Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Non-tribalism

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Karen Tamerius writes,

Through tribalism, Trump has created a self-reinforcing system. The more he lashes out at others, the more they strike back at him and his followers. And the more people strike back at Trump and his followers, the more he and they feel persecuted. The escalating sense of persecution binds his followers to him ever more tightly.

Her advice to progressives for handling Trump supporters:

1. Don’t attack
2. Keep personal relationships alive
3. Hear them out
4. Agree where appropriate
5. Gently nudge them toward progressivism
6. Invite them into the fold

I found this essay quite refreshing. It goes against 99 percent of the essays that progressives write. Conservatives and libertarians would be advised to follow these six maxims, also (substituting their own ideology in #5).

Libertarians and the legitimacy crisis

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A legitimacy crisis is when people stop believing that the governing elite is competent and benevolent.

In theory, a libertarian might welcome a legitimacy crisis. If people lose faith in the government elite, then should that not make them more libertarian?

In practice, we are seeing something closer to the opposite. We are seeing a decline in legitimacy, although it probably does not qualify as a crisis. In any case, the rise of populism helps to promote demagogues, such as Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren.

Today, libertarians are losing whatever allies we once had. We used to have progressive allies on social issues, such as free speech or regulation of sexual conduct. The younger generation among progressives is opposed to free speech. In the 1960s, college campuses ended their rules concerning visitation of dorm rooms by members of the opposite sex (only a few years before I went to Swarthmore, the rule was that the door had to be open and each student had to have one foot on the floor at all times). Now, the campus sexual rulebook is thicker than ever.

We used to have conservative allies on markets. Now, conservatives are happy to excoriate the tech industry or the pharmaceutical industry or outsourcing. Tyler Cowen’s love letter to Big Business is a rare libertarian voice being drowned out by other voices, such as J.D. Vance or Senator Josh Hawley or Mary Eberstadt.

Perhaps the natural tendency is to oppose liberty. I speak of FOOL, which is the Fear Of Others’ Liberty.

One possibility is that liberty, when it includes liberty for others, is a value held by only some elites. When those elites are weak, FOOL holds sway, and demagogues emerge to satisfy the FOOL.

Legitimacy and information control

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Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman write,

Rather than terrorizing or indoctrinating the population, rulers survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent. Having won popularity, dictators score points both at home and abroad by mimicking democracy. Violent repression, rather than being helpful, is counterproductive: it undercuts the image of able governance that leaders seek to cultivate.

They are offering a theory of dictatorship in which the dictator obtains power through nonviolent persuasion. In political science, I believe that this is known as “legitimacy.” In this case, their thesis is that dictators achieve their legitimacy through the control of information.

But the relationship between legitimacy and control over information also might be important in a democracy. That is what Curtis Yarvin argues in a recent essay.

all modern regimes are Orwellian thought-control regimes.

. . .we can explain how a decentralized civil society, effectively protected from democracy, can, does, and indeed must become a distributed Orwellian despotism. But we’ll postpone these loose ends till the final essay.

Any ruling elite must “survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent.” The phenomenon that Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public is the loss of this belief in the era of the Internet and social media.

Note: Tyler Cowen recently pointed to a paper by Guriev and others that also is pertinent to Martin Gurri’s thesis.

Affective polarization

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This is a relatively new term, to be distinguished from issue polarization. Affective polarization is loving your side for being your side and hating the other side. Recall that Lilliana Mason’s work shows affective polarization having gone up much more than issue polarization. Now we have a survey paper by Shanto Iyengar and others

What, if anything, can be done to ameliorate affective polarization? While efforts here are at best nascent, several approaches have shown promise. All of them work to reduce the biases generated by partisanship’s division of the world into an in group and an out group. Hence, some work has focused on making partisan identities less salient or making other identities more salient.

(I am quoting from the published version, forwarded by a reader. The link above goes to an ungated version, which may differ.)

A libertarian would say that in a libertarian world, with less at stake in politics, affective polarization could be reduced.

Populist leaders as father figures

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Mary Eberstadt writes,

In every case, the signature of the new populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off the bullies in any form they appear—illegal immigrants, rapacious elites, menacing foreign nations, and so on.

. . .Nor is Trump alone in functioning as a super-daddy in a world where more and more children and former children grow up without an ordinary father in the home.

I recently read Eberstadt’s new book, Primal Screams, in which she argues that the sexual revolution resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of children growing up in intact families with siblings, creating identity crises for such children, with identity politics stepping in to provide a substitute for the loss of strong family identity. I will re-read her book, which includes interesting reaction essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel (you can think of them as representing the three axes, respectively). But at the moment I would describe her thesis as at best speculative.

I had the same skeptical reaction to the essay on populism. Does the causal analysis hold up under scrutiny? It seems to me that authoritarian “father-figure” leaders have emerged at different times and in disparate countries without being preceded by a sudden increase in broken families. I think that she needs to make a more rigorous attempt to demonstrate the validity of her causal model if she wants to avoid the accusation of practicing right-wing normative sociology.

Identity drives opinion

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Michael Macy and others write,

In each experiment, participants were first asked with which party they identify and how strongly. They were then randomly assigned to 10 parallel worlds of uniform size and administered a survey with up to 20 randomly ordered political and cultural statements (see table S2). In 8 of 10 worlds (the influence condition), participants could see which party was more likely to agree with an item, while in the other two worlds (the independence condition), they could not. In the influence condition, the participant’s own agreement was then used, in turn, to update the relative support of each party displayed to the next participant in that same world. Participants only knew about their own world and did not even know that there were other worlds.

Suppose that there is an issue where people can be either pro or con. In one “world,” people come to believe that Democrats are pro. In the experiment, people who identify as Democrats will take the pro side in that world. But suppose that in another “world,” people come to believe that Democrats are con. In that case, people who identify as Democrats will take the con side.

The authors conclude,

Our results suggest that partisan alignments across substantively diverse issues do not necessarily reflect intrinsic preferences but may indicate instead the outcome of cascade dynamics that might have tipped in a different direction due to chance variation in the positions taken by early movers. Public awareness of this counterintuitive possibility has the potential to encourage greater tolerance for alternative opinions.

The first sentence says that people are so purely partisan that their opinions can be socially influenced in almost a random way. That sentence is supported by their experimental results, although as with many experiments of this type there are legitimate reasons to wonder how much the results in the experimental setting carry over to the more complex real world. Also, note that I am very sympathetic to the theory of political psychology held by the authors, because I see it as consistent with my views in The Three Languages of Politics.

Can you think of any real-world examples of opinion cascades, in which Democrats or Republicans who took one side of an issue made a sudden shift to the other side? I sure can.

The second sentence says that perhaps people can be talked out of their partisanship once they realize that the effect of identity on opinion is so strong. That sentence is based on no evidence and is purely speculative. I would bet against it.

As Jeffrey Friedman has pointed out to me, it is obvious that there are differences of opinion on major issues. Yet hardly anyone sees this as evidence to doubt their own opinion. Instead, nearly everyone is sure that their own opinion is unequivocally correct. So I don’t think that pointing out problems of meta-rationality to people is going to get them to change their outlook.

DNA registration as a crime deterrent

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Anne Sofie Tegner Anker and others write,

We find that DNA registration has a deterrent effect on future crime. Reductions in the probability of conviction for violent, property and weapons-related crime drive this overall decline in recidivism. Both offenders who enter the DNA database for their first ever charge and individuals who have been charged before are deterred from committing subsequent crime, but when compared to their baseline recidivism rates DNA registration has the largest effect on first-time offenders.

Pointer from a commenter, who asks for a three-axes interpretation.

From a policy perspective, I think that only conservatives can like it. Libertarians would worry about the way that DNA registration could enhance government power at the expense of individual liberty. Progressives would worry that criminals come from victim classes and are being further oppressed. Conservatives would instead focus on the deterrence of crime and see DNA registration as a tool for the civilized to fend off barbarians.

I could be missing something, but that would be my three-axes interpretation.

Podcast on Preference Falsification

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Eric Weinstein and Timur Kuran. It’s almost three hours, and I listened to the whole thing. I might listen to parts of it again, because there are lots of little pieces that were interesting.

One interesting piece was Kuran’s recollection of Donald Trump belittling John McCain by saying that being captured did not make McCain a war hero. Kuran’s point was that Trump was violating political norms and his willingness to do so increased his support. As I recall, Kuran used the metaphor of “guardrails” and said that Trump was willing to ignore them.

In the three-axes model, conservatives are very attached to guardrails. Human beings are dangerous drivers on the road of life, and guardrails like religion and traditional values are what keep us from smashing into telephone poles. But in Kuran’s analysis, Trump’s supporters were so fed up with having to pretend to go along with elites that they were happy to see someone who clearly did not care what the conservative establishment thought about him.

I am not happy with the term “preference falsification.” In standard economics, preferences refer to consumer choices, and we say that “choices reveal preferences.” But not many examples that the speakers give to illustrate preference falsification involve consumption. Instead, some of the examples in the podcast refer to signals. So in Turkey when secularism was in power, people signaled that they were secular even if they were religious. Now they have to do the opposite. Also, many examples refer to political beliefs or voting behavior.

I am afraid that if you are not more careful in defining preference falsification, you end up using it as an all-purpose boo-word. The podcast includes some discussion of the suppression of ideas in academia. I’m totally on board that idea suppression is an issue. I am less convinced that applying the term “preference falsification” provides additional insight.