I am 70 years old and my family — my paternal great-great grandfather and his brothers — all each owned 20-35 slaves and were at least upper middle class in 1860. They operated large farming, gristmills, small general stores and a bank in 1860 Arkansas (verifiable on census and tax records). They joined the “CSA” armed insurrection and fought and killed members of the US Military in an attempt to traitorously rebel against the United States. I knew my grandfather who knew his grandfather so I heard the “thinking” (I think I am being generous to call it thinking) 2nd hand. Admittedly I only heard personal explanation of a mindset from a very small sample — one extended family. But it was authentic and unfiltered.

I have never known how to make sense of it. Mentioned in this article is reference to “group think” which (my interpretation) some political analysts call “identity politics”.

It seems to me “group think” itself has dynamics that I believe anthropologists would assign to centuries of tribal conformity used as a tactic in itself historically necessary for self-preservation.

For myself as a lifelong Texan there are things that, as I see it, my state’s alignment with Donald Trump are mostly whole cloth fantasy. Until I was 10 years old we went back and forth over the Rio Grande with hardly more complication than traveling between Texas and Oklahoma. I’m confident my belief would cause recoil by most Americans. Here goes. I believe if we removed all the “border security” with Mexico and went back to just roughly 500 lime green border patrol pickups and about 1,500 green coated agents (“gringo” was what Americans thought we were being called when Mexicans were saying “green coats”) that immigration numbers and contraband volume (drugs) would be virtually no better or worse than it is today. The fear is mostly “made up”. We used to say, “one ranger one riot” because community standards fortified civility and standards … not money poured into bureaucracy.

I grew up with guns on a ranch and owned/used a coyote rifle starting at age 10. I think the “gun” obsession and the idea of a need for a “good guy with a gun” has very little hard data statical merit. 1960s Texas was only 70 years removed from Indian wars and Wild West (most ranchers I knew were operating more than an hour from nearest telephone let alone police response) and no one dreamed of seeing a holstered pistol in town except on a sheriff deputy or city policeman. Gun rights and “gun carry” emotions have been largely “made up” using fears and subjective feelings — not statistical cold math facts.

It seems to me getting some amount of manufacturing of critical electronics — memory, CPU and GPU chips made on shore or in friendly Western Europe actually reduces a real potential problem. Diversification of power generation seems to me a generally good thing especially for agriculture and manufacturing. My sense is that large language model / big data based algorithms could be misused to influence citizens. Same on cyber security. It seems worthwhile to attempt oversight and investment in high tech. My view is that we are in an era of high velocity unsettling and unpredictable change and that scares people. I’m inclined to think we need to come together with civility, calm and cooperation not polemic demagoguery.

In my idealistic world we would work to transition from “Biden vs Trump” (politics of identity, personality, race, tribe, village, age, gender, celebrity, viral memes, etc.) and to a open-minded, calm, rational discussion of problems and challenges using boring and grueling statistical analysis to decide what even is the problem and what level of priority it should have. Maybe we haven’t progressed much since 1860. If that’s the case machine intelligence can and will exploit the masses with propaganda that shapes thinking in ways Joseph Goebbels could not have dreamed of.