Groupthink in Tinseltown

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

About 12 to 15 years ago, I did a bunch of speaking events in Southern California. Book tours, after-dinner right-wing funny guy gigs, luncheon think tank-y panels, whatever.

 

It was then that I came to believe that upscale, ideologically committed Southern California conservative Republicans are a funny species of conservative. Homo conservativus californianus australis, or Southern California conservative Republican, is closely related to a species I know much better: Homo republicanus conservativus novae-yorcensis or perhaps Homo sapiens republicanus conservativus gothamensis. 

 

As with the Asian elephant and African elephant, the similarities are obvious while the differences are subtle. First, both are elephants. And they both have long memories, especially for grievances. The differences have to do with their habitat. Asian elephants, like New Yorkers, live in much closer proximity to humans. This has garnered them a reputation for being more dangerous, even though that might not be actually true. It’s just that there are more opportunities for conflict with elephants when you’re more likely to bump into them. Meanwhile, African elephants are bigger and stronger, and in a sense, healthier. But because they tend to live further away from human populations, violent interactions are less common. At a distance, they seem more docile and peaceable. But the reality is the African ones are actually more volatile if you cross them.

 

Another similarity between SoCal and NYC right-wingers is the understandable sense that they are surrounded, because they are. As a result, they fall into small groups where that feeling is both alleviated and intensified simultaneously. That’s what happens when you go from “I’m alone” to “we’re alone.”

 

This tendency is much more pronounced, in my experience, with the California crowd. I’ll give you an example. When I did those swings through L.A., Orange County, etc., at almost every event, someone would come up to me and say some version of “It would be so great if the L.A. Times ran your column, but they’d never do that!”

 

This would then put me in the uncomfortable position of having to tell them, “Actually, I’ve been an L.A. Times columnist for years.” I’d even point out one of the highlights of my career: Barbra Streisand canceled her subscription to the LAT in protest.

 

The responses varied, from very awkward apologies to shock to laughter. But the explanation was always the same, “I stopped reading that paper years ago.”

 

I never had that kind of experience with New Yorkers and the New York Post, which also carried my column, in part because republicanus conservativus gothamensis lives on a steady diet of Gotham’s paper of record. New York is also more of a media melting pot than Southern California.

 

There are other differences between Southern California right-wingers and their New York cousins, beyond the greater prevalence of vitamin D deficiencies among denizens of the Big Apple. The children and grandchildren of Goldwater’s “little old ladies in tennis shoes” inherited more of the paranoid style. I remember one lady who picked me up in a luxury sedan at the airport for a lunch talk—a very successful lawyer, if memory serves. She explained to me that one of the major campuses of UCLA or USC was now fully compliant and subservient to Sharia law. “They’ve gone full Sharia,” I remember her saying.

 

Not wanting to be rude, I mumbled dryly, “Huh, I hadn’t heard that. I kinda feel like that should be bigger news.”

 

I bring this up to make two points, one about insiders and one about outsiders.

 

How groupthink happens.

 

The conventional wisdom is that ideological polarization is the result of “the Big Sort.” Like-minded people moving to live among like-minded people. But Yoni Appelbaum makes a persuasive case in his book, Stuck, that this gets the causality backward. We aren’t becoming ideologically polarized because people are moving, but because they aren’t. “The problem isn’t that we’re sorting ourselves out; it’s that we’ve ceased to mix ourselves together,” he writes.

 

Not everything about the Big Sort thesis is wrong, though. We do self-sort, but locally, and virtually in digital spaces. In these small spaces, the pressures of conformity push us to more extreme positions. As Cass Sunstein famously put it in “The Law of Group Polarization,” deliberation within subgroups tends to push members “toward a more extreme point.” 

 

Think about it this way. If you belong to an ideological niche group—climate activists, gun controllers, gun rights enthusiasts, Christian nationalists, atheists, whatever—and you start regularly going to meetings with like-minded people, the undertow of the conversation is going to pull you to a more intense version of your beliefs. Obviously, there are counterexamples. Sometimes facing that kind of groupthink elicits the desire to rebel and quit altogether. But these examples tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

This is where groupthink comes from. Pick almost any institution or issue where you think groupthink exists: faculty departments in higher education, the mainstream media, right-wing media, left-wing media, philanthropy, boutique intellectual or political ghettos, sports or celebrity fan clubs. First of all, gatekeeper functions prevent outsiders from even getting in the door. If you’re a laissez-faire free market devotee, American Compass or Bernie Sanders’ Senate office is probably not going to hire you. But let’s say your commitment to free market principles is weak and your curiosity in alternative economic theories is strong. You might get hired, but very quickly whatever sympathy you have for the free market will be discouraged while your curiosity in statism rewarded.

 

Second, there’s self-selection. A few agnostics and atheists, out of intellectual curiosity, might be interested in attending a Bible study group, but most would simply say, “That’s not for me.” The person who thinks queer theory is stupid isn’t going to apply for the faculty position in queer studies.

 

Third, there’s status-seeking. Most people who join an affinity group seek to stand out according to that affinity. A New York Jets fan club rewards people for things like their commitment to the Jets, their knowledge of the Jets, and their attendance record at Jets tailgates and games. Ideologically committed groups reward those who sacrifice for the cause and don’t waver. Hating the enemy group is celebrated. The guy who says “the socialists make a good point” at a libertarian meetup does not often rise to the top of the pecking order. The dude who hates the socialists more than anyone else might.

 

All of these dynamics are at play in organizations and institutions, but they are also at play in the virtual tribes that increasingly define our political culture. In other words, this stuff happens inside Fox News or MS NOW, but it also happens with, and among, their audiences. The latter reinforces the former and the former rewards the latter. You can see such dynamics form like weather fronts on social media any day of the week.

 

The view from the outside in.

 

Then there’s what we might call out-groupthink. Over my 20 years at National Review there were countless times when progressive journalists and academics offered theories of what the thinking inside National Review was. I can’t remember a single time when I thought, “Wow, they nailed it.” I’m not saying nobody ever had a theory or insight of any merit. Some folks did actual reporting that supported their claims. But the ability of outsiders to guess at the motives and internal debates was always weighed down or distorted by the assumptions of the person on the dry side of the fishbowl.

 

I got to thinking about all this because of the rush to claim “they” stole the election from Spencer Pratt. I wanted Pratt to win, though perhaps not quite as fervently as some. L.A.—and California—desperately needs to have the Democrats’ monopoly broken up. Pratt wouldn’t be my first choice, and it’s quite possible that if elected he would fail so spectacularly as mayor it would set back the cause of competitive politics in California. But I thought it would be worth the risk.

 

It didn’t happen. Pratt ran an impressive race, but not so impressive he could overcome the massive headwinds of a wildly left-wing city. His final tally lined up with his poll numbers pretty well. The surprise was Nithya Raman’s overperformance, specifically her late pickup in mail-in votes.

 

Now, I think the way California handles elections is a scandal—a scandal of incompetence and self-indulgence, not a scandal of corruption.

 

Regardless, both the incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and left-wing firebrand Nithya Raman would have much preferred a runoff with Pratt than another Democrat. The conspiracy theories about how “they” stole the election gloss over this point. So who is “they”? If it’s the establishment controlled by Bass, “they” screwed up. If it was Raman, “they” had to have done it without the help of the people running the city government—or the state government (Steve Hilton, the GOP candidate for governor, made the runoff). That doesn’t mean a “they” couldn’t have done it. It sounds like the Democratic Socialists of America—Raman’s faction—may have harvested ballots, which is why she got so many mail-in votes. But as far as I can tell, that’s not illegal in L.A. (even if it should be). So, it’s not a conspiracy to steal the election in any legal sense. It was merely a successful effort to win.

 

But from the outside, it’s pretty easy to see what you want to see and to attribute a bad outcome to an undifferentiated overclass called “they.”

 

And the easiest place to get this perspective is from outside L.A. Pratt had enormous buzz on social media and Fox News. Great for him. But how many people caught up in the frenzy were actual registered voters in the City of Los Angeles? Not that many. Or not that many more than the polls indicated.

 

There are much better examples of out-groupthink than this, but this is the one people are talking about. And it will do.

 

It’s worth noting that out-groupthink is where most conspiracy theories come from, by people looking from the outside in. These people construct their cases backward, starting with conclusions about results they don’t like and ascribing motives that fit their predetermined narrative. That’s what Rep. Thomas Massie did this week with fevered antisemitic B.S. about the tragic attack on the USS Liberty, and what Candace Owens does about pretty much everything. She’s the antimatter universe version of Jerry Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo, who sees antisemites behind every bad outcome. “They don’t just overcook a hamburger, Jerry.” Owens sees semites the same way. They don’t just land men on the moon, Jerry.

 

Not all wrong or outlandish theories become full-blown conspiracy theories. But almost all such theories start from a position of radical distrust. If you think “they” have sinister motives, plausible explanations that don’t involve evil intentions seem less plausible. Occam’s razor gets dull, and the most likely explanation seems like an exercise in naivete, giving the bad guys the benefit of the doubt.

 

And giving the bad guys the benefit of the doubt is what gets you kicked out of your self-selected clubs.