In an interview with Ezra Klein, Obama says,
I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can.
. . .none of us have a monopoly on truth. It admits doubt, in terms of our own perspectives. But if you practice it long enough, at least for me, it actually allows you to not always persuade others, but at least have some solid ground that you can stand on
Neither Klein nor Obama cite Julia Galef’s book, and the rest of the interview is uninteresting.
I don’t see how any politician could ever truly have a scout mindset. To sell a position, you need to pretend you are near-certain in your stance.
This immediately brings to mind Handle’s comment on yesterday’s post.
Despite saying something which sounds pretty scout-like, Obama doesn’t exactly strike me as a scout. You can more or less predict his political positions by looking at the Democratic Party platform.
The scout concept sounds nice, but many of us will probably be fooling ourselves if we consider ourselves scouts. Perhaps this would serve as a useful test: unless you’ve done a 180 on a political position or worldview you once held, you’re a soldier, not a scout. As an example, consider the dramatic change of Dave Rubin after he discussed systemic racism with Larry Elder.
“… Obama doesn’t exactly strike me as a scout.”
That’s because he’s not, and you can predict his positions by looking to the left of the democratic party platform.
Thats simply not true. He was famously late to the party re: gay marriage.
Tim Geitner.
And wasn’t he going to nominate Larry Summers to Fed Chair? Yellen was a compromise.
So many other examples. Really. A lot of “lefty” sites (Naked Capitalism for one) hate him for his conservatism.
LOL! His position on gay marriage was a lie at the time he ran for office. His wasn’t a true 180 degree change- he just stopped lying once he was elected.
It wasnt until 2012 that he came out in favor of marriage.
“Obama doesn’t exactly strike me as a scout.”
The trouble is, like most similar people, he *believes* he is a good scout. This is what I mean that Galef is pushing on an open door.
The question is how does someone like that account for people having *very* different views. Theoretically, perfectly Bayesian scouts with access to the same information shouldn’t disagree *at all*. Well, imperfect humans with different experiences but trying to be good scouts will obviously still disagree, but they will expect the range to be narrow and the issues to be subtle.
But what about people with positions which are *very* far away? What is our insight into the origin of those views? Well, the obvious conclusion is that, while we are open-minded good scouts in the reality-based community, they are bad soldiers, tribal, uneducated, ignorant, superstitious dishonest, bigoted, and so forth. One ends up with a bunch of patronizing and denigrating ‘explanations’ for the *bad* reasons those people believe the *wrong* things they do.
Notice that in the interview they both agree that the Tea Party’s reaction to Obama was ‘racist’. Klein asserts it, in reference to a related passage in Obama’s latest book, in which he tried to explain why he felt he had to bite his tongue for the sake of political expediency, and the psychological cost of doing so.
Talk about some asymmetric insight! This is how the left explains opposition to anything they do. If you knew anything about the Tea Party phenomenon at the time, especially from the inside, how accurate or scout-like do you think this explanation is?
Speaking of asymmetric insight, there’s always this:
See? The trouble with scout mindset is that baked into that cake is this self-contradiction. Being a good scout means you are supposed to be open-minded about different positions, perspectives, and arguments. But if you are being a good scout, then people coming up with wildly different and opposing positions most likely aren’t also good scouts, so their positions are not worthy of such charity, and this naturally leads to these dismissive explanations and defamatory accusations.
Anyone who has been on the non-progressive side of any of out political disputes in the last few decades should be extremely familiar with this kind of treatment, which is not just media spin or political rhetoric but a genuine attitude.
My overall point is that learning about truth is something we do best not on our own as a mental monopoly – especially since it is impossible for many people to make good decisions on who to trust – but dialectically, in a process of competitive collaboration akin to the way that market processes incentivize constant refinement and amelioration of goods and services.
Just an consumers are exposed to a variety of options and have choices in products, judges, jurors, and political audiences get to be exposed to a variety of arguments and decide which ones make the better case.
A good ‘scout’ would presumably reach for the most rational explanation for disagreement, and Obama and Klein here leap right over the most rational explanation (that Tea Partiers don’t understand Keynesian economics) for the most nefarious explanation (racism) they can think of. I don’t think that’s reflective of how a ‘scout’ sees ‘non-scouts.’
I’m not sure what Galef has to say on the matter, but I would think a ‘scout’ would a priori see the most likely explanation for why people have differing opinion is because they are exposed to different information.
You are right, that’s what a hypothetical ‘good scout’ would do, and what they didn’t do. But that’s precisely the issue.
The problem is that most people will rationalize away their own soldier-like beliefs and behaviors and incorrectly believe themselves to be good scouts, “following the science”, being reasonable, weighing the evidence, thinking they are open-minded and in the “reality-based community, whereas it’s always the *other guys* who are just manifesting soldier mindset.
If my team shares a view, that’s not conformity or groupthink, or the result of coercive intimidation for stepping out of line, but just the well-justified expert consensus. If their team shares a view, it’s because they are just being tribal, irrational, and intellectually circling the wagons.
I think the thing to notice is how many people who one can easily and clearly recognize as frequently acting as bad soldiers for progressive views are giving all these favorable interviews to Galef without any controversy, and with a tone of “Well, of course, that’s what we good people already do, unlike all those other people making bad faith arguments. Debate with those people is pointless. Polarization exists because it is *their fault*.”
Look, I’m not making up some potential hypothetical. This is how most of the high status progressives commentators I’ve followed for decades almost all think, speak, and write already.
And all they are going to take away from all this scout-soldier stuff is just another set of words they can use to flatter themselves and dump on their opponents. Well, that’s just par for the course, but what’s more concerning and dangerous is that they will *also* do is to further lower the status of free speech and open debate, and to ratchet up the justification for suppressing ‘dangerous ideas’ and deplatforming the proponents thereof. Well, why not? Soldiers don’t deserve a platform!
I’m a soldier and coincidentally I’m also a hedgehog. No regrets. Prove me wrong.
In some ways it would be better if we all admitted we were soldiers and engaged in pragmatic horse trading of interests until the supply and demand of our political preferences reached some decent enough equilibrium without all the sanctimony.
Of course, sanctimony makes for better soldiers that push their interests even harder.
Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama are ostensible genius policy wonks, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard either of them say a single intellectually interesting thing in 16 collective years in office.
Were they? I know candidates like Tsongas, Mondale, Dukakis, etc., were the wonks. They crashed and burned. Even Hillary Clinton – first row honor student white paper for everything – was the wonk to Obamas “empty suit.” She lost the primary.
Clinton (Bill) was always “I feel your pain” and third way triangulation. Not necessarily wonkish.
Some pretty strange perceptions of “democrats” around here.
That perception of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama was pushed relentlessly by the leftist media, Cow, not people on the right, and, in any case, you missed the word “ostensible”.
The scout vs. soldier idea doesn’t have much appeal to me; perhaps it is because I am a (retired) lawyer, and was steeped in a tradition that the way to get to the truth is to have forceful advocacy on both sides.
Kling downplays the negatives about Obama and accentuates the positives.
Kling downplays the positives about Trump and accentuates the negatives.
Kling’s slogan of “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree” is often very one-sided.
Trump was and is an imbecile. He and the world is in a better place with his social media bans (even if I adamantly oppose them).
If you want to get a true gauge of our hosts charity, wait for his take on DeSantis. He has been eerily quiet.
DeSantis is a completely mainstream elite (Yale undergrad, Harvard law, Navy officer), but he knows how to say F off politely to the MSM, Fauci and the rest of the left.
Donald John Trump is a genius!
Seriously, name calling Trump or any politician that you dislike is not productively adding to this discussion. You are allowed to dislike him. I’m allowed to like him. But this dicussions works better when we raise interesting points.
I really like Ron DeSantis. He’s done an excellent job as Governor of Florida. He has done well combatting some character assassination attempts like the one from 60 minutes. I’d be thrilled to see him as President. I’m not sure if he could win a US wide election. I’m not sure if he would get as much good accomplished as Trump did. I still love hearing Ron DeSantis speak. I love hearing Trump speak.
He’s describing Bryan Caplan’s Ideological Turing Test.
The idea presumably goes back further.
It would have been great if Klein had asked him to, say, put forward Lomborg’s position on Climate Change as well as he could.
But well, giving a question like that to Obama would mean Klein wouldn’t get the next big interview like that.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
-Barack Obama
It’s basically the soothing Morgan Freeman version of Hillary’s Deplorable comments.
Was he wrong?
Sure he was wrong. Dead wrong.
1) Guns I don’t see as an issue and I’ll just skip over it. Gun violence is related to blacks shooting each other with handguns, not rednecks going skeet shooting.
2) Religion is obviously good. Have you read Coming Apart? We should hope they cling to it.
3) People express negative sentiments about low IQ immigrant groups like Hispanics. They are right to do so. They are a net drain on our society and aid the political and cultural opponents of these people.
4) Trade is complicated but at least from their perspective its been a negative for their quality of life. The purpose of politics is to fight for your interests. It’s noteworthy that in the post Trump world both parties basically assume that Chimerica was a mistake.
So yeah, he was dead wrong.
Whether he’s right or wrong, Obama was giving the worst version of the argument those people he described would make, not the best version as he advocates here.
Klein interviewed Galef in 2017 before the book. I had always assumed you knew about her work, considering how sympatico your views are. Otherwise, I would have suggested you follow her long ago.
https://medium.com/@jeremycaney/transcript-icymi-julia-galef-913fb7f8441d
1. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them” As a former Ohioan, I can tell you this is true. My dad lost his job in ’82 and never worked again. I left for college and never looked back.
2. “…and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.” Sound familiar? Hows West Virginia coal mining going?
3. Scapegoating immigrants (and jews) is pretty standard stuff.
Bitter? Ask my mom.
Yup. It’s not that he was wrong. It’s that the statement was a political gaffe in the classic sense. It was dumb to say it out loud, not because it wasn’t true, but because saying it could only hurt him politically. He should have known that. The insults that hurt the most are always the ones that are true.
It’s kind of funny how the people here who are always complaining about how progressives and minorities are offended way too easily are the same ones so shocked and offended by this particular micro-aggression.
The problem is that it isn’t true.
First, you should know that “clinging to religion” is a good thing based on every single metric of social science.
Second, we all know low end immigration has been bad for America, and especially these people. Do you deny it? On what empirical basis?
You know Obama produced a documentary called American Factory about an Ohio factory. What I remember most was that the Chinese workers were basically slaves by any American standard (and I’m not just talking pay, even basic freedoms like where you would live, how you would work, who you would marry…the mass company wedding was freaky to watch). The Chinese were content with it because it was better than the Great Leap Forward, but none of us would consider it a dignified existence. The overwhelming impression I got was that if labor is forced to compete with the entire globe, its inevitable it will be brought down to third world living standards and lose many basic rights.
BTW Greg, how do you respond when people point out what blacks are worthless? Could Obama’s comments not apply 10x to ghetto blacks. They don’t even have to move far away to go where the jobs are, they are right there where they squat on the worlds most valuable real estate and shoot each other. Or have I made a gaffe because the truth hurts the most.
Well, first of all, you haven’t made any kind of political gaffe in the sense we are talking about because, not only are you not a politician, you are entirely anonymous.
Obama didn’t say that clinging to religion was a bad thing. He said it was one of several possible reactions and, I would think, it is the most positive of those he listed. Not that I would assume all religious beliefs are necessarily positive.
American labor is no where near third world standards and it is completely unrealistic to think we can avoid competing with the rest of the world when most big American companies do a huge percentage of their business in other countries. Trump did not bring back the manufacturing jobs he promised to bring back. That was just another con.
You could indeed say that many blacks in the ghetto also cling to guns and/or religion. I don’t know the statistics on religious belief or gun ownership there but my sense is much higher than in the white suburbs but nothing like the 10X in your dystopian fantasies.
“Obama didn’t say that clinging to religion was a bad thing.”
That was the implication. That these people would all vote Democrat if not for their religion (and racism). What’s the Matter with Kansas? and all that.
Trade is a choice. People have debated trade policy since the beginning of time and for most of this nations history. It is a completely legitimate area of public policy for people to be concerned about. We can in fact pass whatever laws we want if we decide to do so as a nation.
I’m fairly certain blacks murder each other with guns at 10x the white suburb rate.
The bottom line is that the sentiment is that these people deserve their fate because they are somehow choosing a bad situation due to a voluntary character flaw endemic to their entire group, and thus their concerns and fate should not be given a second thought or drive policy. I dispute this narrative and its implications.
I further note that the same dismissive attitude is not applied to members of Barack’s political coalition who would be even more deserving of such sentiments given his assumptions. Do blacks not cling to racial grievance? Do they not try to influence government policy to get their fair share?
>—-“The bottom line is that the sentiment is that these people deserve their fate because they are somehow choosing a bad situation due to a voluntary character flaw endemic to their entire group, and thus their concerns and fate should not be given a second thought or drive policy.”
No, that is not what he meant. You are projecting your own ideas about collective guilt and the merits of excluding entire groups from the political process onto him.
Yes, some blacks definitely do cling to racial grievances fo sure. This is the mirror image of your own countless racial grievances seen from the other side of the political divide. Both sides have some people who prefer to wallow in their victimhood.
I’m calling it like I see it based on the evidence.
“This is the mirror image of your own countless racial grievances”
Whites want to be left alone by blacks and not have to be quasi slaves to them providing them with benefits, jobs, and deferential treatment that they don’t deserve and haven’t earned.
Blacks want to blame whites for their problems and be given free stuff from whites by force.
There is absolutely no equivalence.
The “asymmetric insight” here is that blacks problems are due to their genetics (fact) and not white oppression (blacks view of why they can’t get ahead).
Obama’s sentence is true as stated, but his wording strongly implies that (a) the things “they cling to” are bad, (b) it’s bad for “them” to “cling to” these things, and (c) that “their” explanations of their frustrations (which are very real) by means of these things are untrue or irrational. It’s these strongly implied corollaries of Obama’s statement that are false.
You just wrote that it was a direct insult. A direct insult isn’t a microaggression. If I call Obama a goddamn idiot n****r that won’t be a microaggression, will it?
Given the impending tsunami of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, which group among the native U.S. population should have the most status anxiety right now?
The consensus answer is the native white population and this gets repeated over and over again in the MSM and among the punditry.
I continue to believe that this is probably not correct. I’m thinking that the 13% has the most to lose from a status perspective. With a white majority, the 13% gets to blame whitey for their off-the-chart criminality and out of wedlock birth rates, not to mention the massive achievement gaps.
White guilt is starting to lose it’s effective lure as more years elapse since 1964 and as more immigrant populations experience economic success.
And, the Hispanics and Asians don’t really care about white guilt and cannot really relate to the injustices committed over a half century ago.
In my mind, racial wokeness is a last ditch effort before the tsunami hits. The 13% is in big trouble and the elites among them get it.
In a sense, that is what intersectionality is. It is a attempt to save the black are oppressed narrative by saying everyone who isn’t white is oppressed, that the interests and experiences of everyone who isn’t white are, in the ways that matter, the same. Thus, they should all have the same politics and vote for the same people.
@roger
I’m only seeing lukewarm support within the Hispanic community for racial woke and somewhat negative support among the Asian community.
I think the 13% did the best that they could in their (last ditch?) marketing efforts, but they have massively miscalculated support among other minority groups. Have a look at Prop 16 in progressive CA or the defund the police movement.
The top 15 ethnic groups in the U.S. have higher household incomes than whites. Do these folks really care about what happened over a 1/2 century ago between blacks and whites? I’m betting no.
Blacks perceive that Hispanics especially will join their political coalition. Hispanics on net tend to be beneficiaries of affirmative action, so that’s an easy one. Hispanic support for AA heavily revolved around whether they see it as them getting jobs over whites or black getting jobs over them. The polling is pure spoils system.
More importantly, since they have lower incomes they also disproportionately benefit from any kind of public assistance of any kind just like blacks.
That’s probably enough. Certainly its been enough to consistently win 60-80% of the Hispanic vote over and over. Obviously there will be a regional variance here because there is a big regional variance in Hispanics (White Cubans in Miami versus dark skinned Puerto Ricans in the northeast, etc).
Asians are a toss up but for now but their very high class and coastal nature means they tend to align with the high part of the high/low coalition. Obviously they don’t like affirmative action, but so far they seem to believe its the price of admission to being a part of the democratic coalition that dominates every place they want to live and company they want to work for. Like Hispanics there is a lot of variance, with low end Asians like Hmong or natural bitches like Indian women being very leftist, and Chinese Men being naturally Based.
The most logical long term trend is that leftist coalition holds itself together via increased demonization and expropriation of non elite whites. Even if that coalition sheds a few Hispanic or Asian votes here or there, its guaranteed to break through in a decade or so. Only the electoral college and senate are holding it back.
Nitpicker,
>—“You just wrote that it was a direct insult. A direct insult isn’t a microaggression. If I call Obama a goddamn idiot n****r that won’t be a microaggression, will it?”
Well, first of all, these aren’t remotely comparable insults. Most people who are into guns and/or religion are proud of their attachment to them. They might be insulted at being called bitter but reacting bitterly would be a uniquely ineffective way to refute the allegation.
And actually I didn’t call it a “direct” insult. that was your description. I’d be more inclined to think of it as an indirect insult. But go ahead and call it a macro-aggression if you like. Either way, my point is that people eager to tell other people they are too easily offended would be better served by having thicker skins themselves.
Religiosity has declined over the course of the period we’re talking about. I think guns and religion are pretty unrelated to this (if anything trends in religion would predict a leftward shift). Then there’s the lump of labor fallacy of course.
In any case, I don’t really buy this narrative either when Republicans tell it or when Democrats tell it. The bast majority of people who voted against Obama in Pennsylvania or Ohio would’ve voted against him no matter how well-employed they were. That’s what’s wrong with Obama’s statement. He has the standard failure of imagination, he can’t quite conceive of people sincerely holding different views and values, for reasons that aren’t superficial. “If only we could get them away from Fox News or find them good jobs, they’d see the merits in gun control and late term abortion.” Not likely though.
Something I feel like shouting given how little attention it gets: the main reason for the right-ward shift of rust belt states is not because of erstwhile Democrats becoming Republicans out of bitterness, but rather erstwhile Democrats not bothering to vote at all. Look at the raw voting numbers, and you see the decline in Democratic votes in 2016 well-exceeds Republican gains (in Wisconin both parties actually lost votes). This story, frankly, is much much more about the demoralization of Democratic voters in rustbelt cities than about the smalltown working class becoming conservative (it was actually already conservative, religion, guns and all).
Arnold, be true to thy self (i.e., M vc C thinking). Shouldn’t one assess mindsets based on how one thinks through policies, not from select quotes from stray casual conversations? Quoting Obama in the manner you have, is cavalier. It suggests everyone is already practicing a Scout mindset. One merely needs to be recorded publically paying homage to something close in spirit to the Scout Mindset to be a member of the Scout mindset team. No requirement of actual practice in decision-making is required. Curious.
The Scout Mindset does not solve the material problem we are confronting in making personal and communal choices. It presents us with a different metaphor to frame the decision problem. It is a nice metaphor, but that’s all. The real issue we confront when reasoning is about what we value in the face of uncertainty. Value is subjective, contingent, uncertain, and individual. The debate we often struggle with internally and in society is how to arrive at the respective values of A over B in an uncertain world where people have different preferences.