and he has this video that came before all of this political nonsense about how outrage works, which is you don't try to take your outrage to the other group. Most people communicate their outrage to their own group. So, if you just imagine discussing the valley where, like Neanderthals, are on the other side of the valley, and your human group is in the cave, it becomes a safe space to push your opinions. Everybody in the cave just trades anger and outrage and tells each other how mad they are at the other side. Nobody's crossed the valley in months. Nobody's gone to the other side to discuss this, but both sides are enraged.
People act like you don't have convictions if you don't support a side. With convictions, you just don't have them for a single leader, and I think that is the mistake people make. If you want to know how much people across that Valley and lead their own cave of outrage, it's less than 20%, and it's getting smaller. When you look at the political map of how often Congressmen and Senators reach across the aisle to get bills passed and discuss with each other, they look like sea GPS. Gray's outrage map talks about how angry they are amongst themselves and then once in a great while, two people will leave their cave and meet in the valley, and they'll yell at each other and sometimes they shoot each other. That's exactly what this episode is really about - people in the Trump cave went rolling through to the Liberal cave, and gunfire gunshots were exchanged. They didn't shake hands and go to Starbucks and say, let's talk about this.
We're going to link off to a Scientific American article that's about if outrage be a good thing and to be brief, outrage does exactly what Todd was talking about. It gives you social standing; it makes you sound like you have convictions, and it makes you sound knowledgeable. In addition, it makes you sound like you are supporting the cause that you are a tribal leader, and it gets stuff done in a very limited sense. Since moral outrage helps you rally, helps you stick to a cause and it can affect change, especially if your anger comes from a marginalized group. If you are in the 26% of Conservative Republicans still in Oregon who have kicked out the middle-of-the-road Republicans, you are now in a smaller group, and outrage helps you get more cohesive results.
Myth Three – Is picking sides healthy for us? Culturally, we put a lot of stock and being right. But how does that serve our personal well-being?
It doesn't matter what their politics are as long as your side wins. But the problem is it is addictive. As we discussed on our grudge episode, outrage is a great tool. But left on our own day-to-day, we hardly ever get that button pressed. If I shut down the internet and get rid of the biggest culprits of outrage, we don't get that outrage hardly ever. You may get cut off by somebody in another car and you get a tiny dose of that outrage, but it’s not nearly as powerful.
This can't be physically healthy, though; hardened heads to hate and be angry constantly. In our grudge episode, we shared studies about how if you'd legitimately hate somebody to the point where you hold a grudge regularly, it causes you physical pain. It's bad for cortisol. Cortisol goes up in your body, which shortens your lifespan. It's bad for your heart and it's bad for your blood pressure. Once your outrage level gets to you ready to shoot somebody, that's when it starts being wildly unhealthy for you. It would be one thing if that were an outlier, if 1-20 humans got so angry with their outrage that it turned into hate, but that's not 1-20. That is all of the news media sites that are trying to get you outraged to get you to click on their stuff. They're pressing that button. It's not 1-20. It's like 90% of CNN and Fox's followers being outraged.
So now we get into a very interesting question. Why do our media outlets keep pretending that the other shot the other side? If you are outraged at that moment, ask yourself, who is profiting? Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson look really mad when they are shaking their fingers at the other side, but at the end of the day, they both drive home to multimillion-dollar houses.
Let's talk a little bit about Facebook and who makes the most money from you picking sides. So, there's an article by Big Think and Dr. Malik, who's become almost like a spokesperson for outrage and how rage works. She's from the Yale Department of Psychology and she talks about how the media makes the most money when you are outraged. In fact, every word in a tweet that is about morals, it increases the likelihood of a retweet by 20%. So, we're accidentally giving away the secret to everyone who wants to make their tweets go viral. Every tweet that is a moral word increases your retweet likelihood. Moral outrage is the most engaging content online and algorithms will select your moral outrage material. That also puts you at the top and gets more clicks because it works. YouTube will move your video to the top and Facebook will make your story more shareable and those end up being the posts that polarize the most.
We had an episode months ago where we discussed Facebook's algorithms and how there's something called the engagement graph. Zuckerberg had a meeting with his Facebook team, and they looked at this graph. And they showed that the more morally outraged somebody is, the more time they spend looking at Facebook. When they are at maximum engagement is when Facebook is making the most money possible off them. Facebook does this to people when people are at their peak engagement like eight hours a day. It is because they have become radicalized. That's Facebook's words. Facebook knows that you are using their service the most right before you go insane, right before you are radicalized. In fact, the way they put it, right after they reach peak engagement, that's usually when they have to get kicked off of the platform. The graph looks like a hockey stick. It's time you spend in the seat being mad. Then suddenly, you're posting stuff like threats, and you're telling people you're getting your gun and you will see that they die. And that's when you get kicked off of Facebook forever.
If I learned anything from the radio, or if I learned something from Facebook or Twitter, I am more outraged than if I saw that in person. And this isn't just my theory. The University of Chicago did a study about a moral event, and they found out that seeing it in real life doesn’t cause people to get as mad as it does online. I saw wage theft in real life, and I wasn't as mad. I saw wage theft online on Twitter and Facebook and I was ready to shoot somebody. I'm actually going to quote the Crockett's article. I think she really said it best. She says, “I think it's really worth considering and having a conversation about whether we want some of our strongest moral emotions, which are so core to who we are. Do we want those under the control of algorithms, whose main purpose is to generate advertising revenue for big tech companies?”
You're letting an algorithm press it. It's not even people; it's not your party; you're not winning and scoring points with your tribe; what you're doing is you're letting an algorithm show you images other people have made over and over and over again and headlines of false intelligence. If you wonder why we are so polarized right now, it is because of these algorithms. It is because algorithms assign us things to make us angry. Like, it's homework, and then we just do it. We sit there, and we get outraged because me being angry eight hours a day on Facebook makes Zuckerberg a little bit more money. There is an NPR article about how outrage is hijacking our culture and our minds. There's a Science.org article on how social earning amplifies moral outrage expression online and on social networks. In short, if you feel morally outraged when you're watching the news, just remember that people are profiting off of that.
Final Thoughts
For generations, we lived in America where someone in the government, usually the President, will try to slow the political polarization. This hasn't happened much recently. During his presidency, Trump made it pretty clear that he didn't care about peace with Liberals – made fourth by and called Conservatives the most extreme political group in history.
But what if the real danger facing America isn't the other political party? What if the real danger is the big red button Media and Politicians keep pushing to convince us to vote and tune in? What if the real source of polarization isn't coming from Liberals or Conservatives but from the algorithms that hijacked our moral outrage for money. To quote George Washington, “Political parties, May now and then answer popular ends. They are likely in the course of time and things to become pone engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be able to subvert the power of people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government destroying afterwards the very engines which of lifted them to unjust dominion.”
So that's the lesson we are taking away from the research - to gird our emotions, to make our outrage bulletproof. Our morals are permanent, after all, whereas the politicians who hijacked them are temporary employees of the people and will be gone in four years or less. To put it another way, if you're watching the news or Twitter and you feel outraged, ask yourself who's getting paid right now. Because if you have to ask, it's not you.