Here is a recent conversation between Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein. You will find yourself agreeing with some of what they say and disagreeing with some of it.
I did not find Eric persuasive when he compared opening a border to immigrants to allowing a dinner guest to stay in your house forever. I don’t own the land where immigrants reside. They are not my guests to throw out.
I think that we lack the will to enforce immigration law because from an individualistic perspective it feels wrong to do so. When they work for what they get and obey other laws, it’s hard to feel good about throwing them out of the country.
Suppose that we do not think of land in this country as something that we as citizens own collectively. Instead, land is owned by individuals. An immigrant is going to pay rent to an individual landlord. Throwing out that immigrant means that the state breaks a voluntary contract between two individuals, the landlord and the tenant. There may be justifications for doing that, but I don’t think you arrive at those justifications through a metaphor of a guest over-staying.
Eric also said something that was counterintuitive when he said “We need to love them out of their cult.” He supported Bernie Sanders, but he thinks that Sanders has some bad economic ideas. Weinstein says that in general progressives have adopted some bad ideas, but they have good intentions. If we can love their intentions, then perhaps we can coax them away from their bad ideas.
This approach appeals to me. One of my favorite children’s fables is the one about the sun and the wind competing to get a man to take off his coat. The wind blows hard and cold, but that only makes the man pull his coat tighter. The sun bathes the man in warmth, and he removes his coat. I think there is a lesson there for those involved in political conflicts.
But I think that there are complicating factors. Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.
Suppose that there is a spectrum of personal contentment. At one end of that spectrum there are people who are happy with their lives and comfortable in their skins. They feel gratitude. Many of the conservative and libertarian intellectuals that I regularly follow fit in this category. The folks I know at Reason, at National Review, or in the GMU economics department. At the other end of the spectrum are young men who are so frustrated and angry that they become serial killers.
The politics of anger falls somewhere in between. At the extremes, it might be close to the serial-killer end of the spectrum.
How does anger on the left compare with anger on the right? The following is very speculative.
Think of life contentment as normally distributed, with an upper tail of people who are very grateful and a lower tail of people who are very bitter. Now imagine graphing two distributions of life contentment, one for well-educated, articulate people on the political left and one for well-educated articulate people on the political right. My sense is that while the two distributions would overlap, the distribution of the people on the left would be shifted to the bitter side relative to the people on the right. Again, I am limiting this to the well-educated and articulate.
Getting back to Eric’s idea, my worry is that by the time someone has become bitter and has translated that bitterness into political activism, it is too late to love them out of it. Ideally, one could find a way to prevent or overcome such bitterness in the first place. Failing that, it is important to find a way to channel that bitterness toward areas where it is least destructive. Video games or something.
“Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.”
Political anger is definitely dependent on where you are coming from, and I wouldn’t go into projected self-hatred as any kind of explanation. My observations are that anger from the left tends to be emotion driven, very personal, and directed toward specific people who are just bad guys (Trump, Pence, Koch brothers). The anger from the right is more directed toward ideals, and individuals tend to be criticized more as reflections of bad ideas rather than personal animus
When you say bad guys, do you mean bad guys, or “bad guys”?
I ask because I would put the Koch brothers in the good guys column…
Definitely “bad guys”. Most people are too complicated to categorize in a single bucket like that
Before the immigration comment, they spent the first quarter of the conversation (and returnd to it later on) talking about the social media suppression / utility-like platform exclusion problem, and Weinstein in particular mentioned “market failure” as a big issue here. They both seemed very anxious about it. I’d be interested to see your thoughts on that part too.
As for immigration, the broader point Weinstein was trying to make about “data voids”, that is, information sites manipulating results such that the majority position is made to seem small, while the false smear that bigotry is the heart of all restrictionist ideas is made to seem true. Everyone is terrified about being accused of being a racist, or associated in any way with racists, and so the progressives weaponize this fear and work so that any opposition to their agenda at all will be called racism and produce those feared outcomes.
I have some insight into when and why immigration laws are enforced or ignored, and it simply does not line up with your thesis: emotional sympathy for individuals on the parts of voters, officials, or politicians is not what drives policy. It’s not meaningful to ask about the will of people who are opposed to the laws existing. You might ask someone who supports the law, “What are you really willing to do to enforce it?” and I think you would discover more will than you suspect. Does anyone ever ask about the progressive will to enforce the regulations they like against otherwise law-abiding and sympathetic individuals or companies? Never. If anything, we are shocked at the zeal and refusal to listen to appeals for leniency and moderation.
As for where the political anger comes from, I don’t think that it is correlated with life circumstances or position. Emotional displays that feel genuine and authentic nevertheless emerge out of subconscious, cold calculations taking social factors into account, and the environmental incentives that encourage and reward such displays. Political tantrums really do happen for the same reason toddler temper tantrums happen, and just like with toddlers, yielding to them is a recipe for many more in the future.
Harvard says to Asians you aren’t kind or likeable. Harvard says you’re not an attractive person to be with. So there’s a ready explanation for Harvard’s lack of “emotional sympathy for individuals” with Asian surnames: How can Harvard be expected to feel sympathy for people who aren’t deserving of sympathy?
Harvard knows this from written essays, by the way. The lack of kindness can be discerned from the printed page.
What is Harvard willing to do to enforce its quotas keeping Asians out? Lie. Harvard blames racist white students for wanting to keep Asians out. But all of us can lie, and not just Harvard. I imagine a Filipina could improve her likeability with Harvard if she has a Spanish-sounding surname and does some volunteering with a Spanish-sounding non-profit group. Anyone can lie.
As a property owner, your share of public goods is not yours to dispense as you please, permanently and in perpetuity to their birthright-citizen posterity, to non-citizens.
The ending comment about videogames brings to mind work by Eric Hurst and others on time shift among young men in the past few decades: away from work and towards video games https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/maguiar/files/leisure-luxuries-labor-june-2017.pdf
Their argument is about how video games are more appealing than labor on the margin. But it could easily be extended to politics. Perhaps the Bernie phenomenon would have been even more heated had these folks not been distracted.
Then again, videogames -> gamergate -> resentment of culturally elite liberals setting the agenda & criticizing received ways of doing things -> Trump, is also a story one could tell.
If a student illegally admitted himself to Harvard, enrolled in classes, followed all the normal rules, completed assignments, took tests, and paid his tuition like expected, would it be immoral to kick him out? Is it immoral for Harvard to block the student from getting legal admission by rejecting his application?
Philip Roth had with the idea twenty years ago of a giant banner wrapped from one end of the White House to the other bearing the legend A Human Being Lives Here. But Monica Lewinsky was human too. So when Susan Faludi was making fun of her, and Erica Jong was making fun of her teeth, and Larissa MacFarquhar was writing in the New Yorker about “transforming herself from boring old Monica Lewinsky of Beverly Hills into a ’90s Marilyn Monroe” and failing, it might have been useful to produce a sash or at least a t-shirt with the words Human Being printed on it.
Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the villain in a video game or a soap opera. He’s not just the caricature of a white man in a cartoon, but that’s how angry and bitter people have been talking and writing about him. They say in the he’s an avatar for something else, like toxic masculinity or white male entitlement, but that’s the video game in their heads. It’s not reality. It’s a medieval allegory. It’s a bad novel. People ought to remember the difference, even if they feel under siege, even if they feel like there’s a vast conspiracy out there to destroy everything they stand for and everything they care about.
” My sense is that while the two distributions would overlap, the distribution of the people on the left would be shifted to the bitter side relative to the people on the right.”
Interesting. I live in the red area of a purple state. My sense is that the right is more bitter and more angry, among those who are interested in politics. For those who aren’t, I dont see much difference between the two groups.
Steve
Yeah I thought this quote was interesting too. I don’t have strong evidence/opinions on which side is more bitter, but I think we should be very skeptical about beliefs like like, i.e. that your political opponents are more likely to have some negative characteristic (bitterness in this case). A little too convenient.
I would guess people (on both sides) over estimate the portion of their political opponents that have any given negative characteristic relative to their own group, and I think there’s a decent chance that’s what Arnold is doing here.