The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.
—Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 2019
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote a book about his daughter, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism. An anti-vaxxer concluded: “You have no morals whatsoever and you know that you are a fucking liar. I hope you rot in hell” (CNN, 3/21/19). The anti-vaxxer was caught in a purity trap. Two observations make this clear—first, anti-vaxxers commonly believe that “we all know vaccines cause autism,” and second, this one concluded that Dr. Peter Hotez has “no morals.”
The purity trap is not another Political Trap. Rather, it is a kind of Moralistic Trap. Moralistic Traps cause emotional polarization, the kind of polarization that’s ripping us apart by causing hatred. Political Traps only cause issue polarization, which generally only causes disagreement. So why did I spend so much time on Political Traps when it is the Moralistic Traps—the purity trap and what I will call the racism trap—that create the real dangers?
The answer is straightforward. Political Traps lead us to the simplistic ideas that are almost always the source of the purity trap—the trap that is central to almost all radical-left politics.
The Purity Trap: Becoming a Purity Tester
The purity trap is the mistake of assuming people are evil if they fail some purity test, aka a litmus test, such as “Do you believe vaccines cause autism?” Like all Moralistic Traps, it convinces us that our opponents are not just mistaken—they’re immoral. And that leads to the emotional polarization that’s ripping us apart.
Paul Krugman’s op-ed “Don’t Make Health Care a Purity Test” mentions this purity test: Do you agree that Medicare-for-all is the best healthcare proposal? According to Krugman, some Berniecrats apply that test to politicians they wish to condemn as “corrupt shills for the medical/industrial complex.” The Berniecrat applying the test has been caught in the purity trap. Simply put:
Those who believe in a purity test are caught in a purity trap.
Purity traps cause people to hate. Worse, they often cause them to hate their allies. The thinking of someone caught by a purity trap, although it may be subconscious, goes something like this:
- Everyone knows that my purity test specifies the only moral position on [a certain issue].
- Therefore, everyone who disagrees knows they are taking an immoral position so they must be doing it for some evil reason.
The problem here is the assumption that “Everyone knows.” That’s just about never true. If we don’t stop to think, it may seem like they should know. But if we do stop to think, we will realize that even the best and brightest make basic mistakes. And most of us make lots of mistakes. You never know what someone is thinking.
Given how error-prone people are, it is a bit silly to assume that people just couldn’t be mistaken. For example, take climate-change deniers. How could they make a mistake about that? Well, don’t all Democrats believe that the oil companies have been deceiving people? So then lots of people must be deceived—mistaken. It’s always like that. Mistakes are everywhere. You can almost never rule them out.
That means that using a purity test—you disagree with this, so you are immoral—is just ridiculous. There’s no way to know that the truth isn’t: “You disagree with this, so you made a mistake.”
And the truth is even harsher. Most people who are illogical enough to believe in purity testing are quite likely just wrong. They should be saying: “You disagree with this; hmm, maybe I’m wrong.” But let’s not hope for miracles.
Purity Really Is Dangerous
As an example of how the purity trap causes serious damage to the Democrats, consider a story written by one of The Atlantic magazine’s most respected (but now retired) national correspondents.
Only one week before the first Democratic primary in 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates began his discussion of the 1994 crime bill as follows:
Black voters particularly should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral ‘anti-crime’ bill in American history and that Hillary Clinton aided its passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth [emphasis throughout the book is my own].
Coates is clearly thinking of this purity test: Do you agree that the 1994 crime bill was extremely immoral? By telling Black voters what they “should never forget” while giving them no evidence, Coates is implicitly suggesting that this is something everyone knows is true.
He then rules out, again without evidence, the possibility that the Clintons were simply wrong. His “anger over the Clintons’ actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong but on their craven embrace … of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name.”
This is precisely where the purity trap logic takes us once we make the assumption that everyone knows we’re right about our purity test. Because Coates thinks everyone knows the crime bill was immoral, his only logical conclusion is that the Clintons knew it was immoral, they did it anyway, and their actions were craven.
As always, once you buy “everyone knows,” you’re trapped. The rest is completely logical. The only trouble—as always—is that “everyone knows” is just bullshit.
Bullshit History
As we know from Chapter 6, two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus, 10 Black big-city mayors, 39 prominent Black pastors and 58% of all Blacks favored what Coates calls “arguably the most immoral ‘anti-crime’ bill in American history.” Well, it’s immorality certainly wasn’t obvious to everyone.
If it wasn’t obvious to all those well-informed Blacks, who’s to say it was obvious to the Clintons? And if it was not obvious to them, then they could have just been wrong and not cravenly immoral, as Coates claims. As usual, the first step of the purity trap—everyone knows—is wrong, and this time, outrageously wrong.
You may wonder how Coates could miss that much Black history, but it seems plausible given what else he missed. Where he claimed that “Hillary Clinton aided [the 1994 crime bill’s] passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth,” he put a link in his Atlantic article to Hillary Clinton saying “super-predator.” If you click it, you’ll see that, sure enough … but wait, what does it say in big characters at the top of every frame of that video? It says “01-28-96” (See clipped frame in Chapter 30). That’s a year and a half after the passage of the 1994 crime bill. So she did say that to aid the passage of the crime bill. In fact, as I recount later, the word had not even been invented in 1994.
Coates just made up his accusation.
What went wrong? I think Coates may have explained it back in 2012 when he wrote in The Atlantic, “I read what I like before I read what’s important. That’s who I am. It’s my version of the ‘senior editor’ … I also don’t believe it’s my job to be right.” Amen.
Judging Ta-Nehisi Coates
If I were to fall into the purity trap as Coates has, I would conclude that Coates himself is immoral: Everyone knows the Clintons were on the same side as most Blacks. So when Coates denies this, it must be a deliberate deception, and he must be immoral.
But the purity trap always leads us astray. So how do you get out of it? The only way out is to reject step 1—“Everyone knows.” And I do. It is not obvious to everyone that most Blacks backed that bill. It must have not been obvious to Coates. So the whole “everyone knows” argument falls apart.
People make mistakes. And they make a lot of them when they get sucked in. I’m guessing he was sucked in by Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. That has become a powerful radical-left Political Trap and many Democrats seem to be caught in it. Political Traps are the most common source of the “It’s obvious to everyone” assumption that leads into the purity trap.
Therefore, I conclude that Coates is “well-intentioned” and just deceived by a Political Trap. I still think he’s worth reading.
Conclusion
It’s important for Democrats to be aware of the purity trap. It has the effect of making those caught in the trap see other Democrats as immoral and as a hated (or disparaged) enemy.
The purity trap is also responsible for making many Democrats hate Republicans and vice versa. The simplest cure for this is to remember that Republicans could be “well-meaning” but sucked into some Political Trap. Taking this approach shouldn’t be all that difficult.
Ripped Apart
