Author Archives: Arnold Kling

President Trump as a progressive conservative

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F.H. Buckley writes,

our politics can be portrayed along two axes, economic and non-economic, according to the preferences of two-dimensional men who vote for two-dimensional progressive conservatism. This divided voters into four quadrants, and the winning one was left-wing or middle of the road on economics but right-wing on social issues. Those voters went three to one for Trump.

Of course, libertarians are in the opposite quadrant: left-wing on social issues and right-wing on economic issues.

I have argued for the last few years that libertarians have been thrown under the bus by both major parties.

Where conservatives agree and disagree

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Yuval Levin writes,

That human beings start out crooked and prone to sin means we require strong social institutions meant to form us, and that we cannot thrive in their absence. It means the good of the individual cannot be achieved in a society that is not meaningfully attuned to the true common good. But that human beings are made in a divine image and possessed of inherent dignity means that each of us has rights that in practice amount to constraints on what society can do to us. In this sense, the conservative anthropology points toward both communitarianism and individualism, and the tension between the two emerges in every conservative effort to wrestle with real-world governing challenges.

The new class war and the virus

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Michael Lind writes,

The present system serves the credentialed elite in the large private, public, and nonprofit bureaucracies of the managerial elite quite well. In contrast, the members of the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie live in terror of proletarianization. Many professionals fear they will not be able to secure high-status jobs with their educational credentials, and the small proprietors fear they will lose their businesses and be compelled to work for others.

Lind sees a class war between the credentialed professionals and small business owners, with the managerial elite positioned more securely. Now, let us think about the virus situation. Many (but not all) of the credentialed professionals are able to telework. Note that many small businesses are vulnerable. Note that the managerial elite are almost all able to telework.

The managerial elite, who were already ahead, are winning during the virus crisis. You can see that in the fortunes of the S&P 4. The small business owners are losing heavily. The credentialed professionals fall somewhere in the middle. But you can see who has an interest in maximizing fears of the virus and who has an interest in minimizing those fears.

Turning to the George Floyd protests, Lind writes,

I am not the first to observe that what were initially legitimate protests against the use of excess force and racism by particular police departments have turned into a campaign for greater funding for social-services jobs and diversity officer jobs for members of the professional bourgeoisie

Lind’s point is that, not so coincidentally, economic interest tends to align with political tribalism on these issues.

The virus as a social change agent

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Balaji S. Srinivasan writes,

Every sector that had previously been resistant to the internet (healthcare, education, law, finance, government itself) has now flipped to remote-first.

This is a response to Einat Wilf, who writes,

Many of us have been forced to homeschool our children. In doing so, some of us have been realizing a parenting fantasy or living a parenting nightmare, or both. Either way, we’ve become aware of the many ways in which teaching and learning can take place at home. Even many adults have had time to pursue the wealth of excellent learning materials available for free or limited cost—including classes and lectures from the world’s best universities.

I think that the future in many of these areas will be a blend of approaches from the pre-virus era and the virus era.

And if the government schools should self-destruct in the process, so be it.

More thoughts on the religion that persecutes heretics

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In TLP, I contrast demonization rhetoric with persuasion rhetoric. As an exercise, you might try to pantomime each. That is, act out the facial expressions and hand gestures of someone who is demonizing another person. Then act our trying to persuade another person. I am pretty sure that you will appear more open and relaxed doing the second.

Demonization and persuasion are mutually exclusive. If you are demonizing, you are not persuading, and conversely.

When I wrote the book, I assumed that everyone would believe that persuasion is better than demonizing. My thought was once people recognized that their political rhetoric was demonizing, they would want to change.

But the religion that persecutes heretics actually prefers demonization to persuasion.

Paul Graham on the religion that persecutes heretics

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Paul Graham starts with this framework:

The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They’re careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.

He points out that universities used to be places where the aggressively independent-minded were protected from the aggressively conventional-minded. In my terms, universities were a haven for heretics, not the wellspring of the religion that is animated by the identification and persecution of heretics.

I believe that in order to have a cohesive society, you need some enforcement of conformity. But the extend and severity of that enforcement has to have limits. I think Graham’s essay makes that same point.

Ranked-choice voting

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Mark Begich and Sean Parnell write,

Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, found that ranked-choice voting decreased turnout by 3 to 5 percentage points on average in cities that implemented it. Mr. McDaniel was blunt in his conclusion, telling the New York Times : “My research shows that when you make things more complicated, which this does, there’s going be lower turnout.”

I had just finished reading Gehl and Porter’s The Politics Industry, in which they argue that ranked-choice voting would reverse the trend toward polarization and dysfunctional politics. Begich and Parnell never confront the argument that ranked-choice voting would improve the fortunes of centrist candidates. The current system rewards tribalism. The best way to stay in office in a safe Democratic district is to go far left and the best way to say in office in a safe Republican district is to go far right.

If you are going to write a competent op-ed against ranked-choice voting, then you should argue one or more of the following:

1. Polarization is not a major problem.
2. Ranked-choice voting would not help solve the problem.
3. Ranked-choice voting would lead to other problems that are even worse than polarization.

Begich and Parnell are so demagogic and uncharitable that their piece actually moved me in the direction of supporting ranked-choice voting.

Isolation, attention, and totalitarianism

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UCSD scientists wrote,

Joint attention episodes set the stage for infant learning. In many cultures and contexts, infants and children learn to attend to whatever adults attend to. This helps children learn their group’s language, social routines, and practical skills.

We learn by paying attention to what others attend to. I speculate that this is why in-class learning works better than watching a lecture on line. When I am in a classroom, others are paying attention to the speaker. This makes my attention to the speaker instinctive. I don’t have to use so much willpower to pay attention. But when it’s just me sitting in front of a computer, I have to will myself to pay attention. It uses up more effort and takes more out of me.

In the twentieth century, watching television or listening to the radio were often social activities. TV and radio could command our attention the way the speaker in a classroom would, through people paying attention to what others were attending to.

But we use 21st-century media in isolation. That means that the media need other means to command our attention. They cannot rely on our use of social cues. Instead, they have to rely on dopamine hits. Porn. Games. And demonization.

We get a dopamine hit by seeing the demonization of people with whom we disagree. So demonization becomes a winning Darwinian strategy in the age of contemporary media.

The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. I thought that if you recognize the rhetoric, you would back away from it.

Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. To criticize demonization is to be a heretic. In a world where people consume media in isolation, an ideology that justifies demonization has an advantage.

My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions.

The issue du jour

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Russ Roberts talks with Glenn Loury, who says,

the descendants of American slaves, again, taken as a whole, are the richest and most powerful and influential population of African descent on the planet.

So, the idea that we want to scrap the [capitalist] system and start from scratch–as I say, I think it’s a very mischievous idea.

Later, Loury says,

if you brought some of the empathy for the public servants, who were teachers, over to a sense of empathy for the extremely difficult job of being a police officer in an American city, and you brought some of the sense of judgment and insistence upon accountability that is reflexively invoked when we talk about police officers over to talking about how we want to think about our public servants who are providing educational services, I think we’d all be better off.

And of course there is more.