The friend / enemy distinction explains a lot about politics.

It gives you a heightened sense of the good things your friends do, and the bad things your enemies do.

It also makes you blind to the bad things your friends do, and the good things your enemies do.

It's like on West World, when the robots see something from the real world: "that doesn't look like anything to me"

Much like the placebo effect, being aware of this mechanism doesn't really do much to change how it affects you.

So, who is your friend and who is your enemy?

You don't know. I mean, you really don't.

What you do is you make little tests to distinguish friend from enemy. If someone passes the test, they're a friend. If they don't, they're an enemy.

Your brain isn't very sophisticated about this. If someone passes some tests and fails others, they're probably an enemy.

From the outside, someone operating according to the friend / enemy distinction can appear inconsistent, even hypocritical. They fall on one side of the line on principle, and on the other side of the line because they're a partisan hack.

From the outside, hypocrisy is easier to spot because you have a heightened sense of the bad things your enemies do.

From the inside, hypocrisy is harder to spot because you are blind to the bad things your friends do.

Of course, this isn't really hypocrisy. It's all friend / enemy distinctions, all the way down.

Sometimes the harshest reactions are reserved for supposed friends who fail a friend / enemy test. You aren't habituated to seeing them as an enemy so it can feel like BETRAYAL.

A good example would be journalists like Glenn Greenwald or Michael Tracey. They are extremely skilled at critiques that fall just outside of the line for many on the left. Which garners them an inordinate amount of hatred from the left (undeserved, in my opinion).

The friend / enemy distinction is not "both sides". It isn't a good or a bad thing, it just is. It's human nature, or political human nature at least.