Handle, who is a popular commenter here, wrote a long essay on this post.

I’ll start with my outline/interpretation of Handle’s comment, and then reproduce the comment.

1. Political movements need to coordinate. This requires simplifying messaging. (This may explain why my three-axes model seems to work. While there may be all sorts of subtle nuances to individuals’ thinking, it is easiest for progressives to signal to one another by invoking the oppressor-oppressed axis, or for conservatives to signal using the civilization-barbarism axis, or for libertarians to signal using the freedom-coercion axis.)

2. In a complex world, this sort of simplification can have adverse consequences if one group becomes dominant and tries to cram every issue into its simple framework. We are better off in a society where no one ideological framework takes over.

3. However, the progressive movement seems dominant today. The more that the progressive agenda becomes implemented, the more damage it will cause. Paradoxically, this will lead progressives to become more adamant and less tolerant of dissent.

If you combine Sanders and Warren, what you get is socialism combined with demonization and intimidation of anyone who does not support left-wing views. This is the country that the Democratic left wants to live in?

I take this as a rhetorical question to try and make mainstream elite democrats, who would not be comfortable admitting that they side with Socialist bullies, a little ashamed of not speaking up against them and of belonging to a party increasingly characterized by those types of characters and behaviors.

However, I think the accurate and unfortunate answer is ‘yes’ for a good portion of Democrats, and the reasonable, enlightened and moderate folks for whom the answer is ‘no’, still have no desire or ability to resist it.

Which raises the question as to why that should be, which I think is the most important question about social-psychological dynamics of our era, especially since it could give us some insight into how the near future will unfold.

Please allow me to speculate a little on it.

The answer to that question, I think, is a combination of the one given by Schelling 55 years ago in The Strategy of Conflict (officially respectable source) and Auster (officially very non-respectable and infamously irascible source) starting about 15 years ago but here’s a summary of the idea.

The Schelling component is that in any kind of complicated game or bargaining / negotiation process (a category of which the perpetual open-contest of ideological jostling of modern politics is a member), and even with explicit communications, if the participants are to concert, they often do so on the basis of recursive and reflexive cross-expectations similar to what would emerge in coordinating a solution to a tacit circumstance without communication.

These solutions tend to be characterized by a psychological ‘special magnetism’ related to simplicity, prominence, common conspicuousness, uniqueness, and non-ambiguity which will likely reflect shared values and usually take the shape of already well-known established precedents.

One consequential manifestation of this process in the context of political or ideological bargaining seems to be a very ‘low bandwidth’ in terms of the low number and high level of abstraction of major principles. Too many principles, and they could too obviously contradict each other. Too much detail, and there are suddenly too many ‘degrees of freedom’ which creates too many possibilities and makes mind-reading guesses too unlikely, with too much to lawyerly argue about.

This is related to the role that simple, instinctive norms of ‘common sense morality’ play in coordinating social interactions and setting boundaries on behaviors in any situation of a conflict of interests. The evolutionary social psychologists would say that this is the adaptive reason moral sense evolved (or ‘prevailed’) in the first place, but the mental tendency seems to be vulnerable to ‘hijacking’ by ideological movements that demand social arrangements that are no longer adaptive in our modern circumstances.

So ideological movements that are able to garner any following rely on this mechanism to generate the kind of agreement necessary to form a coalition, and thus tend to arise out of an incredibly simplistic set of vague and abstract basic principles, with ‘the details to be worked out later’ by some kind of ‘experts’ who have ‘jurisdiction’ over such matters.

For the contemporary progressive left, that principle is essentially a social-justice universalism informed by a dogma of absolutist egalitarianism, most famously expounded upon by Rawls in his A Theory of Justice. Two people may agree on something simple and vague like ‘social justice’ but wouldn’t be able to agree on details about, say, the minimum wage or tax schedules.

These few, abstract principles necessarily reflect or contain a certain good-vs-bad worldview and thus logically imply – and naturally give rise to – a certain semi-fictional narrative about the way the human social world currently works, the way it should work (perhaps in a ‘Utopian’ vision), and who the good and bad guys are in the story. And that narrative tends to be expressed in terms of just a few core themes, symbols, ‘explanations’, recurring patterns, and words that form a ‘political language’ about which our host has added a very insightful contribution.

The progressive language leans heavily on a class-warfare framework (or identity-based variations on that theme), with the explanation that inequality is caused by exploitation on the one hand and privilege on the other, which makes everything a struggle between oppressors (bad guys) and the oppressed (good guys).

The trouble is that just like any simplistic model informed by a few empirical observations will eventually diverge from complicated reality outside of its ‘operational envelope’, any over-simplistic narrative of human social dynamics cannot capture all the complexity of reality, or otherwise it may refuse to accept some ‘ugly’ facts about that reality..

My own personal opinion (your mileage may vary) is that some of the most successful civilizations – such as the British and Roman empires – at their height were managed with a minimum amount of ideological interference with everyday politics or distortion away from more optimal or traditionally evolved solutions and were thus characterized by a special degree of pragmatic reasonableness and a commitment to the balancing of various, equally compelling interests, without everything being swallowed up by some ‘One Big Idea’.

But, if the big idea is implemented by true-believers who have gotten hold of the reigns of power in the form of naive coercive policy, it will produce lots and lots of undesirable results and unintended consequences, leading to ever more reactive interventions to attempt to remedy the problems created by the last intervention.

But all the policy implications of these novel ideologies and movements are hardly ever implemented all at once (or when they are, they tend to lead to rapid disaster). It takes a lot of work to gain power and to keep it, and if your policies bring bad results they can be counterproductive in terms of staying in charge if you have any serious threats or competitors. There is always the threat of outsiders (or ‘insidious’ influence of insiders) of the constituencies of those whose interests will be harmed by a new policy more in keeping with the movement’s purported fundamental principles.

There is also the ‘frog-boiling’ effect to consider. People can adjust to slow changes, and even lack awareness of substantial change over time and have a kind of ‘amnesia’ about yesterday’s normalcy. But if you throw radical changes at them too fast, they notice and react and stick in their heels.

One might expect this political game to reach some kind of social equilibrium in a stable balance of conflicting interests. But the implications of Schelling’s insight tells us this is impossible when there is no established authority over political ideas that can establish a ‘stable orthodoxy’, and people can thus still argue and ‘bargain’ in public about the details. If the arguing need not stop, it will always go on, arguing for more consistency with the framework.

There isn’t enough ‘cognitive bandwidth’ for people to both know and agree upon the whole Talmudic case-law of the detailed ‘solutions’ of any current equilibrium. There can only ever be the few basic, abstract, vague principles, and there will always be plenty of things to point to in reality that diverge significantly from the moral mandates of those few principles.

The trouble is that there is just no articulable, logical stopping point at some place of reasonable moderation, or some counter-vailing and limiting principle, and thus no place to really, genuinely settle the negotiations at some particular social and legal state of affairs. This is a key point. Without that natural stopping point, ambitious ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ hoping to raise their social status in games of competitive sanctimony will always find something ‘objectionable’ (in the terms of the simplistic moral framework of the principles) to leverage in a demand for amelioration.

It’s a slippery-slope situation that will continue to try to ratchet in one direction only. Every pause or seeming cease-fire is, necessarily, merely a temporary hiatus and ephemeral modus vivendi in a long war. This is because the ideological salience of progressively more extreme positions can never dissipate, because there is simply no ‘room’ left in the box of principles that people can concert around.

That being the case, ideological movements that wish to radically alter the fabric and structure of existing society (because it’s ‘unjust’ or something) tend to keep working in an intermittent and piecemeal fashion at the margins in finding the contemporary path of least resistance to bringing social reality into accord with their politics (according to the limits of their power and legitimacy, and if the limits are relaxed, the pace will surely increase.)

But the obvious problem is what to do with the ‘temporarily too hard to change’ remaining instances of social injustice, i.e. ‘unprincipled exceptions’ to the framework principles of the coalition’s ideology. It’s not enough to simply leave them alone, because interested parties will know about the incompatibility between the reality and ideology and thus be alert to the possibility of eventual ‘rectification’. So the ideological movement must hand-wave and assert some affirmative denial that there is anything to worry about, before finally reversing themselves and implementing the rectification anyway. This is Rod Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility”.

Furthermore, to the extent their own constituents and coalition members feel the need to violate the clear implications of the ideological principles where they conflict too painfully with reality and demand too much from ordinary humans, they must even come up with some rationalization that allows for temporary tolerance of hypocritical behaviors under some socially acceptable excuse. These excuses require their own fictional narratives for support (for instance the non-null hypothesis of education), which layers one delusion on top of another.

However, the sum of all these unprincipled exceptions and rationalized hypocrisies is what makes life tolerably pleasant and society reasonably functional and non-obnoxiously intrusive and tyrannical for the average individual, who is granted a form of temporary reprieve and ‘indulgence’ to continue ‘living in sin’.

But eventually the day will come that the balance of power will shift slightly against people trying to preserve the ‘status quo agreement’ equilibrium, and then some political entrepreneur will point out this long-standing hypocrisy and tolerance of injustice, its inconsistency with good, and then demand it be eliminated, and no one will be able to point to anything within the coalition’s constrained framework of ideological principles to argue against yet another initiative.

And, as Auster said, the movement will work its mischief by eliminating the unprincipled exceptions one by one. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually life becomes increasingly unpleasant, and society works less and less well as the true believers try harder and harder to make it fit to their particular Procrustean bed. The slide ends in disaster and/or emergence of a new order under a different framework where these ‘entrepreneurs’ are no longer free to make their cases.

Looking at contemporary progressivism and its robust hold on power, and its principles, narratives, language, and values, if one accepts the mechanisms described above, I just don’t see how one could not expect them to eventually continue to move in the direction of Socialism and Intolerant Bullying of any Opposition.

Old societies were only able to survive the potential (and sometimes real) collapses implicit in similar phenomena by evolving various techniques to stabilize against these particular ideological failure modes. But many were eagerly abandoned in the zeal of the enlightenment and the spread of norms of free political expression and democracy, but without a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the danger inherent in this system of a freedom that could sow the seed of its own destruction the minute the norms of tolerance free expression came under unrelenting and successful attack.

Our inheritance of several of these social features in the unwritten constitution of Anglo-American culture that slowed things down or occasionally reversed them in the past has now been practically exhausted and/or circumvented. So Warren-Sanders seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of an accelerating trend.

Their kind are going to do some damage to the culture and to the economy, no doubt about it. But again, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and we can absorb a certain amount of redistribution and regulation an dead-weight loss without things getting too bad or unlivable. But the trick will be to prevent them from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and keep them away as much as possible from the foundational engines of our prosperity: innovation and markets.

Keeping them distracted on mostly orthogonal cultural matters (the more irresolvable the better) might be the best way to do this for the time being, but there will always be the danger of there coming a point where they are tempted to take things too far, and when no one will feel able to try and stop them. Especially if they can’t express an opinion contrary to the new, ever-ratcheting, mainstream orthodoxy without losing respectability and being excommunicated from polite society or otherwise having their lives ruined.