Is The Left-Right Political Divide Really Just All In Our Heads? This Clinical Psychologist Says So
Backyard Politics: A Psychological Understanding of Today’s Political and Social Divide by Craig Weiner
Backyard Politics: A Psychological Understanding of Today’s Political and Social Divide
by Craig Wiener. Torchflame Books, 2024
Dr. Craig Wiener is a clinical psychologist with 45 years of experience working with children, adolescents, and families. He is best known for criticising the trend of medicalising behavioral problems, such as ADHD. In this book, he focuses on the American nation as a metaphorical family.
Mentioning Republicans and Democrats only once each in this entire book, Wiener describes our politics as a tension between two conflicting American political minds. One sort of American – the Protector – believes that “problems originate from external factors, not from personal limitations, adaptations, or decisions”, and that the solution to every problem is therefore a change to the system. The other sort of American – the Promoter – holds that “people struggle because life is difficult, and it is each individual’s responsibility to acclimate”.
Both minds want to advance the interests of the individual, but they take different approaches: the Protector starts from outside the individual, promoting an unhealthy external locus of control, while the Promoter mind aims to develop an internal locus of control in every person, regardless of circumstances.
America exists in the tension of these two minds, Wiener writes, and our politics inhabit the dynamic liminal space between them. The tension must continue for America to continue. Should either mind achieve complete hegemony over the other, and the debate end, it will become impossible for America to remain a project advancing individual freedom. Such a world would impose the tyranny of one political mind over another and be abusive by design.
Wiener’s final section explains these two American minds in terms of the inner workings of a family, with each reflecting the average values of mother and father. A new generation needs both the Protector and the Promoter to thrive. No wonder the rising generation has so much difficulty, he suggests. America is threatened by dissolution because we are increasingly atomized, disenchanted, and disembodied individuals. Dr. Wiener says he wrote the book, now in its second edition, because the increasing polarization of our times revealed patterns of interaction similar to those he observed with his clients, particularly couples, during his years of clinical practice.
The subject of gender dysphoria takes up only nine pages of Backyard Politics. However, gender dsyphoria is the topic of Dr. Wiener’s penultimate point, which is that the new identitarian politics are an attempt by the Protector mind to achieve hegemony. Wiener suggests that the Protector mind explains poverty and racism as systems of inequality maintained by a brutal society, and ‘gender identities’ are the purest expression of this mind. Every triumphant announcement of scientific breakthroughs in transgender ‘identity’ has been walked back, but not before an instantaneous, reflexive wave of sensationalist internet headlines has confirmed the biases of the Protector ideology.
Some Promoters – Wiener cites James Lindsay – see “the enhanced tribalism of group identity politics as an endeavor to destroy a liberal society, which has always valued the primacy of the individual, the necessity for universal ethical principles, and the importance of free speech.” These values stand in the way of more radical visions for protection. Wiener uses the term ‘classical liberalism’ to describe this idealized American system, which is threatened by the Protector's intensified ideology.
Dr. Wiener is not the first writer to make these connections. He cites Thomas Sowell throughout, embracing the equivalence between his own framework of ‘Protectors and Promoters’ and Sowell’s concept of ‘constrained and unconstrained’ political visions. Whereas the “unconstrained vision understands human suffering as incident to societal harms and disparities of treatment” (Protector), the constrained view relies on human self-interest to guide individual actions and “does not anticipate that any person, or group of people, can derive a utopia” (Promoter).
Conspicuous in its absence of mention, perhaps, is the 2004 volume Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives by Berkeley professor George Lakoff. Per the title, Lakoff’s book is a partisan promotion of the same conceptual framing. In place of Wiener’s Promoter mind, Lakoff has a “strict father” model of the family, which he contrasts with the “nurturant parent” view that Wiener calls the Protector. Whereas Lakoff seeks to win the war of two minds, Wiener tells us to deplore final victory by either side. The debate must continue for America to exist.
“Both ways of understanding problems and patterns of interventions have merit in some contexts and situations,” Wiener writes. “Neither is intrinsically better or worse all the time.” Context matters. “Clearly, there are occasions when people are powerless victims, and certainly people can benefit from learning and skill development. Often, the problem is discerning the point at which the expectation of personal contribution is reasonable.” It is a matter subject to debate, in other words. “This seems equivalent to asking, Is the harm from without greater than the resources within?”
To the Protector, society “depends on the expert wisdom of a select group of outside decision-makers” that we call ‘experts’. However, this new priesthood promotes superstitions, the most deranged of which are the gender ideologies that have emerged from academia. “Promoters think that it is preferable not to base best-treatment practice on who is most adamant” about their demands for medicalization, Wiener writes, and “they do not want the power of sophistry to shape professional intervention. They wonder if societies endorse transgender claims without inquiry or questioning, then what assertions about ‘identity’ will society not accept, and on what grounds?” It is inherently destabilizing. Although Wiener does not delve into queer theory, it is obvious that, for many Protectors, destabilizing society is the entire point.
Wiener points to social science research showing that “a small contingency of intransient activists can change an entire culture when they reach 25 percent of the population.” Conversely, it is possible to “renormalize” a social group “by progressively adjusting to the loud voices of inflexible people who clamor for accommodations.” In other words, we can learn to say ‘no’ to them. This is the free society being free. The only way to close off this debate – to have ‘no debate’, per the progressive mantra – is to stop being a free society.
The final section of Backyard Politics focuses on the American family, which is when the meaning of the title finally becomes clear. Our politics begin in the backyard, where two parents must debate what is best for their child: protect them from danger, or let them learn to fail and recover? In the ideal, our politics closely resembles the familial tension between mother and father, the ideal situation in which every new generation of Americans was born and raised, until the Great Society began to unravel that ideal. Children are now protected instead of challenged, so they never learn the skills of self-regulation and independence. Instead, young adults demand that the Protector ideology be given hegemony over their lives, so that their lives are ostensibly easier.
Like a family, the Protector is collectivist. But whereas resources can be distributed efficiently in a family, in a socialist welfare state the “detailed parsing of who needs what becomes unwieldy. Potential waste and inefficiencies are pushed to the back burner, and as many people as possible are gathered into the catchment” of identity categories. “The incentive is to magnify the numbers that qualify, and assign blame to external forces, in a quest to provide compensation to all the putative victims” of the protected class. Inquisitions over alleged microaggressions and other putative expressions of racism replace civil debate and free expression.
Rather than ‘fix’ racism, this process has unleashed it against the foundations of liberal society. Rather than relieve anxiety, it has intensified social division. Destruction of “the patriarchy” has likewise destroyed relations between the sexes rather than erase some invisible system of oppression. Wiener’s book helps explain why the gender divide has grown so wide in American politics, with women and men voting very differently today. Basically, “Protectors see females as victims within a system that favors males, while Promoters see mutual benefits and downsides for both in the arrangements between the sexes.”
Although this book was initially marketed as a parenting book, it actually serves as a warning about the consequences of national divorce. Dr. Wiener closes his book with a thought experiment. What does the world look like if the Protector ideology wins? Promoters say that in this scenario, America will forget how to promote individual thriving altogether, that collapse will become inevitable as the system runs out of disfavored groups to rob of resources, and that the new elite will become the object of envy of the new underclasses. Yet upheaval may be inevitable. “Everyone becomes a rebel when the disadvantaged and advantaged agree the system must come down,” he writes.
Autogynephilia is casually mentioned without explanation in this book. So are akrasia, impulsive acts against one’s own interests, and anagnorisis, the point in a story where a principal character realizes the shocking truth, aka ‘the plot twist’. The plot twist of this book is the threat of identitarian politics. Dr. Wiener is clearly well-informed on all the issues and expects readers to keep up by using their phones to look up words. Aside from this, the only difficult moment in the entire book was the first sentence of the introduction, and that is because the author is being so scrupulously objective. Dr. Wiener presents his ideas cogently and neutrally, showing how each of two minds sees the other at every turn and presenting arguments fairly from each side to explore the psychological dynamics of our increasingly dysfunctional American ‘family’. America is not an idea; America is a debate about ideas. If the debate ever ends, so does America.
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