Liberals perceive more racism and sexism than racial minorities and women say they experience. Experiments show that liberals perceive tests where men or whites perform better as less credible than equivalent tests showing women or minorities doing better, even though conservatives rate them equally credible. Liberals are thus predisposed to believe discrimination is the cause of disadvantaged group disparities.
Pointer from a reader, who saw this as saying that progressives are inclined to the oppressor-oppressed axis. The overall article is somewhat rambling and indecisive. For me, the most interesting point is that progressive academics design surveys that with questions that they think measure people’s sensitivity to oppression when conservatives interpret those surveys in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. This survey results are meaningful, but the survey-takers provide biased interpretations. When a conservative says that racism is not the main problem holding back minorities, the progressive academics say that the conservative is showing “racial resentment.’
Confirmation bias is a problem for all of us. Having made that disclaimer…
This finding reminds me of an aphorism from a comment board online:
“Conservatives believe what they see
Liberals see what they believe.”
Grossman states that “Trump took advantage of a moment of rising racial conflict” as if people would have ignored Ferguson and the treatment of those who dared say “All Lives Matter” otherwise. The academic progressives run crosstabs on every item against every other item in as many different surveys as it takes to find the correlation to justify the labels they wanted to hang on Trump voters. Neither are any different than the Russian trolls who successfully used racial tensions to manipulate both Democrats and Republicans, except with more sophistication.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/russian-trolls-hyped-anger-over-black-lives-matter-more-than-previously-known/ A post-racial future awaits us if we simply ignore the race-baiters and refuse to give them the power to manipulate us.
This reminds me of a anecdotal claim, the difference in political cultures between Kenya and Tanzania.
In Kenya politics is highly related to ethnicity. Ethnicity tends to be highly salient, and the “playing of an ethnic card” is pretty common.
In Tanzania, so goes the claim, there is an elite compact to forbid that. Playing an ethnic card gets you drummed out of the Tanzanian political elite, promptly and permanently. (So I heard it argued by a modern historian of Tanzania, in a public lecture, shortly after the Kenyan election riots / killings of of 2007 (ca. 1000 deaths estimated)).
In Tanzania, Nyerere helped to foster this, but it might go much deeper. The fact that Tanzania has lots of lots of tiny ethnolinguistic groups might help. Kenya has many small groups, but several large and self-conscious ones as well.
Party discipline probably helps in this regard.
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Occasionally new elite compacts arise. I’m not a political scientist so it’s not my specialty. A textbook example is the Mexican tradition of one six year term for the president, after which his career is over. Thirty plus years of Porfirio Diaz before the Revolution made many people agree that such a thing should never again be permitted in Mexico, so enough people elites could agree on “six years of presidency and your career is over.”
I am of the opinion that in the USA the president’s spouse should not be able to run later, as we saw with Bill and Hilary Clinton, and the Clinton Foundation which bore little resemblance to the Carter Foundation. Perhaps there will be an amendment to that effect.
Getting back to ethnic and racial cards, it would be nice to see the party functionaries in the USA back away from playing them. How that might happen is beyond me. Especially with the rich American tradition of ethnic politics, churches, neighborhoods, festivals, etc, &c.
On the other hand, I am concerned about any banning of so-called hate speech, and to me it seems self-evident that European tendencies in that regard are ill-considered and the codes have simply become “weaponized.” So, what to do?
So what to do? I think many, if not most, people are voting with their mice and moving to non-aligned new media outlets that do not rigidly conform to any identity-based ideology. Russ Robert’s popularity is a great example of this. Good article on how legacy media is losing audiences at: http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/17/if-the-intellectual-dark-web-is-questionable-so-is-the-new-york-times/
The ability to capitalize on certain opportunities after being employed in elite government positions, and the tendency of these incentives to corrupt, distort decision-making, and recruit for, ahem, moral flexibility, is a huge problem. It’s one that one rarely sees taken seriously, and only complained about when the author’s ox is the one being gored, because some political opponent is caught raking it in in exchange for the access and influence he has over the folks in his rolodex. (do people even still use ‘rolodex’ anymore?).
One hears certain foreign intellectuals rebut charges their their countries have rampant bribery and are very corrupt with the assertion that things are in fact just as corrupt in developed countries, only the bribery takes much more indirect and sophisticated forms, which are in fact so subtle that the parties themselves can rationalize and convince themselves that nothing untoward has occurred.
I have gradually come around to believing this charge to be both perfectly true and far too ignored. Libertarians in particular seem unsure and conflicted about what, if anything, to do about it, since banning or taxing otherwise plausibly legal activities makes them uncomfortable.
For example, I’d like to see a 100% tax on any “speech fees” in excess of, say, $10,000 a day, or book deals over $500,000 (which is still pretty generous!), even in absence of any showing of wrongdoing, but I doubt most libertarians would find those measures to be consistent with their usual take on things, unless they are willing to make very special exceptions for political figures because of the special nature of their role in our system.
“but I doubt most libertarians would find those measures to be consistent with their usual take on things, unless they are willing to make very special exceptions for political figures because of the special nature of their role in our system”
Count this one libertarian as confirming your doubt. There are so many ways this could be weaponized in favor of incumbents…
George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany machine pol, liked to say “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” He made a distinction between honest and dishonest graft.
sorry to say that–it’s nervous tic. Because he is funny, and online (the essays).
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How to change things so the revolving door is less profitable? It’s a tough one.
I find myself wondering what the goal is for all these three-axes posts. Mostly, it feels like Arnold wants to provide a framework for us to understand how confirmation bias tends to fall into categories, with the intent being that this helps us to recognize and check these biases and improve the conversations.
Unfortunately, the commenters often fail to meet the challenge, and instead pick an axis and start venting. Perhaps I do it too. Arnold even falls for this trap occasionally.
Can’t we do any better?
I found this part from one of the papers interesting, if you ever wondered what questions they used to “measure” these things:
The title of the article: “Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism”
Another “scientific” finding that the people with whom the authors disagree about vastly complex social phenomena do so only because of unconscious racism caused by psychological shortcomings. The “measurements” sound like something out of a Scientology textbook.
These questions are revealing–I might call them “lame, inept, and lacking nuance.” It’s tough to know how I would answer them on a 5 or 7 point “strongly agree…to strongly disagree” scale.
Probably the main thing for young minorities to realize that large scale racism does not exist and things are much better than 30, 60, or 90 years ago. (Of course it should be reasonable to expect conservative not go all affirmative action claims against minorities as well.) Anyway, in 2018, there is a bizarro reality, the kids with the least economic opportunities are Rust Belt WWC. (And West Virginia has the highest opoid deaths today.)
Ok try an expert against conservatives which is why is there so much anger against Illegal Immigration.
1) Most economic studies show no disapproving of the null hypothesis either way if immigrants increase or decrease wages. Short term maybe lower wages in local economy for 3 – 5 but long term maybe higher native wages. In reality, immigration effect on natives wages fits your too much micro-economic activity to truly understand the correlation/causation.
2) Crime rates of immigrants are lower than natives. (However, second and third generation are higher.)
3) I still don’t understand how an Illegal Immigrant mowing lawns for the Dallas homeowners or picking avocados in California effects the coal employment. The states that moved most towards Trump have tended to have fewer immigrant residents.
I wonder how much “anger about immigration” is simply attributable to the way in which laws are selectively enforced. I don’t think it really fits into the civilization versus barbarism axis very neatly. Dr. Kling had a post about selective law enforcement a while back and I was puzzled by how it would fit in. One can believe all of the following and be consistent:
(1) Immigration produces net benefits for society.
(2) Immigration laws should be enforced. Changes to immigration policy should be accomplished through the legislative process.
(3) Illegal immigrants should not have advantages over individuals who attempt to immigrate here legally.
(4) Would be immigrants with criminal backgrounds should not be admitted.
(5) The immigration system should be reformed to increase the number of immigrants, to replace the diversity lottery with a skills-based merit/need system, and to narrow the range of extended family members who can be be admitted as family.
Admitting to agreeing to 2, 3, 4, or 5 seems to automatically make one a conservative and to impute a horror of barbarism (not to mention being automatically branded a racist, alt-right white supremacist deplorable by polite society). Like race, immigration is a policy game only one side will be allowed to address.
That “racial resentment” meme goes both ways.
Many of the advantages blacks decry as “white privilege” are situations such as having two parents in the home, or having parents care enough about their children to help them with their homework (I’ve seen lefties actually advocate that the law ban this practice or compel discrimination against those so advantaged). This boils down to saying “I don’t want to admit that I’m not a responsible parent, so it’s unfair to allow anyone else to be one.”
Then there are those who can’t hold down a job because they interpret any criticism of their behavior, speech pattern, lack of attention to detail, and so forth as racism.
I refuse to take seriously the views of anyone who expresses either of those viewpoints. They are simply idiots.
A markedly nicer way of stating this issue is that the farther down you go from the upper quintile or upper middle class, the greater the extent to which parenting assumes “natural growth” rather than “concerted cultivation.” Kids just naturally grow up to be physicians and CPAs. N’est pas? Hey, my kid’s not a CPA! Somebody has done me wrong!
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this.
The article here is a good review. The tone may be a tad self-congratulatory and scolding.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/culture-and-achievement-13681.html
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It has often seemed to me that some of the most keen and cold-blooded analyses of such issues is in Ed Banfield’s 50 year old book _The unheavenly city_. Apparently the book made enemies and caused some controversy.
So says Banfield…the issue of concerted cultivation, time preference, occupational specialization could be seen in the different life expectancy at age ten between Russian Jewish immigrants and Irish Americans in NYC a hundred years ago. Little snippets can be seen at Isegoria, which thankfully is well indexed.
The point is that you’ll be *biased* by your rest position. If you’re self-aware enough to know that you wax conservative or wane liberal, then it’s time to pay extra special close attention to things where you fall back on those. Not in the interest of some mythic balance but in the interest of trying to keep the errors and noise down.
FWIW, I figure both sets of just-so stories have a lot of truth to them,. It’s just noisy.