How labelling uses identity over issues to polarise voters
The fight for the future from early humans to TikTok. It's time to take The Sniff Test.
Out of Asia
Chinese scientists and a few supporters in the West have reinvigorated the debate about the origin of humans. They claim that Asians developed apart from Africans. At the same time, the Chinese government claims that Asia must be ruled by Asians, for which read Beijing.
A theory formed from digging up a skull and creating a timeline for human history is pure conjecture. That’s good as it is how knowledge is created. But only after testing and proof. More fossils complicate the picture.
The out of Africa theory was based on the earliest human remains being found there. If an older bone turns up elsewhere maybe that is the cradle of humanity. Until someone finds an earlier one.
Received wisdom was that homo sapiens evolved in Africa 200-300,000 years ago and migrated outwards about 80,000 years ago. A skull found in China was dated to 260,000 years ago. This does not mean we’re all Asian.
Geneticists align modern DNA with that of early humans. The vast majority is the same as found in African specimens. But these are relatively young because DNA doesn’t preserve well in heat. The theory is if we align with 20,000 year old Africans, we’re African.
What is likely is that early humans left Africa in waves over 100,000s of years. They interbred with other members of the homo species and continued migrating. Some wandered back into Africa.
What is unlikely is that two separate species evolved around the same time, migrated and never met. But you can cling to this belief in the absence of definitive proof, such as the lack of DNA from ancient Chinese remains. This is appealing if you are trying to split world opinion in two.
The Evils of Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the art of labelling. For flora and fauna we use Latin to confer an air of authority on a system devised before Darwin’s Origin of Species. Carl Linnaeus, who invented the labels, also invented scientific racism. He distinguished between humans based on location.
American humans were red skinned, European white, African dark and Asian yellow. Linnaeus made up characteristics for each, which are nonsense. He also embedded the idea that sub-species can be separated and labelled.
Members of a species breed and blend with each other. Distinctions between sub species become meaningless, but dangerous as labels. People will always resist alien cultures, but conflating culture and race widens the gap.
Imagine your family tree going back to the 11th Century. You have enough ancestors to match the population of Europe 1,000 years ago. Mathematically every European today has the same ancestry. Keep going back and you reach the same conclusion about everyone in the world.
Taxonomy is used in lots of places. Numbers, viruses and library cards are three examples. Data is labelled in order to be retrieved.
Whoever labels the data has power. This is Google but increasingly it is AI models. Supervised models use labels provided by humans. Unsupervised ones create their own classifications. The more data you control, the more labels you create and the more power you exercise.
A Once in a Century Opportunity
It’s worth repeating that TikTok is not being banned in the US. Its owner, ByteDance, must sell to US shareholders. The reasoning is simple.
TikTok has access to private data of US citizens that is sent to the Chinese Communist Party. The party will have hacked other databases and got much of this information already. This is not the big deal.
Taylor Swift memes circulate in equal measure across different social media apps. Polarising content is ten times more common on TikTok. This is according to Matt Pottinger, former US Deputy National Security Advisor and chair of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His book Boiling Moat is about the steps required to defend Taiwan today.
China was neutral towards Israel until the October 7 attacks. Then sensing an opportunity to disrupt the West, its rhetoric swung antisemitic, along with its technology tools. The TikTok algorithm was reprogrammed to push pro-Palestinian propaganda.
This is the tip of the iceberg of polarising content. The US State Department estimates that China spends more than Putin on pro-Russian propaganda. The illiberal powers ally and sense a once in a century opportunity to change the global axis of power.
Around a third of TikTok users say they get news from the platform and a quarter of Americans under 30 say it’s their primary news source. That number has tripled since 2020. Pottinger says this is akin to having the Nazis publish the newspapers during World War II.
There is little doubt this is happening. Communist Party documents detail the policy of polarisation by spreading chaos. The People’s Daily explains this means through short-form social media videos. The question is why be brazen when you know the West is watching?
The Complicity of Minority
In 2022, the Chinese crypto company MineOne bought land adjacent to a nuclear missile site in Wyoming. It didn’t report it and no one noticed, until a member of the public tipped off the authorities. President Biden ordered MineOne’s removal on Monday.
In 2020 Trump banned TikTok but was overruled in court. Sentiment in Washington turned against ByteDance after the 2023 shooting down of a spy balloon. That did not stop furious lobbying to preserve Chinese ownership of the US version of TikTok. This was funded by Americans who are among the largest ByteDance shareholders.
The Supreme Court may yet overturn the TikTok ruling. The grounds would be the First Amendment right to free speech. But users will still be able to post videos and are not being restricted. The First Amendment argument favours a sale because anti-Chinese and pro-Israeli content would be allowed.
US politics is slow-moving. The separation of powers, between president, parliament and judges, entrenches minority rights. Two Senators come from every state regardless of population. Nine justices determine the constitutionality of any law challenged by losers in the lower courts. All it requires is for four judges to accept the case.
Minority opinion is easy to capture. Bombarding 170 million Americans on TikTok with videos about Israeli cruelty has not changed US policy. Lobbying a senator to filibuster a bill is simple and inexpensive.
The short-term electoral cycle means that issues are parked while lobbyists go to work. The media moves the public to other issues. To hasten change, Presidents resort to executive orders, especially in the first 100 days when support is strongest. These are subject to judicial review.
By my count MineOne was Biden’s 139th executive order. This makes him the least active of the last seven presidents despite his initial burst. It might be argued that inactivity emboldens China, or that not much has been happening. I doubt the latter.
Useful Idiots
Outside of professional politics, China has use of what Lenin called useful idiots. These are sympathisers within a country campaigning on behalf of foreign powers. Many do so unwittingly.
In the early 2000s I met with a new type of stock exchange investor. Two earnest ladies from the asset manager Henderson came to quiz me about Standard Chartered’s African policy. After bombarding the bank they were no longer receiving a response and I was a well-known seller of the shares. My reasoning had nothing to do with mining in Angola.
The investors wanted to know whether the bank’s management was socially responsible. My reply did not satisfy them. I noted they were more responsible than the Bank of China who would make the loans if Standard Chartered didn’t. With hindsight, this was near the beginning of the West’s acquiescence in China’s hoovering up critical raw materials.
Students have long been a source of useful idiots. Naïve and well-intentioned, they are easily infiltrated and have time to protest. They are also big consumers of TikTok content.
Diverse Western populations, free speech and security services asleep at the wheel, all make China’s job of dividing Western opinion easier. Against that backdrop it sees no reason to hide its intentions.
Left and Right
Polarisation requires everything to be labelled and split between for and against. The politics of soundbites, 140 character limits and the rise of soft-brained university professors enabled this. If you want a boring debate spend it arguing about what words mean. Political debate is a pedant’s paradise.
Ian Hislop is a useful idiot with a national platform on the BBC show Have I Got News for You. Hislop’s go-to accusation is hypocrisy, by which he means changing your mind. Where his magazine Private Eye used to expose charlatans such as Robert Maxwell, it now trawls databases looking for ancient statements that contradict what a person says today.
Left and right wing are among the worst labels. In principle they mean a Labour and a Conservative voter. In the media, a left winger has social conscious and loves the NHS, while a right winger hates immigrants.
Last week the Dover MP Natalie Elphicke defected to Labour. She called out the government’s failure to “stop the boats”. That’s a rabid right-winger in Hislop’s eyes. He used Friday’s show to berate Starmer for accepting the defection.
Limiting immigration has strong support in working class areas. These are the people whose jobs are most at risk from cheap labour. Mostly men in manual jobs, as women have the cushion of state employment. 76% of roles in both teaching and the NHS employ females.
Labour has long seen itself as the champion of minorities. It is a coalition of interests with an axe to grind. This is regardless of conflicting aims, such as antisemite Muslims and LBGTQ+ lobbies.
(Antisemite is mislabelling as semitic people include both Jews and Arabs.)
The party is run by a metropolitan elite that brushes aside contradictions and the opinions of its northern working supporters. This is why it only gets into government after a period of incompetence by the Conservative party. Five prime ministers in eight years qualifies.
Absolute Power Corrupts
All governments are corrupted by uninterrupted periods of power. The New York Post greeted the end of Bill Blasio’s reign as mayor with the headline “Good riddance to NYC’s worst mayor ever”. But the Democrat Mayor Putz was twice elected in the city.
Blasio lived in enough of a bubble that he stood for President. This was at a time when my local park in Manhattan was fenced off to protect the mayor’s residence from protestors. Blasio stood aside after garnering 0.1% of nationwide Democratic support.
Sadiq Khan was re-elected for a third term as London’s mayor. His share of the vote rose even as turnout fell. The policies of the 13 candidates had little between them, other than Khan’s anti-traffic agenda. This was supposed to be contentious but tribal labels ensured Khan a comfortable win. He looks like he can be in power as long as he chooses.
The definition of democracy is the ability to kick bad actors out. You cannot do this in China, Russia, or Iran. This gives them stability as trade and investment partners for the many countries wanting to remain neutral between East and West. The US and Europe must double down on the carrot as well as the stick to win the new Cold War.
Labelling groups of people and making arbitrary divisions into left or right centralises power. When politicians rely more on tribal identity than policy then they act with impunity. There’s no difference to Xi dividing citizens into for or against the regime. Ignoring that opinions are as blurred as genetic makeup is the root cause of polarisation.
Exploiting this is a core tenet of Chinese policy. President Xi is on record saying this and caught on camera repeating it to Putin. The useful idiots labelling everyone are doing the dictators’ work for them. Hanging out on TikTok makes this worse.