Allowing our political discourse to be swallowed up by the internet and spit back out as chewed-up, attention-grabbing “content” has obviously not been good for the American psyche. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party seems to have decided that there’s no path forward except plunging headfirst into the online cesspool.

The DNC recently poured millions into a project called Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, billed as an effort to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated online spaces. Meanwhile, a startlingly annoying crop of Democratic influencers emerged, teenage boys with resistance-lib politics who mimic online MAGA aesthetics to produce truly terrible videos like “Clueless MAGA Bro Gets SHUT DOWN During Debate.”

Politicians, too, are getting in on the fun. California Governor Gavin Newsom—apparently convinced that the key to being a successful governor is to fill the “liberal Joe Rogan” void—launched a podcast. His debut episode featured the late Charlie Kirk and was so obsequious that Kirk criticized him for being “overly effusive.” Later, after an amicable debate with Steve Bannon, Newsom switched to mocking Donald Trump in posts that mimic the president’s disjointed, braggadocious style. 

As demeaning and debasing as all this is, maybe it’s also part of a necessary correction. The left’s approach in recent election cycles—engaging in digital shaming pile-ons and strong-arming social media companies into moderating speech on their platforms—mostly backfired by convincing millions of Americans that liberals were censorious scolds. But if that strategy proved counterproductive, this frantic attempt to match the online MAGA world’s tactics in an attentional race to the bottom might be just as doomed to fail. 

I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that is already gathering adherents among liberal strategists, grassroots activists, and legal scholars. Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up.

The core of the issue is that we have a digital economy built on a business model of trapping people in the virtual world for as long as possible. D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University, calls it “human fracking,” where instead of oil, companies are extracting our attention. Should we really be surprised, then, that at the same time the internet is subsuming the real world, what’s emerging around the globe is a convulsive, reactionary politics? Addressing this crisis—rather than fueling it—should be central to the Democrats’ strategy in the digital age. 

There are abundant signs that people want something different. For example, a 2020 Pew survey found that about two-thirds of American adults believe social media is negatively affecting the country’s direction; only one in 10 think it’s helping. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of social media users’ simmering discontent comes from a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago. Participants were asked how much money they would need to be paid to quit social media. The average answer was around $50. But the participants’ attitudes changed dramatically if asked to imagine that everyone else had already quit. In that case, they would not only give up their accounts—they’d be willing to pay to do so. That exodus may slowly be under way—time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has slightly fallen since, with young people representing the largest decrease.

Thankfully, there are more options in the playbook than to surrender to the internet or simply log off. As the political speech scholar Susan Benesch put it to me, the question Democrats need to answer is this: “Do you want to ape the game the other side is already playing in an environment that is bad for people, or do you want to change the game?” Democrats don’t need to abandon the digital sphere to challenge its terms; in fact, a few of its younger rising stars have shown that liberal messages can gain purchase. But to answer that hunger for reform, while also creating a level playing field for sane, fact-based discourse, Democrats must make a serious political commitment to reforming these technologies that govern our lives and yet remain subject to no meaningful democratic oversight. 

The movement to make online life healthier is already well underway. Currently leading the charge is a growing coalition of parents, scholars, and activists focused on protecting children from the most harmful aspects of the digital world. This movement has also launched a state-by-state campaign to claw back some modicum of digital privacy, with state legislators finally taking steps to curb the relentless surveillance and manipulation of individuals by tech platforms. 

Nearly every expert I spoke with agreed that these crusades offer Democrats a clear strategic opportunity: embrace these efforts, raise the profile of their issues, and campaign on federal legislation that embraces these movements. If the goal is a more dramatic restructuring of digital life, though, these measures must be seen as just the opening moves. The harms that have galvanized these reform movements are symptoms of the broader underlying sickness plaguing the online world.

Right now, MAGA channels much of the anger toward modern life by offering a fantasy of a lost, mythic past. But if Democrats were willing to engage with this dissatisfaction honestly, they could expose the central lie of the movement: Despite all its posturing, MAGA wants nothing more than for you to live your life on a screen. 

Unlike the current race toward the most optimized attentional capture possible—which is also disastrous for our politics by favoring the loudest, most outrageous voices—the lane of reform belongs to Democrats alone. With the right’s online dominance, the political conversions of platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Republican leaders like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, pathologically online, the GOP is an unlikely reformer. Rather than join the stampede of human frackers, Democrats could be the one force fighting to protect your mind from being mined.

The most obvious place where the online world has impoverished the real one is childhood. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation documents the teen mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s, arguing that the “great rewiring of childhood”—the shift from a play-based to a phone-based upbringing—fueled the crisis. Haidt outlines multiple causal pathways linking social media use to mental health harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. To safeguard future generations, he proposes four societal norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and a renewed emphasis on real-world independence and play. 

The book has achieved remarkable success, generating widespread media attention and sparking an eponymous movement attempting to enshrine Haidt’s norms into law. The most effective policy efforts to date have centered on making schools phone-free, with 26 states enacting legislation or executive orders to restrict or ban student cell phone use during the school day. Beyond that, some states have adopted more aggressive measures, banning social media entirely for children under 14 or implementing age verification laws that require parental consent for minors. Other states have taken aim at platform design itself, passing “Kids Codes” that turn on the highest privacy settings as the default for children or prohibiting personalized, algorithmically driven content feeds. Nearly all of these laws have faced legal challenges from NetChoice, the leading tech industry group, which has succeeded in securing injunctions in many cases as the court battles continue. 

Using the judicial system cuts both ways, though. Over the past couple of years, state attorneys general across the country have launched waves of litigation against social media platforms. The immediate outcome of these lawsuits is the exposure of troubling internal communications that reveal how these companies disregard the harms their platforms cause. For example, Kentucky’s lawsuit against TikTok alleges that the company deliberately concealed the app’s addictive design. Internal documents revealed that TikTok identified the habit-forming threshold—260 videos, or about 35 minutes—and linked compulsive use to negative mental health effects. Despite this, it took no meaningful action. A parental control feature, promoted as a safeguard with 60-minute time limits for kids, reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes on average. “Our goal is not to reduce time spent,” one project manager candidly admitted. 

In addition to revealing the true motivations behind platform decisions, these lawsuits could drive real accountability if legislation stalls. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the nearly nationwide lawsuit against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and thus violating consumer protection laws, building on the documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. “Nobody thought there could be a 44-state lawsuit against social media,” Haugen told me. “And now we have a lawsuit comparable to the tobacco lawsuit.” (The lawsuit involved 41 states and Washington, D.C.)

The other reform effort that has gained real traction is the fight for digital privacy. In recent years, data privacy advocates have slowly begun to restrict the surveillance and profiling rampant in the online world. Today, social media platforms and other tech giants engage in nearly limitless online surveillance in order to create a vast informational asymmetry between the internet platforms and their users. If corporations know everything about you—your communications, preferences, habits—it is much easier for them to manipulate you into acting in their best interest. Last year, U.S. internet users had their information shared 107 trillion times—an average of 747 exposures per person, per day.

California is headquarters to most of the companies who pioneered this business model, which is why it was the first state to wise up and pass a comprehensive consumer data privacy law in 2018. To this day, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remains the nation’s strongest privacy regulation. The CCPA was built around the concept of “data minimization,” which means that companies should only collect and use personal information if it is for a purpose that consumers would reasonably expect. For example, a person using a ride-share app would expect the app to use their location to allow the driver to pick them up and drop them off. The user would not reasonably expect that the app continuously tracks their location well after the ride, learns that they visited a pawn shop, and then sells that information to Google, which in turn might start showing that individual ads for predatory loans.

The effort caught Silicon Valley by surprise and came as a blow to the online platforms who have no interest in scaling back their immense data collection practices. Since then, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates have clashed in state legislatures over how to shape privacy laws. Unlike California’s approach, industry-backed bills typically allow companies to collect personal data without meaningful limits, so long as they disclose it somewhere in a privacy policy. Consumers who want their data must submit individual requests to every entity that holds it (this is in the hundreds or thousands). These laws also deny individuals the right to take companies to court. The tech industry has brought enormous resources to the fight: In 2021 and 2022 alone, 445 lobbyists and firms representing tech giants were active in the 31 states considering privacy legislation. Of the 19 states that have passed privacy laws, the vast majority have adopted industry-backed models. 

But in one of the most high-profile privacy battles to date, the tech industry suffered its first major defeat since California. Maryland state Senator Sara Love, who introduced the privacy bill in 2024 while still in the House of Delegates, said she had never experienced anything like it. “It was exhausting. I have never seen that level of lobbying. Nor had a lot of other legislators,” said Love, who has served in Maryland’s state government since 2019. “The first year lobbyists were telling legislators, ‘You’re not going to get your Starbucks points anymore,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle. “The biggest bunch of malarkey. But they [other state legislators] didn’t understand the technicalities of the bill.” 

This time around Love succeeded in passing the strongest privacy regulation since the CCPA, and now a handful of other states are working on similar laws modeled after California’s or Maryland’s approach. The biggest challenge is in convincing lawmakers that defying Big Tech’s warnings won’t bring the sky crashing down. “Knowing that it can be done helps,” Love reasoned. “The more of us that get these good strong bills, the more that will follow.” 

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes compares the development of today’s attention economy to the Industrial Revolution. “Attention now exists as a commodity,” he writes, “in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism … a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs.” In fact, Hayes thinks the digital revolution may be even more disruptive because, “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Much like in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people today face a collective action problem: Those whose data is being mined have few institutions capable of pushing back against systemic abuse. Just as labor unions and worker protections emerged to confront the excesses of industrial capitalism, we now need digital equivalents to defend users in the age of surveillance capitalism. Rights like the ability to delete your data, to move it between platforms, and to hold companies accountable for their abuse of it should be the starting point. 

One promising step in this direction is the Digital Choices Act (DCA), a law passed in Utah this year. Doug Fiefia, the sponsor of the legislation, was inspired to act after growing disillusioned with the data practices he witnessed during his time at Google Ads. After joining Utah’s state legislature, he proposed a simple idea: Make it possible for users to take their data from one platform to another or delete it from any platform they choose. This kind of data portability could eventually allow users to organize and demand better treatment, backed by the leverage to deprive tech platforms of the data they so desperately need. “What we’re doing is taking back what we never should have given to this industry in the first place: control of our data,” Fiefia explained. “That should always have been ours.” Since Utah passed the DCA, the first legislation of its kind, six other states have reached out to Fiefia to explore introducing similar bills. 

Meanwhile, a group of legal scholars has been pushing for a promising reform called “friction-in-design” regulation. These reformers argue that the tech industry’s obsession with seamless efficiency has stripped users of meaningful choice and enabled what they call the “technosocial engineering of humans.” They propose deliberately designing pauses—like speed bumps in neighborhoods or warning labels on products—to help users reflect, exercise autonomy, and protect their well-being online. Previous attempts to regulate social media have often floundered because they focused on specific types of speech or particular actors, inviting partisan backlash. Friction-in-design offers a politically neutral alternative, one that addresses the underlying dynamics of online harm without censoring content or favoring one viewpoint over another. Just as speed bumps make roads safer without restricting where people can drive, digital friction can reduce harmful online behavior without infringing on free speech. 

There are a vast array of friction-in-design regulations that could curb harmful platform dynamics. Addictive features like infinite scroll (which continuously loads new content so users never reach a natural stopping point) and autoplay (which automatically plays the next video without user input) could be banned outright. Platforms could be forced into imposing automatic time-outs after extended continuous use of the platform. They could also be required to add a short delay after a user posts, likes, or replies to someone else. Content that begins to go viral could be deliberately slowed as it passes certain thresholds. High-reach accounts could be regulated like broadcasters, with posts that reach a certain audience threshold treated as public broadcasts. In the realm of privacy, courts could refuse to enforce automatic contracts and instead require evidence of actual deliberation by consumers. 

When tech platforms have voluntarily adopted some of these measures, they’ve worked. After a wave of gruesome lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018 that were sparked by viral false rumors of child kidnappings, WhatsApp restricted the forwarding of messages that had already been shared five or more times, allowing them to be sent to only one user or group at a time. That minor tweak resulted in the spread of “highly forwarded” messages declining by 70 percent. Of course, platforms are unlikely to adopt these measures on their own, which is why government action is necessary. 

The situation requires many more reforms than the ones that have been outlined here. Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolization of the digital economy is crucial. Today’s internet giants have achieved a level of vertical and horizontal integration with few parallels in American history, in large part because previous generations of lawmakers worked hard to prevent it. Even at the height of its power, Ma Bell couldn’t listen to your telephone conversations, learn that you were thinking of buying a house, and then sell that information to banks, which could then cold-call you at dinner with loan offers. Government today could largely eliminate this “surveillance” business model by enforcing existing law—breaking up tech companies’ control of competing social media platforms (like Meta’s ownership of both Facebook and Instagram) and requiring that they follow the same “common carrier” rules that governed previous communications technologies. This would curb a great deal, though not all, of their most exploitative behavior. 

Modifying Section 230, which allows platforms to hide behind total legal immunity even as they algorithmically make editorial decisions, is also important. Beyond that, greater transparency around how algorithms function, and stronger oversight to ensure that they serve the public interest rather than manipulate it, will be key to creating a healthier digital ecosystem. Most major platforms’ algorithms promote the content that gets the most user engagement, which gives undue weight to outrage and misinformation. But those incentives don’t have to be written in stone. Scholars and some smaller platforms are testing out different algorithmic systems, such as “bridging-based ranking,” which sorts internet content using metrics that promote constructive disagreement—such as whether users with opposing views engage with it positively. Documents from Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, reveal that the company tested bridging-based ranking in its comments sections, and found that it promoted posts that were “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate speech, or violence. But they decided not to implement it widely.

Of course, none of this means Democrats can’t or shouldn’t engage with social media. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have shown that it’s possible to use social media platforms effectively in service of progressive causes. But they are the exception. The structure of the current internet ecosystem overwhelmingly favors reactionary, conspiratorial content. Democratic engagement should be grounded not in mimicking that logic, but in naming the alienation the internet produces and offering a more humane alternative. 

The way we live online is not good for us. The average American now checks their phone 205 times a day, or once every five waking minutes. The average young person today spends 5.5 hours staring at screens, putting them on pace to spend 25 years of their life online. Rates of depression, anxiety, and behavioral addictions have soared; rates of friendship and romantic relationships have plummeted. 

Meanwhile, those in the tech industry want to double down on all of it. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is often called Silicon Valley’s “philosopher-king.” He argues that the goal of improving material conditions on Earth is misguided, the folly of those who cannot see past their own “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

It’s hard to imagine a more noxious ideology—or less likable messengers—to run against. To think that the answers to our most existential problems could be found by building ever more seductive online worlds to disappear into is essentially a surrender of faith in the human project. No wonder figures like Peter Thiel hesitate when asked if humanity should even survive. Let MAGA have this bleak vision. And let them own the horror that is our online world. 

Democrats, meanwhile, should start listening to other voices. Zadie Smith, more than a decade ago, wrote that the technology shaping our lives is unworthy of us. We are more interesting than it. We deserve better. It’s time to build something different.

The post Draining the Online Swamp appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Hailed as a hero by MAGA and a heel by the left, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he was doing away with fact-checking at Meta, opting instead for a “community notes” system, similar to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). I’m not here to offer an opinion on the merits of fact-checking systems, or on the flaws of its replacement. But it would be unwise to let the conversation about Zuckerberg’s actions become just another overheated, 48-hour exchange, only to be discarded into the digital dustbin of the Wayback Machine. 

Instead, we should be discussing the core of the problem: Social media’s domination by producers and purveyors of industrial-scale slop, often created by bots and foreign actors. Rather than joining the chorus of those complaining about fact-checking, I want to offer a solution, a common-sense reform that could dramatically improve social media and decrease the destructive role it plays in our political discussions. 

America Needs Social Media Sovereignty. Free speech that can be debated—amplified, embraced, or challenged—underlies the greatness of our nation. But speech manufactured by non-humans and foreign actors for the sole purpose of polluting the political discourse, offers no benefit to our country.  

If we are to cast our ballots in an informed way, we need social media sovereignty and transparency, which requires user verification on social media and disclosure of non-human posters. 

Few would argue that it takes less time to manufacture nonsense than it does to clean it up, and the problem is magnified exponentially when the nonsense is produced at an industrial scale, aided by algorithms, AI, or bots. A machine that can mass produce speech—a non-human nonsense factory—interferes with your right to speak and be heard as an American.  

Under our system of free speech, individuals have both the right to state their view and the obligation to face the consequences. However, if your speech can be shouted down by non-humans and erased by algorithms, then your speech is not free. You might as well be whispering in a sawmill; you may take minor satisfaction from “having your say,” but the noise of the machines will drown you out. 

And what’s worse, the shouting that silences your voice as an American might very well be bots from a foreign country, bots that are then amplified by an algorithm in San Francisco—or worse yet, China. 

By definition, a bot can neither have any beliefs nor face any consequences for manufacturing “speech.” The destructive potential is obvious to anyone with eyes and ears over the last ten years, though each of us might point to different examples. And even while the debate over control of the nation’s physical borders rages on, our digital borders are currently undefended by even the most modest safeguards. 

If you believe control over our borders is important, then it will likely concern you to consider for a moment that foreign actors— whether from Mexico, Greenland, China, or, yes, Russia—can influence our elections. Secretive algorithms produced by corporations can turbocharge these foreign influence campaigns without your knowledge, leaving Americans with no ability to challenge these industrial-scale influence efforts. 

When China floods our market with cheap goods, President Donald Trump demands that we put tariffs in place to stop them. So we should also embrace tools to prevent China from flooding our social media—our marketplace of ideas—with false information designed to divide Americans and inflame political differences. 

Many Americans of both parties will be troubled by the reality that foreign actors could be influencing our elections with the assistance—intentional or otherwise—of profitable but hidden algorithms controlled by tech executives who show no loyalty to any ideology, party, or creed beyond their economic self-interest. 

Rightly or wrongly, the Supreme Court has extended free speech protections to corporations, but they have not yet done so for bots, especially those operated from or on behalf of, interests outside the United States. 

So what can be done about this? It’s simple: Meta, X, and other dominant social media platforms should require user verification of any account before allowing it to be amplified by its algorithms. Users should be identified as humans and by the country in which their content originates. All non-human posters on social-media platforms should be clearly identified as such. 

Though proposed for a different purpose, Jonathan Haidt, a leading voice on the harm that can be caused by social media platforms, has argued for user verification requirements before an account is eligible for algorithmic amplification. In a 2022 piece called, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt put it this way: 

“Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.” 

His proposal even addresses some of the initial concerns regarding this proposal. It still permits the use of pseudonyms—you just have to be “verified as a real human being, in a particular country.” 

We know this process is possible because both companies already require verification for political advertisers. And certainly, changes to the algorithm can have a far greater impact on the number of people who see or don’t see a post than most advertising budgets.  

As Haidt points out, banks already have “know your customer” requirements to prevent money laundering. Surely, the amplification of politically toxic speech—speech that may very well be serving the interests of foreign actors—is every bit as grave a threat as money laundering. 

Under this proposed approach, all Americans are free to say whatever they wish, and if the users are verified as humans, Zuckerberg or Musk can let their algorithms amplify that speech in any way they choose. But the algorithms shouldn’t be able to amplify the speech of bots and foreign actors without at least labeling it as such.  

We have the right to know if content is generated by one of our friends or neighbors or an AI propaganda machine. Silicon Valley shouldn’t be able to profit so handsomely off our use of social media without accepting this small burden of verification. 

Some might wish to go further and restrict what foreign actors and foreign nationals can say that might influence U.S. elections and politics, others might fear that any regulation could lead to excessive regulation. But verification and transparency are worthy steps, no matter your views on additional measures. When democracy is careening down an ice-covered hill on a greased toboggan, it seems untimely to engage in a debate on the risks of a slippery slope. 

As AI becomes an even more dominant part of our lives, these problems will only be magnified, meaning we should require verification of humans and disclosure of non-human online agents sooner rather than later. 

So let’s start with the most basic thing possible: let’s make social media social again by verifying that we are interacting with actual humans, and perhaps, over time, we’ll even find out we are friends again. 

The post America Needs Social Media Sovereignty appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Over the past quarter century, campaign consultants and elected officials realized that citizens don’t make political decisions through rational analysis of what choice is in their interest. Instead, humans make decisions primarily based on emotion, and those emotions are based on underlying values. Literature scrutinizing this has emerged from neuroscience, political psychology, political science, and behavioral economics, including Drew Westen’s Political Brain, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic—to examine how decisions and identities function. The bottom line is that reason takes a back seat to gut feelings, so understanding a person’s core values is essential to knowing how to persuade them.

That’s why I’ve long been a fan of the civic research organization More in Common’s Hidden Tribes model, which segments America’s population based not on demographic metrics like gender, race, class, or income but on their beliefs. In 2017, they surveyed 8,000 Americans about their moral values and parenting styles. They probed their ideas about personal responsibility, identity, threats, and trust. More in Common* followed up with focus groups and one-on-one interviews to understand their psychological differences, moral foundations, and group identity constructs, building a bridge between the large-scale data sets produced by pollsters and the small-group insights of social science researchers. They then sorted respondents into seven clusters or “tribes,” which predict individual political views better than conventional demographic categories did. If you need to slice and dice the American electorate, this is a powerful way to do it.

As a scholar of North American regionalism, however, I’ve also long been aware of dominant regional cultures’ power over a huge range of phenomena in the U.S. As I laid out in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, our sectional differences date back to the rival colonizing projects on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the U.S in the 17th and 18th centuries. These rival regional cultures settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, liberty, identity, and belonging. There are eleven “American Nations” today, and you can read about them in this summary at the research project I run, Nationhood Lab, or in shorter form, in this story from the Monthly.

Their presence has shaped our history, our constitution, and electoral politics. I’ve shown how they’ve impacted elections—the 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests; the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms; and the 2013 and 2011 off-terms—plus per capita gun violence, life expectancy, diabetes, obesity and physical inactivity, Covid-19 vaccination rates, and attitudes about threats to democracy.

I’ve long fantasized about merging the two approaches, discovering if and how the Hidden Tribes are maldistributed across the American Nations. Thanks to More in Common and their polling partner, YouGov, I have some provisional answers I posted last week at Nationhood Lab (with some methodological details) that you can see in the accompanying graphics.

More in Common identified seven “tribes”: Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, and Devoted Conservatives. You can read about each of these at More in Common, but the bottom line is that there are two wings—Progressive Activists (8 percent of Americans) on one end, Traditional and Devoted Conservatives (a combined 25 percent) on the other—that have strong ideologies and spurn compromise, especially with one another. For differing reasons, everyone else—nearly two-thirds of the country—makes up what More in Common calls “the Exhausted Majority,” who are more ideologically flexible and frustrated that politics has become a Manichean struggle.

The graph below (and in this article) shows how the Tribes are distributed in each regional culture based on the location of approximately 7,800 of the 8,000 survey respondents. (The others either didn’t have location data or were from New France, First Nation, or Greater Polynesia, which didn’t have enough respondents to plot the tribes confidently; you can find information on the sample sizes for the rest of the nations and other details here. We also note that the 2017 survey weighted respondents nationally and in traditional Census Bureau domains but not by the American Nations model.)

The first thing you’ll notice is that the relative size of the “wings” varies considerably between outlying regions. Proportionally, there are three times as many Progressive Activists in Left Coast (12 percent) than there are in the Deep South (4 percent), which is tied with Far West for being the major nation with the largest conservative wing (at 29 percent of the population) and the largest far-right Devoted Conservative contingent (at 8 percent). In the Midlands, historically the great swing region, the distribution of the Hidden Tribes is nearly identical to that of the U.S. as a whole.

The most conservative nations—Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Spanish Caribbean—are also the ones with the largest proportion of the Politically Disengaged. This group is considerably poorer, less educated, and less tolerant than the average American and almost invisible in local community life. The nations with the largest share of Passive Liberals—a cohort of would-be Democratic voters who less frequently participate in the political process—are the historically most communitarian ones: Yankeedom, New Netherland, and Left Coast (all at 17 percent). Moderates—politically engaged centrists—are most consequential in El Norte where, at 18 percent of the population, they are the largest single Tribe after the Politically Disengaged; they are the least present in Left Coast where, at 12 percent, they are no more numerous than Progressive Activists.

When it comes to protecting democracy, the threat is largely embodied by Devoted Conservatives, which is where the hardcore MAGA crowd is found. More in Common describes members of this tribe as: “deeply engaged with politics and hold strident, uncompromising views [and] feel that America is embattled, and they perceive themselves as the last defenders of traditional values that are under threat.” This “tribe” is substantially larger in the Deep South (at 8 percent) and Greater Appalachia (7 percent) than in Yankeedom, New Netherland, Left Coast, El Norte or Tidewater—“blue” regions all—where they comprise about 5 percent of the population. These patterns mirror what Cornell’s Doug Kriner and I found in regionally parsing a 2022 poll of Americans’ attitudes about threats to democracy.

These results further emphasize just how rapidly the Tidewater is changing. American Nations, published in 2011, described it as a regional culture that was decomposing on account of having been prevented from expanding westward in the mid-18th century (by the presence of Greater Appalachia) and then, in the 20^th century, by the presence of an expansive federal government around the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads/Norfolk, site of the world’s largest naval base. By far the most powerful region in the Early Republic, the conservative, aristocratic leaders of the Tidewater sought to replicate the neo-feudal manorial society of the English countryside from which they had descended. It ultimately turned to chattel slavery to fill in the role of the serfs. It was home to the Confederate capital, but its power was already eclipsed by the Deep South by the 1860s. By the 1960s, its influence began pushing back from Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax County in the D.C. suburbs. That shift has accelerated, especially in the past 20 years, with Virginia—despite its large Greater Appalachian section—becoming a blue state and Biden beating Trump in the region as a whole—which includes southern Maryland, the Delmarva, and an eastern North Carolina by a staggering 19 points.)

Indeed, the Hidden Tribes data shows the Tidewater now has the second most liberal population in the country after Left Coast. It has a higher proportion of Progressive Activists (11 percent) and Traditional Liberals (14 percent) than either New Netherland or Yankeedom. It also has the smallest share of Politically Disengaged in the country at just 20 percent of the populace, almost a third less than in the Deep South or Spanish Caribbean. The Dedicated Conservative bloc is just 5 percent, the same as in the longtime “blue” regions, and there are no more Traditional Conservatives than there are in Left Coast (both 19 percent).

This is a truly astounding shift in historical terms—from the capital of an ethnonationalist, white supremacist regime to a liberal stronghold—and one that seems to be accelerating with time. And it doesn’t seem like the Midlands is absorbing the region to its north—compare the mix of the tribes, for instance—but rather creating something new from the ashes of a vanquished racial slave-and-caste system.

*Thanks to More in Common for allowing us to access their data, to their partners, YouGov, for crunching the numbers, and to John Liberty at our data partner, Motivf, for the graphic.

The post This Thanksgiving, Understand Our Country Through “Hidden Tribes” and “American Nations” appeared first on Washington Monthly.