Labels are sometimes useful, but pigeonholing and binary thinking also undermine the conversations on which democratic debate depends.
There is a peculiar ritual at the start of any policy debate, and it plays out daily in the comments on the Daily Friend.
Before a single argument is made, before a single fact is cited, the most vocal habitués of the comment section instinctively reach for a label.
Are you with us or against us? Left or right? Proud patriot or woke groomer?
The label, once attached, does all the work. It tells the tribe what to think, whom to trust, and whom to dismiss.
The tiresome cliché “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, for example, dismisses the entire argument of the object out of hand, and insulates its subject from any and all criticism, without a single word being said about the merits of the critique.
(The phrase was coined way back in 2003 by Charles Krauthammer, as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush”. It has become meaningless through overuse.)
When someone comes along who engages with the substance of an issue, or expresses agreement with the author, the labellers simply swarm the downvotes, as if the popularity of a comment is reflective of its merit. (Oh, how I wish people would use the voting system to upvote well-made arguments, whether or not they agree, and downvote low-effort dross. It ought to be a quality indicator, not an agreement flag.)
Binary thinking
This is the tyranny of binary thinking, and it is making us collectively stupider. Not because the people involved are unintelligent – many are not – but because it discourages the critical reasoning that complex problems require.
We have built an epistemic environment so hostile to ambiguity and nuance that expressing uncertainty about a contested question, or calling out someone with whom one might otherwise broadly agree, has become, in itself, risky.
The mechanics are well understood, even if rarely named. Cognitive scientists call it the black-and-white fallacy: the compression of a rich spectrum of possible positions into just two.
You encounter it whenever someone insists that you must be either entirely for a policy or entirely against it, with no room for the obviously true response – that most real proposals contain elements worth supporting and elements worth challenging. Nuance isn’t weakness; it is the basic requirement of honest thought. But it is difficult to weaponise nuance in a single comment, or a thirty-second clip online.
When every position must be sorted into one of two bins, the bins become more important than the ideas inside them.
Pigeonholing
The problem is compounded by pigeonholing – the tendency to infer an entire worldview from a single expressed belief.
You either agree that white people are subject to a genocide, or you don’t care about white lives.
If you don’t support black empowerment, you’re assumed to be a racist who denies the legacy of apartheid and rejects just restitution.
If you don’t support Afrikaner nationalism, you’re assumed to hate Afrikaners.
Declare you are non-religious, and you’re accused of hating religious people.
In the immigration debate, there is no space for moderation. You’re either for open borders, or for mass deportations.
In the abortion debate, you’re pro-life or pro-choice. One side holds that every zygote is sacred, and the other celebrates neonate infanticide. There is no space for people who dislike it but don’t think it ought to be illegal until there is a chance of viability outside the womb.
These inferences are lazy, often wrong, and almost always counterproductive, because they relieve the listener of any obligation to engage with the actual argument.
Social sorting
What pigeonholing really achieves is social sorting. It tells people which team you belong to. And once team membership is established, the content of the argument becomes secondary to its tribal provenance.
Research in political psychology consistently shows that people evaluate the quality of an argument partly by who is making it – and specifically whether that person is on their side.
The same statistic, cited by a political ally, is compelling evidence; cited by an opponent, it is dismissed as cherry-picked.
This is how rival political identities come to function less like loosely held preferences and more like firm allegiances. Loyalty, rather than rational thought, becomes the primary virtue in public debate.
Changing your mind – once considered a sign of intellectual integrity – is recast as betrayal, inconsistency, or weakness. Politicians who update their positions in light of new evidence are accused of flip-flopping. People who express uncertainty are summarily told what their opinion ought to be, depending on the camp of their interlocutor. Citizens who vote differently across elections are treated as threats to political dominance, rather than as individuals who have a right to hold political views of their own.
Cultural warfare
This is a global problem, though much of the cultural warfare that underlies it has found its clearest expression in the United States. Much of it has been exported to other countries, including South Africa.
The consequences extend far beyond any individual debate. When a society cannot deliberate honestly about trade-offs – when every policy question is immediately absorbed into the logic of cultural warfare – it loses the capacity for collective problem-solving.
Consider any genuinely difficult question of the past decades: low-cost housing, energy policy, water policy, pandemic response, fiscal responsibility, empowerment.
Each involves genuine uncertainty, legitimate competing interests, and the need for iterative adjustment as evidence accumulates. None of them fit neatly into a left-right axis. All of them were nonetheless dragooned into one.
The institutions that might counteract this tendency have largely surrendered to it instead.
Environmental selection
News media, facing the commercial incentives of engagement-driven platforms, learned long ago that conflict generates more clicks than objective synthesis.
I see it in my own work. When I write something that violates a shibboleth of a particular tribe, I get way more engagement than when I write a topical article about domestic policy with some research depth and originality.
Political parties discovered that mobilising the base through shared resentment is more reliable than persuading the uncommitted through argument. That’s why almost every party campaigns on xenophobia. Hating out-groups, or blaming them for our troubles, works. Being against things is more effective than being for things.
It is simplistic, and usually wrong, but it is easy and popular.
Social media algorithms reward the snappy slogan, the deliberate provocation. They penalise well-considered, nuanced thought.
The “majority illusion” – when you see your own views reflected and reinforced in your particular social media bubble – solidifies polarised thoughts and establishes consistent “right-think” and “wrong-think” within your political tribe.
And so the environment selects, relentlessly, for the most polarised voices and filters out the most thoughtful ones.
None of this is inevitable. Several democracies have managed to sustain more deliberative political cultures – though none are immune, and the pressure is global.
What differs is partly institutional: proportional electoral systems tend to reward coalition-building and thus punish ideological purity. Civic education that emphasises argument over identity gives citizens better tools.
These are not panaceas, but they suggest that the polarising culture of debate is at least partly a cultural choice.
Against pigeonholing on the right
At the individual level, the antidote begins with a simple, difficult discipline: resist the instinct to file people into pigeonholes.
People are individuals. Most hold widely varying opinions. Those opinions are mostly based upon their own experiences, and are usually well-intended, even when wrong.
For example, I agree with several substantial critiques that the “new right” makes against the left-leaning establishment. I agree, for example, that speech is generally over-policed, and should be radically free.
I agree that systematic racial or gender discrimination in hiring, procurement or academic promotion constitutes insidious social engineering.
I agree that it should not be required to respect the opinions, or religious views, or cultures, of others. Within reason, once should tolerate them, but not all beliefs merit respect, and many merit disrespect.
I agree that trans women ought not to qualify for competition in women’s sports.
I agree with the right to own guns (though I do not oppose competency tests comparable to those required for driving a car).
I agree that Islamic fundamentalism poses a threat to liberal democracies. That I also think that about Christian nationalism doesn’t mean I let Islam off lightly. It might merely reflect that I live in a largely Christian society, where only a tiny percentage of people are actually Muslims, and even fewer are fundamentalists.
I am a free-market capitalist who seeks minimal government regulation, opposes socialism, and rejects Marxist class theory and critical race theory.
These positions are all more or less consistent with people on the right.
Against pigeonholing on the left
At the same time, I agree with many liberal views that are associated (often inaccurately) with the political left.
I agree that non-white people are often marginalised, and that we ought to be conscious of affording equal rights and opportunities to all people, regardless of irrelevant physical characteristics.
I agree that gay people ought to have equal rights, including the right to live their sexual identity openly, to work with children, and to marry and raise adoptive children. Better yet, I would support recognising a single type of civil union, leaving religious marriages entirely in the private domain.
I am pro-choice, and believe anti-abortion legislation does far more harm than good. That doesn’t make me pro-abortion, but that’s a nuance that simply isn’t catered for in political pigeonholes.
I am concerned about the power of big business, especially at the intersection with politics and taxpayer-funded contracts.
I am not strongly opposed to government-run social welfare systems, even though in my theoretically ideal world they would be neither necessary or legitimate. We don’t live in an ideal world; social welfare saves lives, and opposing social welfare is simply not politically viable in a country where half the population is dirt poor.
All of these positions are reasoned derivations from my classical liberal – and sometimes outright libertarian – beliefs.
(These are all just brief examples. I am not interested in discussing them in the comments.)
Think before you write
When you hear an argument that sits oddly with your expectations – that challenges a position you’d normally defend – try to sit with it for a moment before classifying it. Do so especially when it comes from someone with whom you ordinarily agree.
Ask what would have to be true for this argument to be correct. Ask what the person making it is actually worried about. This is not the same as agreeing with them. It is the precondition for disagreeing with them usefully.
It also means tolerating – even welcoming – people who hold what look like contradictory positions, or whose positions are amply qualified with caveats.
Such people are not straddling an incoherent middle ground; they are holding two true things simultaneously, which reality regularly requires.
Most serious policy questions do not have a “side”. They have a range of possible responses, each with different costs and benefits that distribute unevenly across different groups. Pretending otherwise – insisting that there is a progressive answer and a conservative answer and you must choose one – is to over-simplify a complex reality.
Public debate
Democracy has always needed public debate. That is how voters discover which principles to adopt, which promises to value, and which parties to support.
But an argument conducted entirely with slogans and epithets, by people performing caricatured identities rather than examining problems with intellectual rigour, is not really an argument at all.
It is ritual combat – entertaining, sometimes, but utterly useless for the business of actually governing a complicated country in a complex world.
We – and I include myself – can do better than this, and we should.
[Image: Coloured pigeons in pigeonholes. Image modified from Wikimedia Commons photograph.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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