In politics (and social life) what one person thinks doesn't matter as much as what the group thinks. If you understand the thinking of the group, you almost always understand the thinking of the individual. The higher the stakes, the more intense the groupthink. The more ambiguous the issue, the greater the individual's reliance on the group.
The individual who goes against the groupthink, unless he or she is someone with enormous social capital or credibility within the group, finds himself marginalized and stripped of credibility. Virtue in most groups is not defined by independent thinking, but by the degreee to which one is capable of articulating the group's mind and reinforcing what it already thinks. There are exceptions, but they are few. People who don't like living in social worlds dominated by this kind of groupthink have opted out and keep to themselves. That's been my inclination until recently.
Everybody is influenced by groupthink. It's not the special preserve of conservatives, although in its extreme form theirs has a rather noxious tribal and the world-is-against us character. But Liberal political correctness is the other extreme, and it's equally noxious. But this post is not primarily about condemning groupthink–that would be like condemning language; groupthink is foundational in making it possible for us to communicate at all. It's about trying to try to understand how it works, and how to change it when it has gone off the tracks.
So how does the group mind get formed? That's a big question for another day. We'd have to get into acculturation and the sociology of knowledge, and so much more. I'd rather start with the empirical before getting into the theoretical and begin with some observations from my involvement in local politics. I've learned that it's especially the people who are most involved with issues, who are most aware of the technical complications, of the devil in the details, so to say, that seem to be most constrained by groupthink.
I'm not judging that, just observing that it seems to be mostly true. People who have been part of an "issues conversation" for a long time, tend to lose perspective and are in a position where it's difficult for them to judge whether the conversation got off the tracks at some point. Any outsider who thinks it has got off the tracks and points that out might be politiely listend to, but easily dismissed because he hasn't been a part of the conversation; he doesn't understand all the complications and ins and outs. And that's true. But even when the emperor has no clothes, there will be those who insist that he looks just fine, exactly how he is expected to look. You can't just make that history go away, no matter how wrong or silly it has become. To the people involved, it is not silly, and they are invested in it.
But it's also why bad decisions are made. The conversation went off the tracks somewhere during that conversation's history, and there was no one who noticed, or if someone noticed, he hadn't the credibility to persuade others in the group to get the conversation back on the tracks. The bigger bad decisions are not made at one point in time in a vacuum. They are the result of faulty assumptions and cumulative, small, unnoticeable bad decisions made over time, but are legitimated and reinforced by the groupthink. There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing; any one position on an issue is rarely unambiguously right or wrong, but once a bad decision is made, the insiders who made it have a huge investment in justifying and defending its rightness. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan come to mind.
And so the insider understandably comes to perceive dissenters as clueless outsiders who don't share in their history, high ideals, and superior grasp of the situation. When attacked, they unite in common defense. Outsiders, by definition, have not been part of the insider conversation, and so can't know what they know. A perfect case study for this kind of groupthink can be seen in the way the Gates Foundation and the coterie of elites from Arne Duncan down to the local city and state politicos in both parties have shaped fundamentally bad ideas around K-12 education policy.
Yes, there are some bad actors who have been involved in shaping that conversation, but they made arguments that smart, well-intentioned people bought into. And once money and power are behind a particular policy, its groupthink becomes enormously potent no matter how stupid. Everybody lines up behind it because so many careers depend on group members' suppressing whatever doubts they might have. There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and it's easy to justify keeping one's doubts to oneself when people a lot more powerful than you in the group will disagree with you and slam you.
The grass-roots opposition to such policies has little chance against it because it attracts eccentrics with no money and no real ability to organize and to speak with a unified voice. They are easy for "insiders" to dismiss and to outmaneuver. Nothing essential is at stake for most people in the opposition–like a career–it's the issue alone that motivates them, and while it would be unfair to call their involvement a hobby, it's not their job. It's not what puts food on the table, and so they are always at a disadvantage when fighting people for whom the fight is their job and for whom the stakes are much higher as a result. The degree of commitment varies from these "hobbyists", and except for a few, you can count on them to bloviate anonymously on the blogs, but not to show up at a fundraiser or organizing meeting. The hobbyists are always going to lose against the lobbyists. The lobbyists are always in the stronger position to maneuver and frame the issues on terms favorable to themselves; it's their job.
I'm talking about myself here as a hobbyist well as anybody else. I show up for some things but not for others. I have no special virtue in this respect. And I have tremendous respect for the people who do always show up, but they are a ridiculously small number. And some of them are motivated by anger and other things that make them easy to dismiss if you are in the power structure.
And unfortunately the sane people are lumped together with those who are less than sane in the same category: "community acitivists", people who are dismissed by policymakers as a hodgepodge who have their axes to grind, who don't see the big picture, and who don't have the responsibility to live with the decisions they make. Their jobs and careers are not on the line. If I'm a policymaker, who am I going to listen to–some community activist whose ideas might have some validity, but don't fit into the "conversation", or to the elites who have been shaping the conversation?
It's become clear to me that realistically the only way to get things done is to work in the power structure, because in this country the only way things get done is when a consensus develops among the elites who dominate it. While a lot, maybe most, elites are lost causes, there are some who want to do the right thing, but they have only other elites to listen to–there really is only one conversation going on–and so their own better instincts are usually suppressed.
And so the question for me is whether to submit myself to that.To accept the "elite" conversation where it is now on its own terms. To become, in other words, part of a conversation that I think is at its roots based on false assumptions. To sit at endlessly tedious meetings where people, mostly other people, are talking about things that seem formulaic at best and idiotic at worst. To pretend to be respectful so that I can in the short run build my credibility so that in the long run I'll be able to say something that might be heard by someone who has the power to do something about it.
Because nothing can be heard, no matter how much sense it makes, unless it's presented in the groupthink vocabulary that has a history and has the investment of the people who have developed it, and one has to learn that history and that vocabulary, no matter how suffocating if one expects to be taken seriously by the people who make things happen.
Maybe that's just what has to be done. But five years from now will I have become one of them by some process akin to Stockholm Syndrome? That's what seems to happen more often than not. Becoming part of the conversation, is just another word for being coopted. So what is one to do?
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