Which communal identity?

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback on my last post concerning identity, both your through comments and e-mails. I've been thinking about them while traveling and spending time with family, and I would like to share some of the fruit of that thought.

First of all, one reader helpfully asked which political identity did I have in mind. On the one hand, there is national political identity. Lilliana Mason has written a book (which I have not read) about how our complex political parties, composed of individuals with many identities, have collapsed into "Mega-identities." After listening to the thoughtful interview between Ezra Klein and Lilliana Mason, I think I can summarize this adequately to advance our discussion. If you go back to c.1960, you would find significant regional variations in the political positions within card-carrying members (and elected officials) of the Republican and Democratic parties. For example, in the South, Democrats were generally more conservative on economic and social policies, while Democrats from the northeast were more likely to be liberal on both questions. Similarly, Democrats from the south were more likely to be protestant and evangelical or fundamentalist, compared to their New England fellow party members, who were more likely to be mainline protestants, Catholic, Jewish, or even agnostic or atheist.

The variety within each party, according to Mason, was that whatever your party affiliation, Congressmen and women were likely to find members of the opposite party that agreed with them on important issues. This facilitated bipartisan legislation and undermined any attempt at the kind of partisan gridlock that we face today.

What has happened since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, however, is that the parties have re-aligned in such a way that the identities of most people align with those of the members of one party across the board. Today, a boomer conservative white Christian living in a rural community has few if any shared commitments with a millennial liberal Latina agnostic living in an urban area.

The change has been driven by many factors, including demographic movement and sorting, but also the alignment on policy positions that takes place once one identifies with a party or political leader discussed in earlier posts. Together with an increasingly nationalized media environment, political identities are increasingly ossified and hard to break as when one looks at members of the opposite party, one sees a person who is fundamentally unfamiliar. The lack of similarities reinforces the sense of alienation and the othering of those on the "wrong" political team, and increases the perceived threat of the rival political party that is driving negative partisanship.

I find Mason's account compelling. That said, there are places in which it breaks down, and those most-often appear to be taking place on the local level in mid-sized towns with reasonably-well educated populations.  James and Deborah Fallows' most-recent book (which I also have not read... but I have listened to interviews with them and read James' piece in the Atlantic) tells this story. Local communities that have committed to strengthening their place have been able to make significant and meaningful improvements in their communities. Local politics, when it focuses on local issues, has little bearing on the larger (and toxic) national political context and provides a way to transcend those differences to make meaningful changes for their improvement despite what was happening on the national level:

Even as arguments about tax cuts or increases have degenerated into religious war at the national level, we saw them discussed in what you could call reasonable terms locally. Dodge City, in western Kansas, is very conservative in national politics. But everyone we met there stressed the importance of its “Why Not Dodge?” sales-tax increase, which citizens had approved in the late 1990s in a referendum. The proceeds had paid for parks, public swimming pools, and other facilities. In the same 2014 election in which West Virginia voters removed the very last Democrat from the state’s congressional delegation, the taxpayers of the capital city, Charleston, voted for a levy to sustain their public libraries. Even as the local and national economy collapsed in 2009, the mayor of Columbus, Ohio, urged his citizens to approve a tax increase rather than curtail city services and lay off employees, and they agreed.

The power of civic engagement on the local level to make address issues in ways that avoided the partisanship of national politics may also reflect the fact that individuals can make a meaningful impact on their local community. Lisa's comment also focused on this level of identity, and her emphasis on how one can live with one's community emphasizes the practical reality that our day-to-day experiences are much more shaped by the fact that our bodies inhabit particular communities in a much more significant way than they are shaped by the national "imagined community" that we claim to share with the ~325 million people living in the United States.

It should come as little surprise that who lives in one's community matters. Fallows also notes that these communities that are doing well have two important factors that have strengthened them. First, they retain (and draw) talented and highly-educated young people interested in improving their town. Second, they are receiving and integrating significant numbers of immigrants from around the world. The infusion of new community members drives both economic and cultural growth, and the integration of people from diverse backgrounds helps prevent the collapse of local identity into a simple binary on the local level.

Can these two stories fit together, or are they irreconcilable?

I'm inclined to think that they can be reconciled.

First of all, even though identity tends to drive voting (see Achen and Bartels again), actual policies matter. On the local level, communities often have shared economic interests on important issues. Fallows notes this tension:

Two days after the election, Deb and I were in Wyoming, where Trump beat Clinton more than three to one. Most people we interviewed there were happy about his victory—but hoped it would not lead to either an interruption in nafta, which was important for their exports, or a change in the availability of an immigrant labor force.

Contradictory outlooks? Yes. But to us the incoherence of these views said less about the people holding them than about the gulf between many Americans’ outlook on national partisan issues—polarized, tribal, symbolic—and the practical-mindedness with which most people in most regions approach decisions about their own communities. Dysfunction at the national level genuinely is a problem, as the world is reminded every time the federal government shuts down. Some of that pathology has spread to the state level. But for us the American story was of a country that is still capable of functioning far more effectively than national-level paralysis would indicate or than most people unaware of the national patterns we are reporting would assume about the parts of America they’re not in.

I think this may be the key to reconciling these two accounts. While "Mega-identities" may drive much political activity, local and regional identities still exist and they are serving to build stronger communities through united action.

I find a helpful model for approaching this dynamic in the work of Peter Sahlins on the development of national identity in the Cerdanya, a Catalan region divided in two by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Towns and villages were suddenly sorted into Spain and France, but they did not instantly identify as either. Instead, over centuries they gradually developed a sense of being Spanish or French, but also retained their Catalan identity and often moved between these identities as they navigated issues that mattered to them. When a French town had a dispute with a neighboring village over the jurisdiction of each, the shape of the dispute would depend (among other things) on whether or not their rival was on the French or Spanish side of the border. If the rival village was on the Spanish side, then the French town might invoke their national identity and royal honor of the King of France as they asked for his support for their cause. If the rival was in France, however, they still might appeal to the King, but instead they would try to show that their village was the one that the King would want to support, rather than their neighbor. The relevant identity and the legal arguments employed would be significantly shaped by the border, but the driving force that created the initial complaint often had nothing to do with the national border and everything to do with the local one.

Tamar Herzog has made similar arguments looking at the way in which people have lived along boarders between the monarchies of Spain and Portugal in Iberia and in South America. In both cases, she argues, it was local people concerned about local issues who drove the disputes and sought to use larger national identities to bring in powerful patrons (with money and armies, among other things) to achieve what they wanted.

What I have taken away from both studies is that even though identity is driven by opposition (othering), the fact that we each have many identities means that one's relevant identity depends significantly on the issue at hand. In particular, the more local and particular the concern, the less relevant the ideological concerns that drive national politics become for most people, most of the time.

At the same time, I also think that it helps explain what happened to the political landscape in 2015-2016. In my reading of the events, Donald Trump won the primaries despite tepid opposition (and certainly little support) from the institutions of the GOP because of local and regional concerns about immigration, race, and the economy. He received less than half of the votes in the primaries nation-wide (not to mention that those who vote in primaries are already a small segment of the voting public at large), but this minority was able to radically alter the party as a whole. Once he won the party nomination, the national polarization gave him a decent chance of winning the election as a whole, which he went on to do.

In other words, it is the story of those on the political periphery re-defining the identity of being a Republican. Since then, Trump and his allies, newly-empowered and at the political center, have successfully used their institutional power to drive out those who refused to acquiesce to the new meaning of the Republican party.

So, to go back to the question from my earlier post, I am beginning to focus more on the significance of layered identity as the solution to the challenges of living in communal life. This is far from a new idea, I know--James Madison argued that the diversity of opinions and interests in a large republic would prevent the abuse of power by the Federal government under the Constitution in Federalist No.10. Thanks to your comments, I see the connections between working through this complexity if we are to make sense of how we should understand our life within a community.