Why Did the Democrats Lose? Issue 7: Collective Arrogance

When you think your views are the only correct ones, people are going to turn against you.

This is my last post about the 2024 election. I’m sure people are tired of analyzing what happened two and a half weeks ago and are ready to move on. But please indulge me one last time!

I said that my previous post was number 8 (when it was really number 7!). So this one will be number 7. This final election post will focus on the issue of collective arrogance. By collective arrogance, I mean a group of people insisting that they - and only they - have access to the truth. Everyone else is mistaken, misled, or misinformed.

My argument here is that many Democrats - especially those within the progressive segment of the party - have adopted this approach. Only they understand what science is. Only they understand marginalized groups and how to protect them (but see my previous post questioning whether any adult needs to be protected - can people not speak for themselves?). Only they understand what is happening to the Earth’s climate. Only they understand how gender works. Anyone who disagrees is just plain wrong - or is guilty of some sort of -ism or -phobia.

Religious Exclusivity - It’s Not Exclusive to Religious Groups

I attended college in the Deep South in the early 1990s. Many people, both on and off campus, were evangelical Christians. They believed that part of their function was to convert other people to their belief system, and only by accepting evangelical Christianity could these other people be “saved.” I was approached more times that I can count, and invited to attend someone’s Bible study. When I declined the invitation, the person invariably became angry and started hurling insults at me. “You’re going to hell! Jesus will punish you! God will smite you!”

(These are all actual quotes that people said to me during my college years.)

In his book Woke Racism, John McWhorter adopts the thesis that many progressive Democrats have treated their beliefs like religious scriptures. Consider these two quotes side by side:

“Anyone who does not accept Jesus Christ as their savior is a child of the devil” (Pastor Tony Evans)

“If you are not an anti-racist, then you are a racist” (Ibram X. Kendi)

Can you see how the same mindset is behind both of these quotes? There is only one truth, and that truth is what I believe.

This is what I have come to refer to as collective arrogance.

About 15 years ago, my colleagues and I collected data on more than 10,000 college students across the United States. We collected data on many types of variables, including cultural worldviews, personal identity development, well-being, depression, anxiety, substance use, and religiosity. As part of the religiosity questionnaires, I made up a bunch of items that I labeled as “religious exclusivity.” The items were meant to be a joke, based on the statements I had heard in college back in the 1990s.

The items I made up were:

1.     There is only one true religion.

2.     Only people who believe as I do will be accepted into God’s kingdom.

3.     People who do not worship God correctly will not go to heaven.

4.     It is my job to help save people from God’s judgment by showing them the right way to worship God.

5.     The religion that I believe in was created directly by God, or by God’s Messenger.

6.     There is only one right way to worship God.

7.     There is only one set of spiritual truths, and it is the set of truths that I believe in.

8.     As long as you live a good and moral life, it doesn’t matter how you worship God. (This item would be scored in reverse.)

9.     People of all religions can go to heaven. (This item would be scored in reverse.)

10.  The religion that I practice is God’s favorite.

As I said, I made these items up largely as a joke. But they worked! And scores on this questionnaire were highly correlated with scores on other religiosity scales.

Now imagine that we used these same items, but we rephrased them to refer to COVID orthodoxy or to progressive belief systems about race or gender. Do you think they would work? I do.

This is the heart of John McWhorter’s thesis - the Elect (the term he uses for people who adopt progressive ideas with religious fervor) are essentially a religious group, and operate according to all of the same dynamics as other religious groups. Instead of heretics, you have “deniers” (such as COVID deniers - people who did not believe that masks and social distancing would protect people against the virus). In many cases, words referring to -isms and -phobias are also akin to heresy within many religious groups. More or less, you have violated our belief system, so we need to exclude you and make sure you understand how wrong you are.

Collective Arrogance

My argument here is that collective arrogance was behind the Bible study people’s indignation toward me for not wanting to join their religious group. Collective arrogance is likely also behind cancel culture (which I wrote about in another post), where the group who is “in charge” culturally gets to decide who is allowed to speak and who is not.

Groups that insist that they are right about everything, and that their beliefs are settled truth, are likely to behave in collectively arrogant ways. There is a great line from Neale Donald Walsch’s book Conversations with God - “when you think you are better than someone else, that’s when you act your worst.”

I have a friend who lives on the West Coast of the United States. She is a wonderful person. But one thing that she said a few years ago about Trump supporters has stuck in my head ever since:

“Of course we shame them! We know we’re better than them. They’re crass and stupid. Anyone who could support someone like Trump must be a complete idiot.”

Again, my friend is a terrific person - but what she said there is an example of how people sound when they think they are better than other people.

I personally am not a Trump supporter. I consider myself to be a moderate, centrist Democrat. I find Trump’s immigration policies to be heartless, cruel, and just plain awful. But many people I know - including people in my family - are Trump supporters. These people are not crass, or stupid, or idiots. My West Coast friend probably has never had a meaningful conversation with a Trump supporter.

And therein lies the problem. Intergroup contact theory, introduced by Tom Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, states that personal contact between members of opposing groups can help to reduce animosity between the groups. Pettigrew, Tropp, and their colleagues spent years validating their theory. Had my West Coast friend spent time around Trump supporters, she probably would have found that most of them are decent people - even if she disagrees with them politically.

Collective arrogance can be remedied by crossing over the group boundaries and getting to know members of other groups. One of my closest friends, whom I have known for almost 40 years, is a Palestinian American. I’m Jewish. But our friendship transcends these group memberships - and each of us have learned more about each other’s groups as we spent time together.

Condescension

Almost four years ago, during the COVID lockdowns, I attended a virtual workshop held by the agency that was funding one of my projects. Several grantees, including my and my collaborators, were presenting their work over Zoom. One group, based in the Northeastern United States, talked about an intervention program they delivered to Hispanic families in a large northeastern city.

The group stated that, on the materials that were shared with the families in their study, they used the word “Latino,” because that was the word these families used to describe themselves. But, these presenters said, when they wrote their findings up for publication, they changed the word to “Latinx” because they wanted to be more inclusive.

In Spanish - as in all Romance languages - all nouns are gendered. Even inanimate objects have gender! And the gender is important - for example, “la puerta” means “the door,” but “el puerto” means “the port.”

Another rule in Romance languages is that, when referring to groups of people, the feminine form of the word is used only if all the people in the group are female. If even one boy or man is present, the male form is used. So a group of female lawyers are in a room, they are “las abogadas.” As soon as one male lawyer joins them, they are “los abogados.” This is how the Spanish language has operated for more than a thousand years.

In the last several years, a small group of people in the United States decided that this inherent sexism in the Spanish language needed to be corrected. So they started placing an “x” in place of the “a” or “o” at the end of many Spanish words. I saw people on social media - mostly academics - talking about their “amigxs” (a word that would be almost impossible to pronounce). And as most people know, “Latinx” was introduced as a substitute for “Latino” or “Latina.”

The only problem with this trend is that most Hispanic people don’t like it. Only about 5% of the US Hispanic population uses “Latinx” to refer to themselves, and the vast majority of these people are cultural elites - academics, media members, and politicians. Regular Hispanic people - the ones who work in stores, drive trucks, and fix computers - they didn’t buy into the changes that the elites, many of whom were not even Hispanic, were making to their language. My wife, who is of Puerto Rican descent, despises the word “Latinx.” I have a good friend whose wife’s family is Mexican American, and none of them like the word. Most Hispanic people who were not in elite progressive circles didn’t like it. Hispanic men, in particular, were averse to it. I’ve been in chatrooms where an elite person uses “Latinx,” and a regular (non-elite) person will simply type in “Latino.” You’d think the elites would eventually get the message, but they haven’t.

Is it any surprise, then, that more than half of Hispanic men voted Republican in the 2024 election? Did we really expect them to support a group who thinks they know better about what regular Hispanic people should be called than those people themselves know?

The progressive segment of the Democratic Party seems to have gotten the message that “Latinx” was not what Hispanic people wanted to be called. But their response was not to go back to calling the Hispanic community what this community calls itself. Instead, other imposed words, such as “Latine” and “Latin@,” have emerged alongside “Latinx.” Do progressives really think that using another word that Hispanics don’t use to refer to themselves is going to work better?

In my opinion, “Latinx” is the epitome of condescension - telling other people what they should call themselves, and not listening to them when they tell you they don’t like the label you have assigned to them.

Virtue Signaling

In the summer of 2022, I was at a major academic conference in the Pacific Northwest. As has become somewhat common in progressive circles, the meeting organizers started the conference with a “land acknowledgment” - essentially listing off all the Native American tribes who had once lived, or still lived, in the Seattle area. It seemed like a nice gesture, but those tribes were never mentioned again during the meeting. No tribal members were invited to give talks, nothing was offered to the tribes by the conference organizers, and the tribes were essentially forgotten about as soon as the meeting was underway.

I personally am a huge admirer of Native American cultures. I always have been. When I lived in South Florida, I took my kids to the Seminole reservation several times so that all of us could learn more about the tribe, their history, and their traditions. When we visited New Mexico - a state that has many Native American pueblos - in 2023, I spent hours asking Native people about their cultures and their histories. I made sure to buy products from the Native artisans who had brought their designs to exhibit and sell. I wanted to support them and show them that they were important. And I also have a friend who is a full-blooded Native American, and she has told me all about the history of her tribe. Every time I see her, I learn something new.

So you can imagine that the idea of land acknowledgments really got under my skin. It’s essentially virtue signaling - saying something that sounds good and makes you sound virtuous, but at no personal cost and requiring no real effort. If you really care about the tribes in your area, go visit them, support them, buy from them, and offer to help them in whatever ways they would find useful. Make friends with tribal members and show them that you care about them.

The epitome of virtue signaling occurred in July 2023, when the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s put out a tweet saying “The United States is on stolen land. This July 4th, let’s commit to returning it.” Upon seeing the tweet, Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation, a Native tribe in Vermont, said he was open to discussing the possibility of taking ownership of the land that the Ben & Jerry’s factories in Vermont were located on. One would think that Chief Stevens’s statement would be the perfect opportunity for Ben & Jerry’s to make good on their sentiments - but they never reached out to him. Several weeks later, Chief Stevens said that he had attempted to contact Ben & Jerry’s corporate headquarters, but no one responded to him.

If this is not virtue signaling, then what is? Ben & Jerry’s made a statement that made them look good but cost them nothing and did not involve any expenditure of effort. Chief Stevens’s request would have required Ben & Jerry’s to give up something, which they were apparently not willing to do. They could have given the land back to the tribe and leased the land back from them - which would have fulfilled their pledge to return the land to its original inhabitants.

In my opinion, virtue signaling is a form of collective arrogance - using a marginalized group to make oneself look good, without actually doing anything to help that group or its members.

Effects on the 2024 Election

As I have said several times across this blog series, voters are smart people. They know when they are being leveled with and when they are being misled. They know when someone has their best interests in mind, and when someone doesn’t. Hispanic people - at least those who are not in academia, the media, or politics - didn’t want to be called “Latinx.” They didn’t want their ethnic language to be changed. They just wanted to be left alone to live their lives - just as most people do - and wanted to be called what they choose to call themselves. I honestly don’t know whether most Native Americans spend time thinking about the land that was taken from them, but certainly when someone offers to give it back, I would expect them to pay attention. Realizing that the offer was not genuine likely came across to Chief Stevens, his tribe, and many other Native Americans as just another slap in the face. No one likes to be misled or lied to - especially people who have experienced that throughout their collective history.

When voters sense that a political party is arrogant and believes that its stance is the only one that is acceptable, they likely will turn away from that party. Reality often is not all that complicated - and it certainly wasn’t in this election.

How do we move forward as Democrats? We need to let go of our “stranglehold” on the truth. We need to stop lecturing and start listening. We need to respect people’s wishes and accept what they see as true in their own lives. We are not inherently better, more virtuous, or more “right” than anyone else. Believing that we are is what got our asses kicked in this election. If we don’t want that to keep happening, we’d better change our ways - and start being more humble and honest with the public.