An Inconvenient Truce

Political leaders and tribal missionaries have perfected a technique for maintaining anger between groups by constructing narratives designed not to resolve issues but to make the other side seem fundamentally inhuman. The mechanism is elegant: introduce an aggressive, attractive claim, then retreat to a reasonable defense when challenged, treating both as equivalent. The result is two separate realities where half the country believes things about the other half that almost nobody in that half actually believes.

• The Christmas Truce teaches an unexpected lesson: After 1914, military leaders actively prevented subsequent holiday truces not through brute force but by controlling which stories got told. Once leaders recognized that shared humanity was dangerous to their aims, they simply erased it from the narrative. The mechanism was psychological, not physical.
• The motte-and-bailey doctrine works because it conflates two completely different arguments: An aggressive premise (the bailey) gets swapped with a sensible one (the motte) whenever the aggressive version faces challenge. Both sides have become expert at this. What looks like a genuine policy debate is actually an argument structure designed to make compromise impossible.
• The gap between Narrative World and Reality World is now massive: Sixty-one percent of Red Tribe members believe Blue Tribe wants to abolish police. Only 28 percent of actual liberals believe that. Fifty-seven percent of Blue Tribe believes Red Tribe thinks police shootings are always justified. Only 31 percent of actual conservatives hold that view. We're not disagreeing about facts. We're disagreeing about characters in a story that mostly don't exist.
• Each side uses the other's aggressive claims as proof of the other's fundamental corruption: Blue Tribe can point to the dumbest Red Tribe narratives and declare it consensus. Red Tribe can caricature Blue Tribe's most extreme elements and treat them as representative. The missionaries benefit from this. The rest of us lose the ability to see anyone across the divide as anything but an enemy.
• The question becomes whether we can even recognize when we've been conscripted into someone else's war: If you can't tell the difference between battles that are yours and battles someone selected for you, how will you know when to stop fighting? And more importantly, what does it take to make people most uncomfortable? Peace.