Here is a species of group phenomena that can be called “oppositionists”. These are a group of people or organizations (or, for that matter, higher mammals) who compete with one another but do so within a set of rules that are useful for furthering their individual interests. A good example of oppositionists are gladiators. They fight with one another and may even kill one another, but they have a guild whereby they mutually train or from which they receive common services such as food, shelter and medical attention. We are familiar with such groups in the movies “Spartacus” and “Gladiator”. It is strange to contemplate how people out to kill one another can bond with one another emotionally, but there you are. The consequence of being practical and also the practice of admiring the heroism of one another even if pitted against one another as deadly foes. The same could be said of other deviant groups. Prostitutes compete with one another and will trick one another but they may share with one another the hazards of their work and so train another in the skills that allow them to survive in that endeavor. They are all in the same boat. The same is true with non deviant groups. Baseball teams compete with one another under the rules of the league and baseball players honor one another’s service as they compete on the field and are traded to different teams when those holding their contracts may do. A Red Sox player won’t hate the Yankees even if the fans feign to do so so as to gin up team rivalry. After all, most players will easily adjust to the new team to which they have been traded. Johnny Mize moved from the New York Giants to the Yankees and Johnny Damion from the Red Sox to the Yankees. Loyalty to the profession and to money rather than the competition provides real loyalty and motivation.
Now it gets a bit more complicated. What happens when people or organizations develop so that they become more unequal in their competitions? One thing that can happen is that a ranking can be established within the groups. People in amateur sports can compete only within Division I or II or III schools. Baseball teams will decide whether they are in competition to win a Pennant and so pay extra money to players so as to be that competitive to be a winner or might even acquire a player late in the season so as have an additional push to a championship, while other teams of the second rank will not expend resources but satisfy their fans by having a few good weeks of good performance before falling into the pack and so making their money by not buying players but not having very many championships. The difference of the two strategies seems to be in whether the team is in a big market area. The Yankees have enough money to compete while San Diego does not, but that is not always the case. The Cubs should compete every year because Chicago is a big market team but it does not compete and Tampa Bay is competitive even though it is in a small market. The owners decide which strategy to follow.
Business competitors also engage in rankings. Adam Smith had imagined that individual businesses were in competition with one another, one or more of them going under because they did not produce better goods at lower prices than the competitor, a great boon to the system as a whole and miraculous because it happened without external control as to values or government. That is not the way it works when there are bigger companies and then again smaller ones. Amazon can compete with Walmart but smaller suppliers do better by making arrangements to sell their wares to one or the other rather than compete as boutique dealers in books or blouses by arranging to use their website or outlet so as to make out some business and perhaps do very well in these dependent venues. Both can buy cheap goods from China. Even nations engage in ranking. Great powers will view with one another, following Grotius’ idea that every nation was sovereign, beholden only to itself, each taking on all comers but deciding which nation was an ally and which an enemy, but the truth of the matter is that small nations rely on some larger regional or world power to provide them with the services they need to further their relatively meager economic and political and organizational resources. At the moment, Haiti needs the United States to provide some modicum of government for its country, and Grenada and Antigua are barely nations, just tourist destinations which the United States supports even though those nations have flags at the United Nations. Luxembourg and Monaco are conveniences as I daresay is also the case of Singapore and of what we now consider to the United States as the nuisance of the Northern Triangle because the countries are so badly run that their people are walking with their feet to get to the United States.
There is an alternative to ranking when some members of an oppositionist group include relatively weaker and stronger members. People and groups decide to withhold competition or provide other avenues to exercise influence than through direct competition. Collective bargaining is a good example. Workers could compete with one another in wrangling wages from their employees, but that was a bad bargain because the employer did not have to take any particular applicant to be an employee while the potential employer pretty much had to take the job so as to survive. So the employee got poor wages and working conditions or left unemployed. John Locke was wrong to think that a free labor contract was not slavery because life was not endangered. Having to contract at such uneven bargaining terms did impact matters of life and death. But employers thought it unnatural for competitor employees to bind together in unions that would allow their bargaining to make a difference for the employers. The workers could strike and disrupt the enterprise.
Another form of non-cooperation in an oppositionist organization takes place in the United States Senate. The usual way for the Senate to conduct itself is for each of the elected leaders to act as independent actors pursuing each of their own interests and making coalitions with other members so as to further their legislative agenda, whether for their constituents or their party or for the nation. At the moment however, and that has been the case for almost a decade, the Senate has largely been unable to get major pieces of legislation through because the republicans, particularly by Mitch McConnell, has thwarted collective action by refusing to corporate with any Democratic initiative, notorious for having refused to even allow Merrick Garland to be put up to a vote as a Supreme Court Justice. Many Liberal commentators regard this refusal to cooperate with a rival collection of oppositionists as somehow unfair, not in keeping with the customs and usages of the Senate, which is reminiscent of what occurred when industrial leaders thought it unfair or otherwise unnatural for unionists to engage in collective bargaining. But Sen. Mc Connell can do what he wants to do as can the body of the Senate as to how to manage the combination of cooperation and conflict that go on in any oppositionist body. The reasons for the stalemate of Congress has to do with the fact that the numbers of Senators within the body are so close in number that it is useful to each side to see and organize its caucus as unanimous, and that is certainly the case at the moment given that there is a fifty fifty tie. Resolving the issue of an obdurate faction within the Congress will be alleviated depending perhaps on breaking the filibuster or using resolutions around the filibuster. It is more certainly to be dealt with by having one or another of the two parties having a considerable majority, in which case members of both parties will be free to act more independently and for the body as a whole to adopt more of its legislative agenda
The social structure of oppositionists is not limited to large scale economic and political issues. The same holds for matters of personal life. Families, for example, are oppositionist when parents cooperate with one another in providing service such as babysitting or child care for one another’s children, part of the common experience of parenthood, every parent minding every other parent who is playing outside an apartment building, but also competitive with one another in that they view for children to outdo one another, to display themselves advantageously, in school, sports or popular esteem, the parent taking pride in the distinctive advantages and skills of their offspring. Parents are all in the same boat even if as separate boaters every child wants to be the one who at least gets a trophy cup for trying hard. Or at least that is the case in Western and some Asian societies, while anthropologists suggest that some cultures, such as the Navaho, do not share that double situation and so are indeed very different from the mainstream in that competitiveness is not seen as a virtue.
Here is another case in which oppositionist structure plays its part in ordinary life. People both compete and cooperate in courtship. Young men will vie with one another to get the favors of a young woman. A number of people can hope to take her out on Friday or Saturday night. Competitors try to be charming and gallant and good conversationalists or offer some peculiar trait or interest that will make the young man stand out. He wants to be an astronomer or else he is good at ballroom dancing or his clothes are particularly spiffy without being too preoccupied with clothes to seem superficial. The young woman finds one or another suitor eventually boring or overly preoccupied and turns to someone else. While all this is going on, however, one suitor will be polite to the other suitors, unlikely to disparage one of them lest it offend the young woman, and may even provide a service for another suitor, as Richard Nixon did when he drove the soon to become wife Pat Ryan to dates with other men, which seems a bit strange, but where it is not outlandish for a young man to inquire of a competing suitor about when a young woman is coming to town and expect an honest answer. Ever so has been the case. Penelope’s suitors to marry her and take over Ithaca did not kill one another while vieing with one another. They just accumulated themselves in the environs so as to see what Penelope would decide, just as Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors were civil to one another while waiting to go off to war and mostly die. The competition, after all, was about a serious matter, whether to marry someone, and yet there were customs about how to conduct this endeavor for the time being when the suitors were just that rather than settled in their decisions, and even after that, so that women could no longer be courted once the person was married. fIt is a very old rule not to covet one’s wife and violating the rules of competition is likely to result in bad or tragic results, though authors tend to blame the women, like Madame Bovary, rather than the male violators, like David for having violated Bathsheba’s marital bond. The postman, for all we know, rings more than twice. The complexity and complications of conflict conjoined with cooperation make up a good deal of the substance of private life, give it its juice and adventure or, on the other hand, the relief of settling down so that a spouse is reliable. Oppositionalism is a part of life for when one is young and willing to put up with the stress of these relationships.
Look to the long view so as to see what is at stake in thinking of oppositionists as behaving so as to satisfy practical demands, such as being polite to fellow suitors of a young lady so as to keep social peace among them and so as to further their other relationships, like being school buddies or friends from the neighborhood. Fifty ears ago, sociologists would have taken a different tack. They would have emphasized communities, which mean sets of people tied together by common norms and values and who interact with one another so as to establish a solidarity that lets them survive discord or outside adversaries, as in a war. Small towns and the Boy Scouts and ethnic groups are communities, as are even the professions, such as law and medicine, because the members of such a group have had similar experiences in being trained and are welded together by their allegiance to being loyal to their clients and honorable to one another, sharing with one another the scalpel, on the one hand, or the brief, on the other. So gladiators had an esprit de corps even if or maybe because they soon will die at one another’s hands. Community also explained that working class members would form a union even if most early unions would lose getting recognition from factory owners and that soldiers would fight so as not to be ashamed of how they acted before their fellow soldiers rather than because of loyalty to nation or ideology or because of the wages paid by the government to their soldiers.
Take the other tack. People do things because each individual does something that will practically advance a person’s interests and so the art of sociology is to figure out what is of interest and how complicated it may be to suit your interest, taking into account the complexity of the social environment. So people like to use toothpaste because it tastes fresh and will be amiable to a rival for a girl friend because both of the young men are on the soccer team, and a nation relies on a nearby great power to protect its homeland from hooligans because what else can they do to further the national interest? That means people are rational rather than primarily emotional and understood by the facts of the circumstances, however complicated they may be, than the forms of solidarity which lets a group survive against adversity. We strip relationships bare by consulting the complexities of self interest. And so it makes a difference if we think that Mitch MacConnell is violating the norms of the Senate and soan object of ridicule when we just think of him as making sense in being obstructionist because it will get him what he wants, which is success in the midterm elections. Think of people as making a kind of sense rather than as, in the common parlance, people are just crazy for having bashed Congress on Jan.6th. They thought Trump won and the wrong should be righted, not just people overcome by the furor of the moment and now sorry to have been carried away. Making people more rational doesn’t make them more nice; it just makes them responsible for their own endeavors and not merely the whims and irrationalities of a cultural moment. Everyone takes sides on whether to see people as members of a community or on their own.