Suppose that your beliefs can be firm or soft, and that your tone can be militant or moderate. This yields a matrix:
| Firm | Soft | |
|---|---|---|
| Militant | True Believer | Tribal |
| Moderate | Principled | Weathervane |
The True Believer expresses anger and contempt for those who disagree.
Tribal means that you care most about group status. An example would be an economist who is a deficit hawk when one party is in power but a deficit dove when the other party is in power. Or an economist who uses a high estimate of labor demand elasticity when arguing for more immigration and a low estimate of labor demand elasticity when arguing for a higher minimum wage (or an economist who does the opposite).
Principled means that you care more about your beliefs than about tribal loyalty. However, you are willing to tolerate and even respect people who disagree.
Weathervane means that you want to just “go along to get along,” to please people and further your ambitions.
1. David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise (2000), seems to me to have suggested that people with firm beliefs tend to have to be militant in tone in order to be successful as public intellectuals. That is, the public does not respond to the category I call Principled as well as it does to the category I call True Believer. People may even mistakenly treat a militant tone as a signal of firm beliefs.
2. I think that in the media, the biggest growth over the past twenty years has been in the Tribal category. The other categories are losing out. Both the strong pro-Trump camp and the strong anti-Trump camp strike me as Tribal.
3. I am disturbed by the increasing use of violence and speech suppression by the True Believers on the left.
4. You can argue that the Weathervane category is what holds the country together. Politicians who can change with the mood of the country and compromise make democracy more comfortable than politicians who stick to their guns. Many people look at Macron in France as a sort of Weathervane savior.
My bottom line is that I like the Principled category the most and the Tribal and True Believer categories the least. I lament that the media culture rewards and amplifies militants over moderates.
I like this, and agree with all of it. Thanks.
These are my exact thoughts on a whole lot of blog posts on this site, but, it’d seem redundant to keep posting those thoughts.
What makes you think that the campus anti-speech people are True Believers rather than Tribal? What would be their firm beliefs? Historically, there have been militants with firm beliefs in communism on the left, but that ideology has seemed to fallen out of favor. Those on the left are more likely to talk about “practical” capitalism or “sensible regulation” than label themselves as socialists or statists. Even identity politics seems tribal: opposition to Hillary Clinton is anti-women but not so for Betsy DeVos or Marine Le Pen.
I’m not sure that libertarian public intellectuals with firm beliefs actually benefit from a militant tone, contra Brooks. Classical liberalism seems more compatible with moderate tone.
To your fourth point, I would put the four presidents before Trump (Obama, W, Clinton, Bush Sr) in the Weathervane category. I think both Trump and Hillary were in the Tribal category, which may explain why voters were so dissatisfied with their choices this election. Arguably, Reagan was in the Principled camp. Militants seem to do well in media, but moderates seem to do better in elections.
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And not the violence and speech suppression of the right? You reveal too much.
Militant beliefs promote further militant beliefs among moderates as they realize it isn’t about reason and persuasion or cooperation and compromise but ideology and loyalty and conformity and obedience, and promote them equally among those they agree with and those they don’t. Militants fail to even see their militancy, considering themselves only moderate and right and their opponents as militant, violent, and wicked.
You rate Principled too highly, and True Believer too low. True Believers are the ones who actually accomplish things. For example, if we take slavery, the True Believers were the abolitionists, while the Principled were people in the northern states who didn’t own slaves, but were content to leave the southern states as they were. The True Believers come off better in that comparison. Similarly, True Believer suffragists got women the vote.
Principled people are too willing to settle for the fact that they think the right things, but are unwilling to do the actual work to advance their causes. If unpopular causes want to get anywhere, True Believers are more valuable than Principled supporters.
On the other hand, if your cause is in the minority, you want your opposition to be governed by Principled people. Those people are more likely to compromise a little, carve out space for your viewpoint.
Did the true believers cause the civil war? I find it funny how we just discount the civil war. I also took not of how the mainstream laughed at Trump for similar thoughts.
Murray Rothbard argued that the radical pietists were a driving force behind the Civil War. They pushed for the freeing of the slaves, not for some equality, but that as slaves they were not free to experience the emotional/mystical conversion experience, free will to be saved. They were also the ones to come to use the state to stamp out sin. The same pietist use of government can be seen in those who abandoned Christianity for Marxist socialism in the early 20th century.
He speaks of it for about 20 minutes in the lecture below starting 19 minutes in.
https://youtu.be/o2ndkCvHGj4?t=1138
Does anyone not consider themselves Principled? How do you know you are Principled and not tribal? People in all four categories you list could probably list out principles they feel they believe in.
It seems to me weathervane leaders is the largest category and the main reason we are here. Hillary voted for Iraq because she was a weathervane. Most people would call weathervane “corrupt”. Hillary and the GOPe ran very weathervane campaigns and were rejected. I don’t think that’s because of the media, which was very pro-weathervane the entire election. Rather, weathervane policies have had devastating effects on the electorate that were so bad the media couldn’t control the narrative anymore.
If you consider “firm belief” an intellectual failure and “militant tone” an emotional failure the weathervane societies should outperform the others, including “principled” societies.
Wording matters in this analysis. If you replace Weathervane with Flexible the choice of ‘Principled’ as best becomes less obvious.