Andrew Yang has spent the past several weeks ramping up his Forward Party’s 2024 presidential campaign, whether he admits it or not. And strategically, at least, this is to his credit; for some inexplicable reason, he seems to be the only third party candidate who’s noticed that if you are going to make this kind of campaign work, you need to launch it well before the major party launches have captured all of the media attention. Unfortunately, however, there’s nothing remotely innovative or subversive about Yang’s warmed-over Centrism 3.0 politics; if you don’t believe me, just look at the report he shared this morning.

You probably saw the paper that Yang has posted, The Hidden Tribes in America, back in 2018; for a few ridiculous weeks back then, centrists were enthusiastically passing it around like some kind of scientific breakthrough and even squishy liberals at Vox were rolling their eyes at it. I’m not going to spend much time relitigating it today even though Yang is trying to relive the magic, but there’s one particular kind of argument Hidden Tribes makes that I always found particularly ridiculous, and since it’s exactly the one Yang’s promoting I thought it worth taking a look.

The thing I find so funny about this is that if you divide Americans into seven distinct ideological groups, and then you call what one of those groups believe “political correctness”, then yes: obviously the chart is going to end up looking something like this!

Hidden Tribes has done the NFL equivalent of dividing fans up by which NFC East team they support, and then proving that Eagles fans are out-of-step extremists with a chart like this:

The game Yang and Hidden Tribes are playing here is so cartoonishly meaningless that it’s hard to believe this is what they are actually doing, but just look at the text. Here’s how they did it:

1. The authors looked at how Americans answered “a subset of 58 core belief and behavioral questions” (p.5)

2. If your answers indicated that you “reject traditional cources of authority and privilege and focus on rectifying historical injustices” — that is, if you are interested in what most people call “political correctness” — then they called you a “Progressive Activist” (p.11)

3. Then, they forgot that they did (2), looked at this group of people who were mysteriously tagged as “Progressive Activists” for some reason, did some extremely sophisticated data crunching, and discovered that this group of people seem to really approve of political correctness!

There is of course some noise in this data, which is why Progressive opposition to PC is around 30% rather than 0%, but this is obviously just emerging from ambiguities over what political correctness means. Hidden Tribes could save this finding from absolute tautology by creating a more rigorous definition of PC for respondents, or by deriving views on PC from the rest of the data; but I don’t think one can look at the graph they’ve presented here and pretend that analytical rigor is what they’re actually interested in.