Us Against ‘Those People’

How shady political operatives use unwanted identities to manipulate and control their supporters.

"Garbage."

"Deplorable."

"Fascist."

The way many (if not most) die-hard Democrats/"progressives" feel about their political counterparts was no secret before or after Joe Biden's recent comments about Donald Trump's supporters. There is a lot to be said about their dismissive, insulting disregard for their fellow citizens, and plenty of people already have, especially in light of the well-earned backlash their disdain has triggered among the electorate.

But as someone who used to agree with them and has since left the Left, I want to pause for a moment to explore how bad actors invoke unwanted identities to delegitimize critics, derail substantive conversations, and keep supporters in line. If you’ve ever wondered how people who claim to support ideals like freedom, democracy, and inclusion could somehow end up supporting censorship, an unelected presidential candidate, or cancellation, it’s important to understand how unwanted identities affect people’s judgment.

Identity politics extends beyond the ways political operatives divide and manipulate people along lines of race, sex, religion, etc. In addition to exploiting our group membership to try to get us to vote or otherwise act the way they want, they also invoke unwanted identities to undermine our ability to think critically. Quoting other shame researchers, Dr. Brené Brown describes unwanted identities as "characteristics that undermine our vision of our 'ideal' selves." People naturally try to distance themselves from these traits, affiliations, or characteristics in order to avoid negative judgments or discrimination that can seriously threaten our well-being. Savvy cause marketers and political operatives understand this, which is why they exploit our fear of being seen as one of 'those people' to nudge us into supporting whatever Current Thing™ boosts their fundraising and political prospects.

Invoking unwanted identities is not only a divide-and-conquer tactic that pits their supporters against everyone else (a tactic that fosters relationship-festering contempt among families and community members, to say nothing of stoking political violence). It’s also an effective means of getting supporters and would-be critics to self-censor and stop asking inconvenient questions lest they, too, be publicly identified as deplorable garbage and potentially lose their friends and family, their jobs, their businesses, their physical safety, or whatever other punishment the self-righteous mob conjures up.

In-group/out-group dynamics are powerful drivers of human behavior because we are social beings wired to care about group membership for reasons of basic survival. But in our divisive digital age, that primal fear of not-belonging can be easily exploited to trick us into protecting even fictitious or trivial group associations that benefit political power players far more than ourselves. For instance, most Democratic Party leaders gain far more power and money from black voters than we get from them, or from the racial label we’ve been conditioned to invest our identity in. Yet many of us continue to prop them up with our free labor, donations, and votes for fear of being labeled an “Uncle Tom” or “getting our Black card revoked,” even as their policies undermine far more valuable things like our faith, our families, and our freedom. (Fortunately, a small-but-growing number of black voters are rejecting this manipulation.)

Similar shaming dynamics exist among other demographic groups, and among different “sides” of various policy debates. Abortion extremists wield the “misogynist” label to dissuade would-be supporters of even the most modest efforts to regulate abortion drugs or procedures. Gender activists wield accusations of “hate speech” and "transphobia" to shut down inconvenient conversations about parents’ rights, sex-based rights, and people who profit off of gender drugs and surgeries. Carbon-obsessed climate activists label anyone who disagrees with their preferred ways to deal with greenhouse gas emissions a “climate denier,” even if those people agree that humans are responsible for changing the climate. I’m sure you could add plenty of other examples to the list.

Though it’s easy to dismiss this dynamic and argue that adults shouldn’t be so susceptible to peer pressure, it’s important to remember that in adulthood, crossing the Mean Girls (and guys) who run HR departments and universities, drive online outrage, and more can cost a person their entire livelihood, or even their safety. For all their talk of being “empathetic” and “inclusive,” committed Democrats and leftists are often very mean. Worse, they are utterly convinced of their righteousness and thus, the righteousness of their anger at those who violate their (ever-shifting, subjective-yet-treated-as-absolute) moral standards. Giving someone one of the aforementioned labels isn’t just petty name-calling — it’s a signal to the rest of the in-group that it is now fair game to ruin that person’s social and professional life or worse. And as any honest person who’s ever participated in and/or been attacked by a cancel mob can tell you, people who’ve convinced themselves they are (on the side of the) oppressed, and who feel morally superior to perceived oppressors, will gleefully indulge such opportunities to flex their power.

Meanwhile, should a person manage to get over those social and emotional hurdles and start questioning the in-group’s consensus, we still have to fight through the social conditioning that causes us to automatically doubt or deny evidence presented by people or organizations we’ve been trained to mistrust. In addition to the pervasive left-leaning bias we receive via schools, universities, mass media, and pop culture, there are also entire organizations within Groupthink, Inc. that exist primarily to stigmatize their political opposition. They leverage often dubious accusations of ‘misinformation’ or ‘bigotry’ to rake in millions of dollars, while training their supporters to adopt the cult-like habit of reflexively dismissing people or groups who threaten their preferred ideological consensus. These groups partner with legacy media outlets to discredit alternative sources of information, so that even if we start questioning the obvious nonsense within our in-group, we’re likely too disdainful or distrusting of those who are willing to challenge their consensus to give them a fair hearing.

Fortunately, these toxic power dynamics contain the seeds of their own destruction because you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually, for those of us who aren’t completely hard-hearted or -headed, the cognitive dissonance gets to be too much to ignore. In my own life, the sickness of the socio-political environment I live in became obvious when I found myself considering whether I should create secret social media accounts so I could 'like' and comment on heterodox content without my 'friends' or family knowing about it. Wait a minute, I thought to myself. If these are ‘good’ people who love me, why am I afraid to be ‘caught’ disagreeing with them? (I didn't start the accounts, but yes, they did start ostracizing and gossiping about me when I started liking 'wrongthink' on social media under my own name and changing my mind about various issues. So much for empathy and inclusion…)

If you've ever found yourself wondering why so many ex-Democrats and -progressives make videos and posts talking about their #WalkAway moments or leaving the left, it's because this ideology isn't just a set of ideas. It functions, and is socially enforced, like an identity. Those of us who have broken out of it intuitively recognize the importance of speaking up in order to make it safer for others to consider breaking away from this totalizing, deceptively authoritarian worldview. We know what it’s like to feel alienated from this ideology, but also feel at a loss to consider alternatives because we’ve been so conditioned to look down on people who don't agree, and we know how our peers treat those people. How we may have treated those people, to our own shame and regret.

Luckily, it’s pretty simple — though not necessarily easy — to challenge these shaming tactics: cultivating awareness and humility. This kind of manipulation only works when we are so accustomed to it that we don’t even notice when it’s happening, and when we covet the false sense of moral and intellectual superiority manipulators attach to members of their in-group. The moment you decide you care less about looking or feeling good about yourself than doing good for others; the moment you realize you’re better off without thought-policing fake friends; the moment you discover that many of those people are actually worth listening to and doing life with, you’re free. Free to make your political and cultural choices based on proof instead of peer pressure, and free to root your identity in who you actually are, not whatever labels bad actors train you to adopt or reject.