The book is Uncivil Agreement. I conclude,
Consider the persuasive case she builds that citizens’ political behavior is driven primarily by group emotions and tribal loyalty. This would seem to me to support a libertarian view that a better society is one in which most decisions are kept out of the realm of politics altogether. Making good choices is hard enough even for the most rational of centralized decision-makers. If the underlying political behavior is not even rational to begin with, then the prospects for beneficial government intervention must be even more remote.
I thought that the political psychology in her book was very consistent with what I wrote in TLP.
Here is an interview of Mason by Ezra Klein, which struck me as very worth a listen. Neither of them seems to have found that the research moves them in a libertarian direction.
So far, the book still ranks at the top of my list of non-fiction books of the year.
“This would seem to me to support a libertarian view that a better society is one in which most decisions are kept out of the realm of politics altogether.”
To me too. But it won’t. I doubt the idea would ever occur to them, even just to consider and reject.
And judging by other writings by Mason, I don’t think she’s going to be a person who is going to lead us toward lower levels of polarization. Here, for example, is her take on why polarization is mostly the Republicans’ fault:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/28/heres-how-political-science-explains-the-gops-obsession-with-civility/
You start your book review by saying
“In political analysis, it is natural to assume that citizens are rational, so that their political preferences reflect their views on policy. These policy views in turn derive from some combination of self-interest and concern for the general welfare.”
I have not read the book so I have nothing to say about how Mason departs from your view of political analysis. I have a different view of political analysis, one that focuses on politicians —those people that are willing to pay a price for the benefits of having the power of legitimate coercion over others. If we accept government as a necessary condition for a society to survive, then someone must exercise that power. Indeed, once a politician becomes the government, the temptation to use and abuse that power is a problem: in constitutional democracies, to take that risk, citizens are supposed to trust the institutions constraining that power as well as the politicians interested in accessing and enjoying it. In my view, the relevant questions are about how that trust is built, sustained, and eventually destroyed.
Indeed, and I would add that it is important to include within the definition of “politician,” judges, who are largely unconstrained in their official behavior and can deliver their preferred outcomes in their court decisions without respect for the rule of law. We should also consider bureaucrats, especially enforcement officers, to be politicians. They have the freedom to pick and choose which individuals they go after and persecute. The IRS and intelligence agencies have been thoroughly weaponized in this regard. This problem is growing especially damaging now with the rise of the ironically named “antifa” which is a paramilitary wing of a major political party and which can violently attack citizens at any time and any place with impunity afforded by prosecutors and law enforcement officials who choose to take no action against them.
We take a highly complex set of political decisions, and condense it down to a single binary choice. We then stand back and declare that the choices were uninformed, tribal and driven by group emotions. How could they look like anything else?
The actual underlying ideas that attach to a candidate are chaotic, squishy accidents. There was no Donald Trump tribe 4 years ago, and the weird combination of affiliations he is calling on today won’t define a tribe for very long after he goes away.
I still say the most under-rated aspect of Trump 2016 campaign run was his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare while being a Midwest Democrat on free trade. His campaign got smaller percentage than Romney against a weaker opponent but he got the right voters for the electoral college.
Probably several points here:
1) For whatever reason, economic growth and especially real wages have not increased since 2000 so we are the middle of a very grumpy 4% unemployment economy. (Both labor and capital are upset at the growing labor shortage.)
2) I still say the biggest problem with Ayn Rand libertarianism is the Jon Galts become the Taggarts real quickly. Hasn’t Mark Zuckenberg suddenly become a global important political player with a private sector company?
3) Another piece adding to ‘grumpiness’ is the decline of family formation which tends to make families more religious, community oriented and conservative. But the modern global economy is slowing this down. (Remember the US is behind similar nations on later marriage and less fertility.)
4) Politically we are lot closer to the Gilded era than any other era. This division is not new.
5) And if we live a global economy that leads a lot to global and national coordination.
6) And can we accept the high trust and every succeeds economy in the immediate WW2 was the historical outlier and came about:
6a) Low labor supply from WW2, defined sex discrimination and the Depression baby bust.
6b) Other similar nations were bombed out and could not compete economically for a generation.
6c) We had a great victory in WW2 and facing an existential enemy, the Soviet Union. And with a great enemy, we did see some positive change as with WW2 & Cold War, I do wonder if Civil Rights would have been passed.
“This would seem to me to support a libertarian view that a better society is one in which most decisions are kept out of the realm of politics altogether.”
The decision of which decisions to assign to politics is itself inescapably political. So libertarianism or (more realistically, because there aren’t any “libertarian” societies) organizing society on a mostly free-market basis is not a get-out-jail-free card. And assigning a certain kind of decision to the nonpolitical realm does not mean that decisions of that kind do not affect other people.
Discussions of the supposedly “irrational” motivations of people’s political views are usually a waste of time, because it usually turns out that “reason” is assumed, without demonstration (or by citation to some flimsy “study” that came out last week) to dictate whatever political views the speaker holds (and the speaker is almost always on the left).
Are any of those classic social psychology experiments like Tajfel’s results or Robber’s Cave at all believable anymore, after so many others have turned into scandals of one kind or another? Seems pretty unwise to trust any implications or claims based on them without plenty of recent replication.
How exactly did Mason determine what was actually “conservative” and “liberal” policy and what wasn’t, when such things change and are debated vigorously all the time? That’s pretty important when calculating correlations.
There is another possible implication of Mason’s work that is very un-libertarian, which is that it seem entirely plausible that only certain kinds of significant state interventions can stop a Social Failure Mode mechanism from going into pathological runaway chain-reaction, like the meltdown of a nuclear reactor.
For example, conservatives justifiably fear that they and their ideas are being unfairly discriminated against and shut out of all but the very small number of information dissemination sectors they control. That’s one perfectly rational reason to go “tribal” with group solidarity: to arrange a kind of collective defense against culturally dominant entities abusing their power of formation of public opinion to delegitimize conservative interests. A kind of “market failure” in the market for ideas.
Well, one possibility could be to regulate all companies engaging in communication transmission and require them to be “common carriers” that must serve the whole public equally under the principle of free expression and with only those exceptions afforded to the government under the First Amendment, in exchange for immunity from liability (as per section 230 of the CDA).
Another possibility could be to institute minimum political balance quotas for tenured faculty, administrators, and trustees, for any university receiving public funds for any reason, to include research grants or loans to students. Just like lawyers must maintain good standing with their state bar association, academics and journalists under the quota must maintain good standing with the state branch of the party with which they affiliate.
And the Supreme Court and all subordinate courts could be reformed into bipartisan commissions with equal representation from both parties and in which no decision of Constitutional importance could be made without broad, bipartisan consensus.
These and other similar steps help to diffuse the high stakes of the current situation that are the real drivers of polarization and so-called ‘irrational tribalism’. But they are not very ‘libertarian’ (though the one about making private companies serve under a free expression standard is, I suppose, debatable.)
In the past, liberals and even prominent libertarians argued that only a hopefully temporary but certainly intense program of state intervention could break the back and spirit of bad cultural patterns of oppression and prejudice. If one buys that logic for what was necessary then, then one should adopt it again for now.
Still chewing on your review. Will have to read the book. But one consideration is that given group loyalties, electoral systems that accomodate polarization should be preferable to winner-take-all systems that do not. Israel and the Netherlands, have closed-party list proportional representation systems in which elections are carried out using ‘pure’ proportional representation, with the votes tallied on a national level before assigning seats to parties. Adopting this system would be a huge improvement for the US given its lunatic congressional gerrymandering system. It would also force parties to adopt meaningful policy platforms rather than equivocate around the middle. And because these systems do not involve focusing on individual personalities and celebrity, parties would have an incentive to seat competent individuals unlike in the US where local celebrity and pandering are the order of the day.