I.
Anthropologists call it schismogenesis — the process by which one group’s behavior elicits a contrasting response from the other, producing a feedback loop of social differentiation. Left unchecked, schismogenesis will eventually result in discrete cultural antitypes, the likes of which regularly appear in the historical record. The Peloponnesian War provides a paradigmatic example, with the cosmopolitan, pleasure-seeking, democratic, mercantile, seafaring Athenians defining themselves in opposition to the parochial, austere, oligarchic, agrarian, landlubbing Spartans and vice versa. The cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in Apologies to Thucydides (2004), described an eerily similar dynamic that developed during the 19th-century conflicts between the Fijian kingdoms of Bau and Rewa, while the Cold War, with its oppositional logic and mutually-escalating arms race, provides a more recent and relevant example. And we might add the case of democratic, westward-oriented Ukraine, which has increasingly defined itself in opposition to its despotic Russian neighbor.
Closer to home, we see this playing out in the context of American oppositional politics. Domestic politics has become a matter of mutual aggravation and repellence. If the right is pro-life, the left will gravitate towards unrestricted access to abortion. If the left has fallen prey to woke ideology, then someone like Andrew Tate (of all people) can become an icon for many on the right. First Thing’s Jonathon von Maren has called this “reactive gullibility and fact-free contrarianism,” which is true as far as it goes, but this is really just a function of hyperpolarization. You do not need to agree with every claim made in Joshua Strayhorn’s recent American Journal of Political Science article “Making the other side mad: How out-group distaste benefits less competent candidates” to accept the basic premise that an “environment of polarization and negative partisanship” tends to lead voters to make decisions based on “out-group distaste,” which is to say “the extent to which particular in-group candidates provoke strong negative reactions from the out-group.” The fascinating and disturbing thing about schismogenesis is that it is continuously amplified by a vicious cycle resistant to any centripetal political forces. As Strayhorn notes, the received wisdom has traditionally been that “exposure to out-group members, or to cross-cutting political discourse, can help alleviate polarization and ideological extremism by helping group members learn about one another’s shared values and connections.” Under conditions of schismogenesis, however, the opposite is the case, since
increased intergroup communication might give in-groups better information about out-group distaste toward candidates, resulting in the more frequent selection of those that specifically aggrieve the other side. When intergroup contact results in polarized group members learning each other’s opinions about political entities, this second form of learning has the potential to degrade intergroup relations, possibly increasing the perceived distance between the groups.
It is very seldom indeed that any political discussion in this day and age produces rapprochement or revision of either party’s priors. Strayhorn’s conclusion that “low-quality candidates” will “emerge from competitive primary processes in the modern polarized era” as they “maximiz[e] the extent to which they anger the out-group” can be debated. What seems undeniable, however, is that oppositional politics inevitably becomes an end in and of itself, all the more so in an era defined by the fatuous discourse encouraged by social media.
Maximizing out-group anger is evidently an important consideration for the current administration. Why else would Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visit the Haskell Free Library & Opera House, through which the Vermont-Quebec border runs, and reportedly hop back and forth between the two countries, alternating chants of “USA Number One” and “The Fifty-First State”? There are those who would consider this kind of behavior infantile and well beneath the dignity of any private citizen, let alone a public official; at the same time, there are doubtless those who ate it up, considering it high time that we put all those overbearing Canadians back in their place. Oppositional politics demands an unending flow of vitriol, directed more and more towards our traditional allies, who are not above criticism but did not used to be treated with outright contempt. Thus, we have populist commentators breezily declaring that “The Euro alliances were fake and weak at best. We knew they hated us; they barely tolerated us, and we got to vacation in France and Italy. They know we don’t need them as much as they need us but have never been able to hide their contempt and jealousy very well. They’re all mad their own ancestors didn’t have the balls to emigrate while they could.” As engagement bait, it’s probably effective, and this historical illiteracy of it all is besides the point for those purposes, but there is a broader purpose here. If support for the trans-Atlantic alliance is perceived as liberal- or elite-coded, then it pays domestically for populists to define the United States in opposition to Canada or Europe, instead of, say, in opposition to the authoritarian axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China, just like it pays to demean Canadians before blowing up the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (“the best and most important trade deal ever made”) and implementing tariffs on the pretext of combatting the (largely illusory) smuggling of fentanyl across our norther border.
This insistence on undiplomatic behavior has a tendency to backfire, though even the backfiring presumably reinforces in-group/out-group dynamics. Take JD Vance’s March 3, 2025, interview with Sean Hannity, in which the vice president caused an international incident by mocking the idea of Europeans serving a peacekeeping role in Ukraine: “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” This prompted outrage across the Atlantic, particularly from Britons who understandably felt that their sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan had been treated with a lack of consideration. Conservative Shadow Defense Secretary James Cartlidge found it “deeply disrespectful” of Vance “to ignore such service and sacrifice,” while Trump ally Nigel Farage characterized the comments as “wrong, wrong, wrong.” Even the right-wing English tabloids were up in arms. Vance, surely realizing that he had made an unforced error, responded that any criticism of his remarks “is absurdly dishonest. I don’t even mention the UK or France in the clip, both of whom have fought bravely alongside the US over the last 20 years, and beyond,” even though he has yet to clarify who else he could have been referring to, given that only the United Kingdom and France have mentioned providing peacekeepers in those particular amounts, and other potential contributors (Poland, Denmark, Estonia, other “random countries” that happen to belong to NATO) have likewise participated in, and made sacrifices during, campaigns conducted alongside their American allies.
Nuance is inherently suspicious in a world of antitypes.
Such is the nature of oppositional politics in our current age. You always have to be “owning the libs,” naturally, but also “owning the Canadians,” and “owning the Europeans,” and probably “owning the South Koreans” will become necessary when the next round of tariffs hits, all in order to signal your ideological purity to the base.
II.
It is in the Ukrainian theater that we find oppositional politics reaching its zenith, or nadir, depending on your thoughts on the matter. Brendan O’Neill, writing in the Spectator, explored the “Zelenskyy-bashing of the Very Online right,” a sort of “Zelenskyy Derangement Syndrome” that he argues “creepily mirrors the frenzied loathing for Israel that has been infecting leftists for years. In both cases, a frothing moralism masquerades as an anti-war critique. In both cases, one nation is made the scapegoat of world affairs, held culpable for virtually every ill facing humanity. Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are both blights on the body politic.” Prompted by the Oval Office meltdown of Feb. 28, 2025, O’Neill observed how
what we have seen from the White House these past few days, and percolating furiously online, is not just “criticism of Ukraine”: it’s a strange, seething contempt for Ukraine. Just as the radical left’s enmity for Israel long ago crossed the line from political critique into blind and even bigoted hatred, so the radical right’s hostility towards Ukraine now belongs less to the realm of judicious analysis than to the realm of unstable emotion. As an unforgivable consequence, Russia, like Hamas before it, is absolved of responsibility for the horrors of this awful war. The left views Israel as the source of the world’s problems, and now some on the right seem to have a similar take on Ukraine. Such scapegoating is morally infantile and politically blinkered. It is unbecoming, wherever it comes from. Is it too much to ask for some moral consistency? Ukraine and Israel were both criminally violated by foreign armies and they have every right to fight back against their persecutors.
So virulent is some of the rhetoric directed towards Ukraine from certain corners of the Very Online Right that we can see a complete divergence in worldviews taking shape, with global events serving as ambiguous image optical illusions interpreted variously through the phenomenon of perceptual multistability, like the Rubin vase, the rabbit-duck, or “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law.” In the aftermath of the Zelenskyy-Trump-Vance falling-out, during which the Ukrainian president sought (misguidedly to some, quite understandably to others) to comprehend the precise nature of the security guarantees his country might receive, given Vladimir Putin’s predilection for breaking ceasefires, invading sovereign countries, and massacring civilians, populists found themselves in the toils of a new and particular virulent outbreak of Zelenskyy Derangement Syndrome. At last, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was well and truly put in his place and wasn’t even fed lunch. America is back.
Elsewhere in this country, and elsewhere in the world, there were other viewers who saw something very different. An open letter, written by Lech Wałęsa and 38 other Polish democracy activists who were jailed and persecuted by Poland’s communist regime, expressed “horror and disgust” at the “atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation [which] reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from the courtrooms in communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none.” It seems safe to say that few, if any MAGA hardliners, perceived the event in these terms. The Polish letter noted wistfully how
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial involvement, it would not have been possible to bring about the collapse of the Soviet empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness consisted, among other things, in the fact that he did not hesitate to call the USSR the “Empire of Evil” and gave it a decisive fight.
And indeed it was Ronald Reagan who, in his July 17, 1987 proclamation of Captive Nations Week, so movingly related how “a struggle that began in Ukraine 70 years ago is taking place throughout the Soviet empire … All captive nations deserve and require our special support. For those seeking to enjoy humanity’s birthright of liberty, independence, and justice, we serve as guardians of their dream.” Nowadays, this is the sort of rhetoric that is dismissed as “moralistic garbage” by self-styled realists. How very far we’ve come. (RELATED: A Letter to a Young Realist)
The recent Oval Office horror show (“great television”) was one example of a politically ambiguous image, interpreted in vastly different ways depending on one’s prior convictions. Another such illustrative example was the presence of an Iranian Shahed drone, shot down by Ukrainian air defense and transported to the latest CPAC through the efforts of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, which was intended to underscore the nature of Russian–Iranian cooperation in the wholesale slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and destruction of civilian infrastructure. So, how did the CPAC organizers interpret this gesture? By tweeting that
We have a Shahed Drone on display here at CPAC. The Shahed Drone has been used against and killed U.S. troops in the middle east in addition to countless civilians across the region. This drone serves as a reminder of how barbaric the Iranian regime is, and serves as a message to Iran that they will have hell to pay if they continue to attack the United States or our allies.
To this, the Polish journalist and diplomat Marek Magierowski responded: “I will use my free speech and say the following: this drone serves as a reminder of how barbaric the Russian regime is. Unless the very word ‘Russian’ is now off limits at CPAC.”
What a curious new world, in which the stick is reserved for allies and fellow democracies, and the carrot for our geopolitical rivals; in which Russia is a trusted partner in peace, deserving of sanctions relief, whose use of Iranian weapons and cooperation with Iran on missile production is evidently taboo; in which the victims of a war are blamed for its origin and perpetuation; and in which mineral rights extraction deals can be imposed on a country without security guarantees, because, as House Speaker Mike Johnson put it, “we will definitely always defend our interests and our investments,” if not necessarily our values. (That President Trump and his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani agreed on a deal in 2017 to have American companies develop Afghanistan’s rare earth mineral reserves is a matter perhaps best passed over in silence.) I’m sure there are people in power who find this all quite liberating. As the Russian journalist Anton Barbashin has pointedly remarked: “Who needs friends and allies when you can have tariffed trading partners who kind of hate you. Putin once said he is happy that Russia has no allied obligations since true sovereignty is freedom to act without any reservation.”
III.
Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), in an interview with journalist Andrew Desiderio, lamented how Ukraine aid had become a domestic political football: “Most of it is explained through domestic politics. That’s the only way I can reconcile it. For those who are searching for a sophisticated and nuanced policy analysis, I don’t think they’ll find it.” This is certainly true — domestic political considerations have come to dictate American foreign policy with respect to Ukraine and most everything else. In most countries, there is something of a cordon sanitaire between domestic and foreign policy — think of the Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s Cold War-era dictum that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” By keeping aussenpolitik relatively insulated from innenpolitik, a country ensures a certain level of continuity and reliability, which foreign policy realists, concerned as they supposedly are with rational state-level behavior and permanent interests, should appreciate. Thus in Germany, the electorate may replace a left-wing SPD government with a center-right CDU/CSU government, in Poland the right-wing PiS may cede ground to a centrist PO-led coalition, in Britain the Conservatives may be ousted in favor of Labour, but in all these cases a change in government led only to the most modest changes in foreign policy. (RELATED: Nations Negotiate For a Reason)
Foreign policy as chronic disorganized schizophrenia.
It is a very different story in the United States, which is essentially two countries taking turns at governing, each of which is led by political antitypes. Innenpolitik now produces immediate sea changes in aussenpolitik and abrupt, disorienting lurches in policy. Now we’re blaming Ukraine for the war, labeling its leader a dictator, pausing military aid, and ending intelligence sharing (an about face even France’s Marie Le Pen has condemned on the grounds of its “brutality,” which “is very cruel for the soldiers engaged in the patriotic defense of their country”). We’re waging on-again, off-again trade wars with allies and rivals alike. We’re talking about annexing Canada, annexing Greenland, leaving NATO and the U.N., dividing the world Metternich-style into discrete spheres of influence dominated by China, Russia, and the United States, while simultaneously trying somehow to peel Russia away from its growing alliance with China. All of this is quite novel, to say the least, and even if you are in favor of these various geopolitical gambits, or are feeling a certain sense of triumphalism right now, deep down you know that American politics is still on a knife’s edge, and all of this would all be abandoned in a trice by a future Democratic administration. Maybe it would then be resuscitated by a subsequent populist government. Who knows?
Andrzej Kozłowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw, has provided the European perspective that the “deep hostility that exists now between the two principal sides in American politics means that dealing with the United States, and especially alliance with it, has become very difficult … This problem did not exist until fairly recently as U.S. foreign policy enjoyed a large degree of bipartisanship, but now things have changed. This is going to be a big problem for anyone relying on the US, not just Ukraine but also by Poland and most of all, by Israel.” There is something to be said for reliability. When the president hoped that farmers could “have fun” with the new tariffs being put into place, the American Soybean Council bitterly responded that “Farmers are frustrated. Tariffs are not something to take lightly and ‘have fun’ with. Not only do they hit our family businesses squarely in the wallet, but they rock a core tenet on which our trading relationships are built, and that is reliability. Being able to reliably supply a quality product to them consistently.” The markets do not appreciate unpredictability, as a glance at the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for the United States suggests, and there is similarly something to be said for reliability in the foreign policy arena as well.
China has always stressed its role as a “reliable long-term partner of fellow developing countries” through Belt and Road cooperation, the multilateral Global Development Initiative, and other measures meant to underscore its nature as a “calm and stable” actor in international affairs. Russia is less able to pull off this trick, being such a nefarious actor on the world scene, but it has its own easily defined core interests and a negotiating strategy inherited from the Soviet Union that is eminently straightforward. As Kamil Galeev has put it, “First thing you need to know is that the post-Soviets never take the interests, or position of the other side remotely into their consideration. They just set their own agenda (‘what we want’) and try to impose it onto the other side, forcefully. That is their plan A. And they never have a plan B in case plan A goes wrong. (That is the second thing you need to understand about the post-Soviet strategising).” At least you know where you stand.
Due to the constant seesawing of political power in the United States, and the seemingly intentionally erratic approach adopted by the current administration in matters like tariffs — which are, depending on the day or the hour, in effect or suspended, and either short-term measures designed to force concessions, or long-term measures designed to raise revenue and/or stimulate industry and/or protect vital economic sectors and/or create some manner of neo-mercantilist autarky — other international actors (state and non-state) can have little idea what we believe or what we are likely to do at any given moment or in the relatively near future. Are we isolationists who have given up neocon warmongering for good, or are we preparing for a colossal, earth-shattering geopolitical confrontation with China? Are we providing a nuclear umbrella to NATO members, or are we pursuing an “AmerExit” or “NATexit” like certain senators and congressmen and Elon Musk have been demanding? “It depends” is definitely an answer. It is not always a good one. (RELATED: Geoeconomics in the Service of Geopolitics)
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, warned that the devil “always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking about which is the worst. You see why, of course? He relies upon your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.” Schismogenesis is part of the human condition, and oppositional politics is addictive for a reason, but there are still occasions when errors really do come in pairs of opposites, when the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, and when “reactive gullibility and fact-free contrarianism” combine to produce perverse outcomes. We should, all of us, learn to recognize those occasions.
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