There Are Two Kinds Of People

There is a witty one liner that “There are two types of people in the world: Those who divide the people in the world into two types, and those who don’t” often attributed to Robert Benchley.

Other variations also exist, like “There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who are wise, and those who are otherwise”, but the idea of breaking the world into two groups is also used for mundane purposes – left and right being the common one in politics. But often the far left and the far right have a lot in common, and so there are two types of people, those at the extremes, and those in the middle.

Yet another way of dividing the people is to say there are two types of people in the world, those who join political parties, and those who don’t. Despite Canada being a democracy, few people here ever bother to join political parties, despite their being no barriers – while in countries like China, being a party member is an entry into an elite.

Few Canadians are members of a political party because Canadians tend to be very practical people. Even if someone is interested in politics, party membership in Canada has few real benefits, though membership in any given party will dramatically increase when there is a leadership election and people want to vote or are recruited to vote by candidates.

I am rare in having belonged to more than one party in my life – I think of myself as a radical centrist who isn’t fully in tune with any movement, political fad or ideology.

Usually I was disgruntled because I disagreed with parts of my party’s policies or platform, but I disliked the other parties more and wanted to influence who won, or what we did or didn’t do as a nation. I am often more of a “negative partisan” than someone who is highly partisan to the party I join. Sometimes this is the lesser of evils, and rarely are voters highly enthusiastic towards a candidate, like Trudeaumania in 1968. More commonly, they just want change – or to stop change they don’t like.

But politics have become far more polarized and hyper partisan in the last few decades – Trump is particularly polarizing in the US, and there are many social media posts in Canada showing extreme hatred of Justin Trudeau – though certainly his father was very unpopular with certain segments within Canada in his time.

But as a self-professed political junky since I was a kid, I am always interested in trying to understand political trends and in particular how people can support candidates, parties or ideas I find mostly ridiculous – though my own views often include policies considerably to the left or to the right of centre.

There is the term “Manichean”, which I sometimes might use in writing but not in conversation – as I feel it pretentious, I guess. But it describes a binary “good versus evil” world view, or even just that there is a duality like right and wrong, or left and right. But politics has become far more complicated, so there are things like the Vote Compass which is 2 dimensional with an X and Y axis – with different aspects of political issues on each axis. Commonly, it is capitalism versus socialism on one axis, or big government versus small government. On the other axis, it is either left-right or progressive-conservative social issues, or an authoritarian-democratic range of governance. One in a while, someone tries to locate people in three dimensions with three axes.

But, a number of books I have read in the last few years try to keep it simple instead of using three dimensions. Most of these books deal with the US or the UK, and none of these books seems to get everything right – but they often are useful in trying to fathom the left-right political polarization in the US, and by extension in Canada or elsewhere in the world.

Popular books on the topic of political polarization are not new. One of the first ones to be a best seller was Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” from 2004. The political trajectory of Kansas is a lot like that of Saskatchewan, where the provincial NDP under Tommy Douglas brought in Medicare before any other province. Socially progressive Christian preachers lead the charge against big business and for better social programs for farmers and average people. But by the 1990s, both major US political parties had shifted towards neoliberalism and voters in Kansas shifted towards voting based on the ”culture wars” such as abortion or gay marriage instead of voting based on their economic interests.

A book that more clearly laid out two alternative mindsets related to politics was the 2018 book “Prius vs. Pickup: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide” written by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. Using databases of questions that voters answered over several elections, the authors describe two opposing mindsets – “fixed” and “fluid” – that tend increasingly tend to align with Republican and Democratic voters (respectively).

The publisher’s description is:

“What’s in your garage: a Prius or a pickup? What’s in your coffee cup: Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts? What about your pet: cat or dog? As award-winning political scholars Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler explain, even our smallest choices speak volumes about us—especially when it comes to our personalities and our politics. Liberals and conservatives seem to occupy different worlds because we have fundamentally different worldviews: systems of values that can be quickly diagnosed with a handful of simple parenting questions, but which shape our lives and decisions in the most elemental ways. If we’re to overcome our seemingly intractable differences, Hetherington and Weiler show, we must first learn to master the psychological impulses that give rise to them, and to understand how politicians manipulate our mindsets for their own benefit.

Drawing on groundbreaking original research, Prius or Pickup? is an incisive, illuminating study of the fracturing of the American mind.”

The four questions are pretty basic, but frankly, rather than being a matter of personal taste, it is simply far less practical to be a pickup driving dog owner if you live in a tiny condo in liberal Downtown Toronto than to do so in a conservative small town in the country. Whether you prefer oldies to country music may also be dependent on where you live or how old you are, rather than your deeper values – particularly in 2024 when Beyonce has a breakthrough country music hit.

A choice between meatloaf and chicken curry is more telling: “fluids” tend to be more open and interested in other cultures or variety than more traditional “fixed” people who prefer the familiar and conventional.

The book lays out its thesis early and then goes into the details on various aspects, and it a little longer than is really necessary, frankly. This gives the gist of it:

“This book uses two terms to describe the opposing sides of this divide, two words to sum up what is represented by the personas of John Wayne, Jane Fonda, and their ilk: fixed and fluid.

The term “fixed” describes people who are warier of social and cultural change and hence more set in their ways, more suspicious of outsiders. and more comfortable with the familiar and predictable. People we call “fluid,” on the other hand, support changing social and cultural norms, are excited by things that are new and novel, and are open to, and welcoming of, people who look and sound different.

Of course, the world isn’t as neat and tidy as this. Not everyone falls squarely into one of these two camps. Rather, worldview is more like a spectrum, with fixed and fluid outlooks anchoring the ends. People who fall between these two poles, who feel more ambivalent about these fundamental questions of life, we might call mixed…

The profound differences in the basic outlooks of these two sides help explain why political conflict today is so unmanageable. That is because the fixed and the fluid have become so dominant in the Republican and Democratic Party bases, respectively. These developments not only further entrench the parties and their staunchest adherents in their respective positions, they also limit the ability of Americans of mixed worldview—those who are less set in their ways and might be more willing to compromise—to envision a different path.”

On LGTBQ issues, immigration, gender issues and attitudes towards racial minorities, the Fixed and Fluid mindsets line up neatly with support for each of the two US political parties, with graphs to illustrate it. It is pretty convincing that, while not everyone can be so easily sorted, there is a meaningful correlation. But it is pretty one sided, and since this is a popular book and not a scientific report, a reader is left wondering if the authors have left out any examples which do not so easily fit the paradigm.

Another book that attempts to explain politics by setting out two clear groups is the controversial “The Road to Somewhere” by British writer David Goodhart, published in 2017. It tries to explain British politics and in particular the Brexit vote, but again I will leave it to the publisher to succinctly summarize its thesis:

“Many Remainers reported waking up the day after the Brexit vote feeling as if they were living in a foreign country. In fact, they were merely experiencing the same feeling that many British people have felt every day for years.

Fifty years ago, people in leafy North London and people in working-class Northern towns could vote for a Labour party that broadly encompassed all of their interests. Today their priorities are poles apart.

In this groundbreaking and timely book, Goodhart shows us how people have come to be divided into two camps: the ‘Anywheres’, who have ‘achieved’ identities, derived from their careers and education, and ‘Somewheres’, who get their identity from a sense of place and from the people around them, and who feel a sense of loss due to mass immigration and rapid social change.

In a world increasingly divided by Brexit and Trump, Goodhart shows how Anywheres must come to understand and respect Somewhere values to stand a fighting chance against the rise of populism.”

In the US, the Democrats do well in urban areas and along the coasts, but not so much in rural areas and in the “fly over” states. The Brexit vote in England was mostly for “Remain” in London and urban areas, and for “Leave” in the rest of the country. Scotland and Northern Ireland had different voting patterns reflecting their unique political situations, so the split is not really applicable to those areas.

London is much like Toronto and Vancouver – ethnically and racially diverse with a high percentage of immigrants, and with jobs in things like finance.

“Somewhere” people tend to be traditional white voters who are nationalistic, while the Anywheres tend to be educated urban professionals – many of which could benefit from EU membership to work in similar jobs anywhere in Europe. The “Somewheres” are people who were often upset at how immigrants from Poland who came to Britain and were doing well in construction jobs or starting their own businesses.

I have a perfect example of “Anywheres”. Emma Raducanu is a young tennis player known for winning the US Open in 2021, beating Canadian Leylah Fernandez to win the title. Emma is actually Canadian as well as being British, since she was born in Toronto. Her parents were immigrants to Canada from Romania and China, and they moved to the UK when Emma was 2 years old, to get better jobs.

Emma Raducanu’s highly educated professional parents’ moving around from country to country – wherever and whenever a better opportunity presents itself – are perfect examples of how the “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” concept applies to Canada and other countries, and not just to the UK. Canada has similar partisan voting patterns to those in the US and UK, in that left leaning parties do well in urban areas while conservatives tend to dominate rural areas, though the Atlantic provinces have tended to vote Liberal, and Quebec has its own patterns where the left-leaning Bloc do well in rural areas.

This book review in The Guardian describes who Goodhart is and his thesis:

“In 2004, he wrote an essay for Prospect magazine, which he both founded and edited, that earned rapid notoriety and saw him branded a “liberal Powellite”. In “Too Diverse?”, he argued that there was a trade-off between increased diversity, through mass immigration, and social solidarity, in the form of the welfare state. Goodhart said that for citizens willingly to hand some of their hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they needed to feel a basic level of affinity with those others. He wrote that in the homogenous societies of old that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. But in the highly mixed societies of today, such fellow-feeling was strained. Goodhart offered copious data to show that people bridled at subsidizing the housing, education or welfare benefits of those whose roots in the society were shallow. As he wrote, “To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.”…

He (in 2017) argues that the key faultline in Britain and elsewhere now separates those who come from Somewhere – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those who could come from Anywhere: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated. He cites polling evidence to show that Somewheres make up roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20% to 25% and the rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.

A key litmus test to determine which one of these “values tribes” you belong to is your response to the question of whether Britain now feels like a foreign country. Goodhart cites a YouGov poll from 2011 that found 62% agreed with the proposition: “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.” Only 30% disagreed. A 2014 survey found a similar breakdown when asked if “people led happier lives in the old days”.

For Goodhart, the data confirms his belief that Anywhere and Somewhere describe real groups, the latter characterised by an unease with the modern world, a nostalgic sense that “change is loss” and the strong belief that it is the job of British leaders to put the interests of Britons first. Anywheres, meanwhile, are free of nostalgia; egalitarian and meritocratic in their attitude to race, sexuality and gender; and light in their attachments “to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation before stability, community and tradition”. Unsurprisingly, Goodhart’s Somewhere/Anywhere distinction maps neatly on to the leave/remain divide.”

Other than Quebec nationalists, Canadian nationalism and sense of identity is far weaker than in the UK, or even the US. Canada, as a New World country where everyone except indigenous people have some ancestral ties to another continent, and where 23% are now foreign born, doesn’t quite have the same sense of a unifying history or identity as England, but yet, polls have consistently shown that more Canadians want immigration reduced than want it increased.

Canada has a stronger social safety net than the US, in part because of the deeper longstanding racial divide in the US where white voters have often been subjected to “dog whistle” political campaigns that undermine support for programs from which white voters might feel that blacks or other minorities disproportionately benefit. Yet, the old Reform Party of the 1990s was similar in its populist appeal to the “Somewheres” that Goodhart finds in the UK – people who don’t like change brought on through high immigration.

While David Goodhart leans towards defending “Somewheres”, American writer David Leonhardt adopts a different bifurcation of people – “universalists” versus “communalists” that has a degree of similarity with Goodhart’s categories, with the communalists being the nationalist defenders of tradition.

Leonhardt is the author of “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream”, which I have only partly read, but he wrote an article in the October 2023 issue of the Atlantic that outlines his concepts, which are tied to the work of Jonathan Haidt. He states:

“Around the world, educated professionals emphasize two values above all: care for others, especially the vulnerable, and fairness. Working-class people put significant weight on those values, too, but not quite as much. And working-class respondents emphasize values that are of little import to college graduates, such as respect for authority, appreciation of tradition, and loyalty to family and community. Other researchers have come to use the terms universal and communal to describe the two belief sets.

Both universalism and communalism have important advantages. The universalist passion for fairness and harm prevention has undergirded every great social-justice movement of the past century. While some communalists defended racial segregation and sexism as cultural traditions, universalists refused to accept them. In foreign policy, universalism helped lead to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. Universalism has made the world both freer and more equal.

Communalism can claim its own accomplishments, though. Without loyalty, tradition, and respect, human beings would not have been able to form groups that allowed them to survive. In modern times, communalism has inspired Americans to enlist in the military and become teachers at local elementary schools. The same outlook helps explain why working-class households tend to give a greater percentage of their income to charity (often their churches) than upper-income households. Communalism also played a central role in social-justice movements: Religious groups, and the loyalty they inspire, were crucial to both abolitionism and civil-rights activism…”

The Atlantic article is focused on immigration, and this is where the similarity to Goodhart’s Anywheres and Somewheres is clearest:

“Immigration policy presents a distillation of the tensions between the two worldviews. To communalists, a government should limit arrivals and prioritize its own citizens. To universalists, national loyalties can be dangerous, and immigration can lift global living standards by allowing more people to share in a rich country’s prosperity. In recent decades, this debate has become part of the growing political polarization in many Western countries, including the United States. Surveys show that liberals tend to be universalists who support higher levels of immigration, and conservatives tend to be communalists who favor less immigration.”

What Leonhardt also looks at is how the rise of neoliberalism in the US from the 1970s through to the rise of populism after the 2008 financial crisis meant that the establishments both the Democrats and the Republicans were pro-immigration, but the rise of the Tea Party and then Trump has led to changes. Leonhardt states that, by the 1990s:

“To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…

In the 2000s, the Democratic Party has moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record…

They are also unlikely to revere assimilation… To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…

The universalists may have won the struggle over government policy, but their victory has come with a political cost. The high level of immigration since the 1960s helped move the working class to the political right. A rich stream of social-science research has documented the phenomenon, and not only in the United States. Immigration helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016 and helps explain why many working-class voters distrust Democrats…

More recently, universalists have portrayed immigration as inevitably positive, an argument that depends partly on wishful thinking. Immigration can be wonderful, but good things are rarely free, as (former Representative Barbara) Jordan said.”

Another book has similar categories to Leonhardt’s “universalists” and “communalists”, but it separates economic issues from social or cultural issues, dealing mainly with the US.

Gary Gerstle’s “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era” examines political orders, and in particular, how the ideas of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” became dominant from the 1930s to the 1970s. Even Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon essentially had to accept its main economic features – regulation and the social safety net – as the norm.

From the late ’70s and the rise of Ronald Reagan until the 2008 financial crisis, a new Neoliberal economic order emerged, centred around deregulation, freer markets and globalization. The dominance of the Neoliberal order meant that Bill Clinton’s Presidency mostly included the acceptance of neoliberal policies, including welfare reform – his non-neoliberal health care policy was an exception, though he failed to get it passed. The 2008 financial crisis represented a reversal of neoliberalism given the huge role government had to play under Obama, in terms of spending and new regulation or government involvement.

Gerstle’s point is that neoliberalism became the dominant political order on economic issues, with both the Republicans and Democrats accepting it in place of the New Deal, but on other issues, there was a split between two “moral perspectives” he labels Neo-Victorians and Cosmopolitans. Here are the descriptions:

“Every political order contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among constituencies that it must manage; the neoliberal order was no exception in that regard. One such contradiction has already been noted: that which existed between those who saw neoliberalism as a strategy for enhancing rule by elites and those who saw in it a pathway toward personal emancipation. Another lay in the uneasy coexistence within the neoliberal order of two strikingly different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life. One, which I label neo-Victorian, celebrated self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption. These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess—accumulating debt by purchasing more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family—heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing. Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and especially in the young, and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. The intellectual guiding lights of this movement, such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and her husband, Irving Kristol, believed that nineteenth-century Britain under Queen Victoria had achieved this symbiosis of family and market, and that late twentieth-century America could achieve it again under Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party that he was fashioning. This view found a mass base in Jerry Falwell’s legions of evangelical Christians, mobilized politically as part of an influential religious organization known as the Moral Majority.

The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order, which I label cosmopolitan, was a world apart from neo-Victorianism. It saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from the liberation movements originating in the New Left—black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them—and flourished in the era of the neoliberal order. Cosmopolitanism was deeply egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities—London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, and Miami among them—developing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.”

These two “moral perspectives” explain that while both major US parties differed little on economic policy and both were closely aligned with Wall Street, on other issues the battles were mainly what we call the “culture wars”, with the Republican neo-Victorians positioning themselves as pro-religion, pro-family and for traditional values, up against the Democratic Cosmopolitans who were for secularism, multiculturalism/pluralism (particularly against anything racist or sexist) and for breaking away from traditional norms in favour of individual self-expression or freedom.

Ironically, Republican President George W. Bush and his administration contained elements of cosmopolitanism in his attempts to help minorities improve their economic position by becoming homeowners, and his belief in pluralism was evident in his good relationship with Latinos. This included attempts at immigration reform, openness towards immigration, and paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants – pretty much the opposite of Donald Trump.

After the Obama re-election victory in 2012, Republicans did an “autopsy” to figure out why they lost and how they could win in future, with the recommendations being to embrace pluralism by doing a better job to reach out to women and various minority groups, though no major policy changes were proposed. Donald Trump actually took the Republican Party in the opposite direction, yet won a narrow victory due to the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.

Now, obviously there are thousands of ways we can divide humanity into two separate groups, and there are grey areas or exceptions to any attempt to break humans into a limited number of categories.

Certainly there are other writers in the last couple of decades that have come up with other ways of analyzing the changes of neoliberalism, populism, identity politics or other political realignments since the decline of the New Deal or the end of the Cold War, but like a lot of people, I am puzzled by the changes on both the right and left. I have been looking for thoughtful ways of explaining “wokeness” and political trends on the left that I disagree with, but also with the rise of Trump in the US and broader shifts in other countries – not just the UK but also places like Hungary or Turkey, where right wing authoritarian or even neo-fascist politicians have met with popular success.

I myself am neither a “fixed Somewhere communalist cosmopolitan” nor a “fluid Anywhere universalist neo-Victorian”, and I doubt few people fit perfectly into either mould. But I also grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s which was the heyday for Canadian nationalism. This included the new flag, the centennial, and economic nationalists pushing back at the extent to which Canada had become economically and culturally dominated by the US, and the weakening of ties to Britain, particularly with the repatriation of the Constitution and creation of the Charter of Rights in 1982. Yet, as someone who spent nearly my entire life in Toronto or other cities and has more than one university degree, and was not even the first person in my family to go to university, I should be a “fluid Anywhere universalist cosmopolitan”. However, on the key issue of immigration, I have been a sceptic ever since the 1993 election.

I have never been a fan of Donald Trump. I have been struggling to understand how there are Republicans whose hatred or distrust of Democrats is so deep that no matter what is said about how terrible Trump is, and what a threat he is to the US or the world, they would rather vote for him than for Biden. John Bolton is an example of this, and it makes me wonder whether if Adolf Hitler himself was alive and was running as a Republican, would they still refuse to vote for a Democrat, no matter how centrist? If insurrection instigator and 91 times indicted Donald Trump doesn’t cross the line, then where is the line?

And of course, some people are just so power hungry or cowardly that they are willing to say or do anything to avoid losing their elected position for fear of being frozen out in future (even Mitt Romney sucked up to Trump in 2018) – but why are there not more Liz Cheneys?

But this also goes for the left.

A key policy of the political left since the 1960s has been environmentalism. Popular books like “The Population Bomb” or the far superior “Limits to Growth” questioned population growth and perpetual economic growth.

Both the extremes of libertarianism on the right (and neoliberalism as well) and socialists on the far left have long believed in “open borders”, but most environmentalists do not also ascribe to these extremes. Yet, environmentalist groups and even the Green Party of Canada reject or ignore population growth as an issue, despite Canada’s massive level of population growth – which has been increased further still by Justin Trudeau since 2015.

It is perhaps understandable that mainstream political parties like the Democrats in the US, or the Liberals and even the NDP in Canada, might shy away from calls to reduce immigration. However, something is odd when even environmentalist groups or a political party supposedly built on a core value of environmentalism remain silent on population growth, or even actively support and defend it.

In 2022, the Green Party of Canada even rescinded its all policies on population growth, including the goal to “address the problem of global overpopulation through a foreign policy committed to environmentally sustainable local economics and the education, health care, political, and economic rights of women as equal participants in society”.  The objective of this action was:

“…to reflect current understanding of the impacts of population and consumption on the climate crisis, acknowledging that consumption rather than population is the problem. Such views are now widely considered to be racist and colonial, which goes against the principles of social justice and respect for diversity.”

The Green Party rejected population entirely as an issue, and in 2024 rejected a policy for Canada have moderate and sustainable population growth of 0.5% or less (200,000 per annum), which is roughly how fast the US grew in 2023 under Joe Biden.

So apparently, it doesn’t matter if global population never goes down and even increases, somehow people will consume less to compensate? And it doesn’t matter if people move from low consumption countries to ones like Canada with high consumption and among the world’s worst records on CO2 emissions?

In his Atlantic article, Leonhardt states:

“On universalist grounds, a relatively open immigration system is easy to support. But the other side of the ledger matters. Immigration tends to impose costs on lower-wage workers and to alter the political atmosphere in ways that make government policy less generous to those same workers. The past century suggests that there are trade-offs between immigration levels and progressive policy goals.”

Yet, it seems that environmentalists who are universalists/cosmopolitans are unwilling to acknowledge the costs of population growth on the environment. Some have instead opted for neoliberal YIMBY regulation of zoning, and even supported top-down undemocratic planning interference by federal and provincial governments over local democracy, rather than violate the universalist/cosmopolitan preferences that favour open borders and reject limits or reductions to immigration.

Since the 1970s, political extremes on both left and right have become more dominant. Sadly, we do not only have to contend with this polarization, but also with highly irrational views which are so contradictory that their proponents have to do logical gymnastics to deal with conflicts between a core value like “democracy” or “environmentalism” and the underlying “communalist” or “universalist” mindset which demands that a core policy objective has to be sacrificed or ignored.