Dan Crenshaw on the Political Polarization of COVID

Even though we just got through a fucking horrible year, that year exposed a lot of weird shit about our civilization. It's exposed a lot of weird shit about a bunch of really freaked out people that are just paranoid and schizophrenic and how many people that are just fragile. There's so many fragile people in our culture. I was blown away by the politics of it. I'm a politician, so this is what I analyze. I was blown away that the conversation about how to deal with the last year became the division fell upon partisan lines. About whether to lock down or not to lock down. About whether people liked masks or didn't like masks. At first that seems really odd. I spent a lot of time analyzing this because it shouldn't be that way. It should be mixed. You would think about... What you're really talking about is somebody's risk assessment and how they perceive risk and how they want to deal with that and how they think everybody else should deal with that. It's strange. I think there's a lot of factors involved. I do think that there was some political opportunism. I think that if Trump says something, people reactively say the opposite. That's a problem, right? That's definitely part of it. However, after Trump lost the election, that didn't stop. That pro lockdown movement never stopped. It was not clear to me then that that was the only reason. But it is. The problem is once people get committed to an ideology or a narrative, just because Trump lost and now Biden's in power, it's not like everybody just abandons this narrative and creates a new reality based on objective truth. But they'll never even do an after action report on it to the point to where it's ridiculous. I thought you were showing us something. I put another few factors in there. I think some of it is the fact that Democrats tend to congregate in urban areas and the virus is more in your face in an urban area than in a rural area. That might be some explanation there. For sure, right? But it really boils down to, and there's studies on this, where our brains light up differently when assessing risk. Now, it doesn't mean that the behavioral outcomes of these studies are a change. Basically, they would take liberals and conservatives and they would give them a bet. They would bounce to a betting game and see how they react differently. Now, the actual behavioral outcomes, what they choose didn't change all that much. But when they're doing the MRI scans, they see that their brains light up differently. So that's interesting. So we clearly assess risk differently somehow. So I looked at data on the kind of jobs that we choose. And it turns out, and this is intuitive, you would guess this, that the vast majority of dangerous jobs are mostly populated by conservatives. Lumber, jacking, hard labor, military, law enforcement. So it's obvious that we're choosing to engage in risk differently, just overall, in the aggregate. And so I think that gets at why we think differently about this. I think we're truly wired differently. And on top of that, the natural disposition of a liberal to believe in some sort of collective action, whereas the natural disposition of a conservative is to believe that government can only do so much. There's life out there and sometimes it's dangerous. And it's up to you as an individual to generally assess that. And that's also the most efficient way to do things in order to get the best outcomes in the aggregate. So these are two dispositions that are always present. And they manifest in policy outcomes all the time. And in this case, it's pretty obvious how they manifested into the way we dealt with coronavirus. And I think that kind of explains it. Because think about it this way, too. When a more left-leaning public health official talks about it, they always give you the worst case scenario. Well, it's possible that if you're 15, you could die. Well, yeah, it's possible. But it's also far more unlikely than even if you got the flu. So they leave out that part. They leave out the context. They leave out the probabilities. This is why I've been so frustrated with our public health officials. Yeah. Give us the whole truth. Right. Don't just give us the most dangerous truth. Don't tell us the tail end of the probability scale. That's not useful information to us. It's been very frustrating to watch how we've dealt with this over the last year. Around the world, not just in America. Frankly, we've had it better than a lot of countries. I think people tend to try to find a group that they can attach themselves to. And Chris Rock has a great bit about this. You know what? You can find Mick Maynard, who is one of the matchmakers for the UFC, posted this on his Instagram. Go to Mick. You got it? Yeah. Okay. So Mick Maynard posted this from the great and powerful Chris Rock. And this is, we can watch this because it's on his Instagram. And if Chris will holler at me, if it's an issue. But I fucking love Chris Rock. And this is one of the best points. It might not be one of his best bits. But it's one of his best points ever. Because it's so accurate. Because he's talking about... Goes on, but that's where the clip ends. But that's so accurate is that what a lot of people are afraid of is being alone. They're afraid of being attacked. And one of the things about today's culture, particularly with social media, is that it's an attack culture. It's a bully culture. And a lot of these people that are doing the attacking and they're doing the bullying, they've been bullied in the real world. So they want paybacks. They're trying to bully people online. And that's what you see. There's a lot of low status males, a lot of really weak people who have never really overcome physical adversity. Or they're not successful. But they found a way online to gather up a group of people that resonate with some of their opinions. And they can attack people. And they do it all day long. You know, there's... I find that to be the most... It's fascinating. The most probable... If somebody's saying something extremely crude and awful to be online, it's probably a younger man. It doesn't necessarily. Sometimes it's older men who have failed their life. They've decided that this is their stand. This is their line in the sand they're going to draw. Or that now they're going to be anti-racist or they're going to be anti-homophobic or anti-transphobic or whatever it is. And they're going to attack all these people. There's so many different ideological pathways that you could choose, that you could get a group of people that agree with you. And then you fight against anyone that opposes these ideas. And you do it in a really aggressive and nasty way, which is something that we should push back against, period. Ideas should be something that you should be able to discuss and debate and analyze. You should be able to sit down and go, why do you believe in the simulation theory? You know, and we shouldn't be like, well, you're a fucking idiot, Joe Rogan. That's why you agree with him. It should be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I'm a fucking idiot. Yeah. But that's not why I agree with this. That's not why I look at this. I look at this because I'm curious and I see all the various components. You know, I think there's a lot of truth on both sides. But the problem is when you ignore the truth on a side that doesn't fit with your ideology, then you're not interested in truth. You're interested in what Chris Rock is talking about. You're interested in supporting your gang. Yeah. And that's your gang or team. I always say that you're either wearing a blue jersey or a red jersey and then you act accordingly. You repeat these sort of mantras that you think you're supposed to repeat in order to gain favor within that group. Make sure they know you're part of the loyalists there. And if you don't say the things, then that group gets distrustful of you. But this is a problem we have on the right. So I think the left is power hungry. I think the right is paranoid. And we tend to look for betrayers in our midst. Wait, wait. Who's paranoid? Who's power hungry? Which one? The right. The right is more paranoid. Can you switch it back and forth, though? Left is paranoid sometimes, too. Look, everybody's on a spectrum. And I should say that in the beginning. I'm analyzing in the aggregate the coronavirus why people fell on partisan lines on that. But look, I recognize that not all liberals are risk averse to this extraordinary degree. I recognize that. We're all on a spectrum from the left to the right. But in the aggregate, this is sort of what we see. And then in politics, as you're talking about, we put on these jerseys. And so I'm just talking in generalities. Of course, the left can be ultra paranoid. And of course, the right in its extreme form can exhibit more power hungry tendencies. But it tends not to be. And if we look at the policies actually being implemented, that tends not to be the case. But what I see on my side, because I'm always dealing with my side, we tend to be looking instead of thinking how to persuade. This is the problem I have and I'm trying to change the that I have. I mean, that I think we have. We talk about fighting all the time and I say, look, we have to define fighting as persuasion. Persuasion is the name of the game in politics. Look, I can I can go charge a hill as a seal and that's fighting. Right. I mean, it looks cool, but I'm going to die. OK, what I really should do is communicate, maneuver and and kill the enemy that enemy that way in politics that the fight must be persuasion. And too often we we get more concerned with saying the things, saying the slogan, saying the things that make us feel good, that make us that that that help us recognize one another as part of the same team wearing the same jersey. I think that's what he's getting at. And if somebody veers from that, well, they're a traitor. They're not one of you. And then they're automatically wrong. And instead of saying, I knew you were going to say that, let me let me tell you why it's wrong. Let me explain it to you. Let's have a debate about it. We get really mad and we go online and we call names because we haven't actually done the background work to at least understand why we think what we think. And when you understand why you think what you think, that's how you can persuade people. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. 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