The disconnect is so large. What the author calls mere tribalism is freighted and begs the question in regard to his example of US coastal and european elites having more in common with each other than their fellow "working stiff" citizens. What I think he misses is that these elites aren't elite, and the popular/ist reaction to them is to being made subjects of technocrats who always seem to be working for the good of someone else far away but mostly self-dealing to their own benefit.

The reason these elites are not in fact elite is their (our?) advantage is mediated by technology, and so it doesn't matter whether it's social media or muskets, without legitimacy, there is no elite, just a crumbling power vaccum sustained by the control of tech. The hatred we expereince is from the impostor syndrome that comes from the precariousness of this percieved elite status.

People who percieve themselves as having been elevated from ignorance and poverty have unlimited cruelty for others who "held them back," and who they "left behind," and I would argue that's the crux, as there's almost no way to convince them they have been seduced and decieved as a means to unleash and harness that very cruelty for political ends. If you feel justified in being cruel to the ignorant and that they are deserving of humiliation, I am sorry to have to be the one to say, you are the mark.

The author chalks up the social tension Haidt identifies as the effect of neutral and inevitable change, but to me that belief is a kind of affectation. The attitude of, "this is change, learn to cope or be left behind," is the newly bourgois version of "let them eat cake," and Haidt I think identifies that the consequences are looking similar.

In general we can bet that all people will align to whatever they percieve to be power. The notion of change is presented as inevitable, and so aligning to it seems like aligning to the power of the universe and the prevailing forces of history. The notion of history as progress iterates the logic of that idea. But what undermines the legitimacy of the people who percieve each other as an elite, installed and annointed by the inevitable forces of historical progress, is that they exist over a substrate of stability, built for them, and provided to them by people who have invested themselves and their identities in it.

There is an appealing argument to be made that the working stiffs whose parents invested lives to build homes, communities, and institutions so that their children could thrive, have a more persuasively legitimate claim to the fruits of that culture and society than those who identify as a new elite and use tech to deconstruct and redistribute them to the arbitrary and placeless coalitions they assemble to support themselves. The counter to this is that there is only one humanity, which even seems compassionate, until it clicks that a single humanity and shared interdependent planet reduces to a zero-sum power struggle to prevail in the flow of progressive history, with no truth or rules, and in whose pursuit all things are justified.

The explanation for why things are so irreconcilable is not that one side is basically stupid, but this author seems to have fallen for that.