Note that the coalitions that command our loyalty aren’t always the kind we typically consider “political.” Each of us is a member of many different groups, which can be nested within each other or else partially overlapping, as in a Venn diagram. We live in neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations; we work on teams within companies; and we worship at churches belonging to denominations of overarching religions. We’re also tied to a given race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. All of these groups compete for our loyalties; note, for example, Madeleine Albright’s insistence that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” And how much loyalty we feel to each group depends on many factors, both personal and cultural. As the political scientist Samuel Huntington points out, Westerners typically have a lot of national loyalty, whereas Arab Muslims are less devoted to their nation than to their extended family and tribe (on the one hand), and to their entire religion and civilization (on the other).At that our political behavior is driven largely by coalition loyalty, then, we’re not trying to single out political parties (Democrat, Republican) or political ideologies (liberal, conservative) as the fundamental focal points. The left–right split happens to be important in modern liberal democracies, especially the United States in recent, more-polarized decades, but changing circumstances can shift the focal points. When a nation goes to war, for example, intra-national political divisions often take a back seat to patriotism and national unity. In other words, context matters—a lot. Nevertheless, our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to “our side” (whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation), rather than as a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes. In addition to the Do-Right’s motives, then, we also harbor the motives of the apparatchik: wanting to appear loyal to the groups around us. This is the key to making sense of our political behavior. It’s not just an attempt to influence outcomes; it’s also, in many ways, a performance.
We are all engaging in this performance online where we can signal our loyalty to our “tribes” as well as our views. When we share or chat with our friends about how “stupid” the other side is, a hidden motivation is to entrench our loyalty and feel supported. Attempting, in good faith, to improve outcomes can get difficult if we remain in our digital or physical echo chambers.
