The Red and the Blue

Partisan coding, group chats conquer the world, and more in this week's digest.

My digest is out a day early this week because I have another article scheduled for tomorrow.

I got a brief, accurate mention in this New York magazine article about the debate over empathy. I have not commented much on empathy, but as you can see from my previous use of the term, I view it positively. Obviously, our society is replete with people who are trying to emotionally manipulate others into doing their bidding by portraying themselves as victims. But in general, empathy is a tool that simply allows us to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings from their perspective.

I like what A Journey Through New York Religions editor Tony Carnes said about their journalistic philosophy in our podcast. He uses the term “sympathetic objectivity” in which they seek to have both empathy and sympathy for the people they cover, but also objectivity. That’s why I strive for here.

I also wanted to highlight this month’s Member only podcast, which is about the trends we don’t see until it’s too late.

The Trends We Don't See Until It's Too Late

Members get an exclusive monthly podcast, monthly interactive Zoom sessions, and access to a private Member only Slack community. Check out my Support page for more information on how to become a Member.

The Red and the Blue

X user Empty_America lives in New Mexico and runs a small knife manufacturing business. I don’t know his politics, but he seems to be mostly referenced in right wing circles. His cultural observations, however, often challenge both the contemporary online right and left.

Some recent threads he triggered noted a difference in activities that are blue coded (left) versus red coded (blue). He started by arguing that, contrary to popular belief, not all hunting is red coded. He says, “Hunting that involves high physical exertion is NOT highly right coded. Not sure I would say it's left-wing but the average tends to be sort of centrist at a minimum. This is specifically related to and tracks directly with the amount of human physical exertion involved.”

He then goes on to expand this, saying that anything that’s more physical and requires more effort is left coded, whereas things that are mechanized are right coded. Implicitly, this was extended to natural/traditional materials and techniques (left) vs. modern or industrialized (right). He and his commenters came up with a wide range of examples. For example, boats:

Someone suggested a range of other dyads.

• Snows shoes vs. snowmobiling

• Fly fishing vs. boat fishing (the red coded high end bass boat was one example)

• Deep country tent camping vs. RV camping

• Manual lawn mower vs. riding lawn mower

It’s not really an activity, but inner ring historic house vs. suburban McMansion was another suggestion.

There’s definitely something weird about the fact that things we’d say are in some respects deeply conservative are primarily embraced by the political left. I wrote a column on this for Governing magazine about Vermont, which on some measures is America’s most conservative state.

Imagine the kind of state that a right-wing Twitter troll might describe as utopia. It’s full of picturesque small towns. Many traditional ways of life are still alive there. It’s a patriotic place, with American flags hanging from the light poles. It’s a “constitutional carry” state where no permits are needed to walk the streets with a concealed weapon. It’s full of natural, unspoiled beauty hearkening back to a “purer” age. It’s so safe and crime-free that cafés leave outdoor tables and chairs in place without any chains or locks. Towns leave nice toys in the sandbox at their park for kids to play with, assuming they won’t be stolen. And it’s overwhelmingly white. There aren’t many immigrants or refugees either, perhaps just a few thousand over the last 30 years.

This place actually exists. But it’s a utopia of the left, with a socialist as its senior U.S. senator. It’s called Vermont.

A critic of Empty America’s analysis said that these are really a difference of class vs. politics. However, politics is becoming class coded. Trumpism has been an accelerant of this, in which right wing politics is becoming what the online world calls “prole coded.”

This is a big problem for the right as attracting elites is important to being able to sustain power and actually govern. It’s notable that so many of America’s conservative elites choose to live in very progressive areas like New York or Washington.

As it happens, reality is not as quite as stark as these comparisons suggest. The homesteading/local food and agriculture movement is at least as conservative as it is liberal. Many of the vendors at farmers markets are conservative Christians. (The Amish are of course the obvious examples here).

Also, somewhat strangely, health and fitness are becoming right coded. The addition of the “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) movement to Trump’s coalition is adding a new dimension. Prior to Covid, the epicenters of vaccine skepticism, for example, were in very upscale left wing places like Hollywood. While bringing some of their nuttier ideas with them, this upscale, largely female demographic is status additive to the Trump coalition in my view. Strangely, but perhaps not surprisingly, the left is now embracing unhealthy regimes simply because the right has taken the pro-health position. So the left is becoming anti-protein, pro-seed oil, pro-“Dad bod” etc.

Nevertheless, I think the fact that we can instantly do a rough partisan coding on so many activities is very interesting. There’s something real here.

The Group Chat Revolution

Ben Smith - the journalist who published the infamous and now debunked Steele Dossier when he was at Buzzfeed - has an interesting piece at Semafor on the group chats that changed America.

There’s been a significant migration of online discussion from public social media platforms to group chats, today largely on Signal. While people are still active on places like X, that’s just the visible part of the iceberg.

This article helps show the reason why. We can see the hostility towards Marc Andreesen and other figures in these group chats. The furor over the use of Signal in general is in part about people having private spaces that journalists don’t have access to (even though, as Smith notes, journalists have their own private forums like the infamous JournoList where they coordinate action).

These Signal groups are also heavily male, many of them all-male. I also see this as men looking for male spaces in a world where male spaces have been targeted for elimination. Since Signal groups aren’t formal institutions, they are often illegible, which is part of their appeal.

I’ll remind you that if you become a Member of my newsletter community, you get access to our private, Member only Slack group.

It’s important to remember that as Smith’s article shows, content does leak from these groups. I always tell people that they should expect anything they put into a group chat to end up in the hands of a New York Times reporter, and behave appropriately.

Best of the Web

The Standard: 6 in 10 young men in the UK turning to masculinity influencers, study says - Mainstream authorities and institutions - including churches - have been getting crushed by online influencers. Yet we see so little effort to genuinely compete. It’s mostly just more shaming.

NYT: Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times - This is an interesting example of the power of masculinity. Who is more likely to do something this crazy, men or women? It’s mostly, if not exclusively, men.

Michael Foster: Jack Reacher Won't Ask Girls to Dance

Palladium: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love L.A. - Not about what you might think

Irving Goffman—who also coined the term “passing” as a sociological concept—described “destructive information,” a fact that the real-life actress must keep secret from her audience in order not to threaten her performance. Here was the truth that the L.A. girls understand better than anyone: when you are “vulnerable” and “authentic,” when you “destigmatize your trauma” the way we were always encouraged to do, you are advertising that other people in your life have treated you badly. When you mention at a cocktail party that you had a mom who threw dinner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eyebrows, or a landlord who shafted you on your security deposit, or whatever else, the wrong person hears “he got away with it, why can’t I?” He spots a wounded deer unable to protect itself, perpetually separated from the happy herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfairness in the fact that people who have been dealt the most hardships in life are the least served by “living their truth.”

WSJ: How the Highest-Earning Millennials Made It to the Top of Their Generation

New Content and Media Mentions

As I noted above, I was mentioned by New York magazine this week.

New this week:

• Making Peace with the Downsides of Where You Live - Why accepting unfixable downsides is key to thriving where you are

• My podcast this week was with Geoffrey Kabaservice of the Niskanen Center on why we need moderate Republicans.

• My Member only podcast this month was on the trends we don’t see until it’s too late.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.