You Fight Differently When Everything You Own Is on the Beach

Here is a question soldiers understand better than voters do. How hard you fight for a position depends on what is behind it.

A small beachhead, taken this morning, of no particular value, can be given up. You pull back, you lose a little ground, and tomorrow is another day. Nobody dies for it if the odds turn bad, and nobody should.

Now put everything you own behind that same strip of sand. Your house, your family, your way of life, everything you have ever built. The position is physically identical. The fight is not. You will be ruthless, because retreat is no longer a tactical adjustment; it is the loss of everything at once.

The ferocity is not a property of the position. It is a property of what is bundled behind it.

The Bundle Is the Problem

This is what our political system does to us, and I think it explains the radicalisation everyone complains about better than the usual suspects do.

An ideology, or a party platform, is a bundle. Your view on taxation is packed together with your views on immigration, on defence, on drugs, on religion in schools, on the environment, on forty other things, and the whole package is handed to you with a name and a colour. You did not assemble it. Somebody else did, for reasons of coalition arithmetic that have nothing to do with whether the positions belong together.

Once you have adopted the package, every single argument becomes an argument about the package. A dispute over the marginal tax rate is no longer a dispute over the marginal tax rate. If you lose it, your side is weakened, and your side is carrying everything you believe. You are defending the whole beachhead every time, on every issue, including the ones you barely care about.

So you fight like someone defending everything, because in the terms the system has given you, you are.

Why Reasonable People Become Unreasonable

Notice what this does to a person who is perfectly capable of nuance in every other part of life.

At work, he changes his mind when shown data. In his marriage, he concedes points. About football he can admit the other team played better. And then the conversation turns to politics and he cannot yield an inch on a question he has never studied, because yielding that inch is yielding the entire coastline.

The usual explanation is that politics is tribal and people are tribal. That is true but it is not the mechanism. Plenty of things are tribal without producing this intensity. The mechanism is the bundling: it converts every small question into an existential one, and people respond to existential threats exactly as you would expect.

You cannot fix this by asking people to be calmer. Asking a man to be calm while, by his own lights, everything he values is under assault, is asking him to be irrational. He is behaving correctly given the stakes he has been told he is playing for.

Remove the Bundle and the Ferocity Drains

The test of this account is what happens when the bundle is removed.

Ask people a single question, isolated from party identity, and something remarkable happens. They become reasonable. Referendum campaigns on narrow issues can be ugly, but they do not produce the permanent, generalised hostility of party politics, because when the vote is over, nothing else was riding on it. You lost on this. You may win on the next. The beachhead was only ever a beachhead.

Direct decision on separate questions is often defended on the grounds of legitimacy or representation. This is a different argument for it, and I think a stronger one: it lowers the stakes of every individual disagreement to the size of that disagreement. A tax question becomes a tax question. You can lose it without losing your identity, and so you can argue it like an adult.

What This Is Not

I am not saying that people have no deep commitments, or that they should not. Some things are genuinely worth fighting for without limit, and a healthy person knows which ones.

I am saying that the system has arranged matters so that everything looks like one of those things. It has taken the small number of questions on which a reasonable person would refuse to yield and attached them, with tape and string, to hundreds of questions on which the same person would happily compromise. Then it asks him to vote on the lot, once, and wonders why he behaves as if he were cornered.

He behaves that way because he was cornered. The remedy is not a better temperament. It is a system that stops piling everything onto the same beach.