Category Archives: Politics

Voices of moderation

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1. Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute writes,

To win in 2020, Democrats should resist the urge to turn the House into the new headquarters of the anti-Trump resistance or to initiate battles over legislative priorities favored by party liberals that have no hope of passage.

My own sense is that we will not see much moderation in the Trump era. Neither Mr. Trump’s non-college-educated male supporters nor his college-educated female antagonists are likely to respond to an appeal to moderation.

2. Brink Lindsey and Niskanen Center co-authors write,

A moderate is one who is grateful for both liberalism and conservatism, and hopes for — and tries through their own work to move toward — the best version of each, in part in service to improvement in the other.

Their manifesto runs to 18 pages, including footnotes, and it is not consistent in tone. Notwithstanding the sentence quoted above, there is quite a bit of straw-manning in the earlier sections, including using epithets like “market fundamentalism” and “democratic fundamentalism.”

David Brooks read the Niskanen manifesto and gave it the sort of review that Lincoln Steffens once gave to the Soviets. Brooks writes,

I felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them. I began to feel at home.

The way it looks to me, the Niskanen Center occupies a sort of John McCain place in the media firmament. That is, the NYT will give it points for moderation whenever it breaks with conservatives. For example, it’s fine for the Niskanen Center to attack climate denialists.

But suppose the Niskanen Center came out with a plan for a sustainable long-term budget and attacked those who are in denial about the projected deficits in our entitlement programs. If that wins plaudits from the NYT, then I might begin to feel at home.

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How religion tames politics

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Andrew Sullivan writes,

if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.

Conor Barnes writes,

Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”

I recommend reading both essays in their entirety.

I think of major religions as having teachings in two realms. One realm is the self, and the other realm is the world at large.

In the realm of the self, the teaching is typically that as a human being you have weaknesses, flaws, and some inclinations that are evil. You are taught to acknowledge this and to strive to improve. These sorts of teachings make you somewhat hesitant and uncertain about claiming to know how others must live.

In the realm of the world at large, the teaching is that there is wickedness and injustice that we must try to correct. These sorts of teachings incline you to think that you know how others must live.

So there is tension between the teachings in the two realms. The teachings in the realm of the world at large incline you to be intolerant and authoritarian. The teachings in the realm of the self incline you to be humble. People have to find the right balance, so that they care about the world at large without becoming despotic in their inclinations.

But what if you have no religious affiliation, and instead you get meaning in your life primarily from your political beliefs? Political movements do not come with teachings in the realm of the self. Their entire focus is on the flaws that are in the realm of the world at large. There is nothing to hold you back from a righteous certainty that can justify violence and totalitarianism.

Virginia Postrel on culture

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She writes,

In both markets and culture, the blue-collar values of loyalty, solidarity, security, and physical production, have largely given way to the creative-class values of creativity, self-expression, risk-taking, and brains. It’s the revenge of the nerds. The winners are symbolic analysts. The losers are guys good with their hands. For those who adhere to the old values, the shift can be infuriating. Many people suddenly feel not merely economically insecure but culturally disrespected.

Near the end, she poses some questions.

What can a liberal analysis tell us about cultural change? Do institutions of experimentation and feedback work to correct errors in cultural systems as they do in economics? Are there significant differences that might affect outcomes? Are the time scales similar or different? Are there institutions that might limit the collateral damage—a worthwhile question in the case of economic dynamism as well?

Culture is too important to be left to the sociologists.

Comments on contemporary politics

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1. Tyler Cowen was interviewed by Max Read and David Wallace-Wells a couple of weeks ago. He sees a growth in non-libertarian right-wing politics, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

That seems correct. I think that the Republicans can do well electorally by throwing libertarians under the bus. The Democrats’ best chance in a national election is to throw coastal progressives under the bus, but I don’t think they will be able to do that.

2. Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni (WSJ) wrote,

a campaign for Congress in many places starts with 60% of college-educated white women favoring the Democratic nominee. An even larger share of white men without degrees favor the Republican—making both essentially unreachable by the opposing candidate.

…The differences between the two groups are stark on many of the issues dominating the midterm campaign: immigration, gun control and health care. In each case, white men without college degrees support Mr. Trump’s policy stance, while white women with degrees are opposed.

For me, this is the most useful polling analysis that I have seen in a long time. I brought it up with a friend, and she said, “Of course, those two groups despise one another sexually, as well.”

The first story in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest story collection, You Think it, I’ll Say it, concerns the sexual tension between a professor of gender studies attending a conference and the Trump-supporting driver who takes her from the airport to her hotel.

In movies of an earlier era, there is a theme of tension between a prim, proper, attractive woman and a blue-collar male played by an actor like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, or James Garner. If the movie is a comedy, the man wins the affection of the woman. If it is tragedy, it ends. . .differently.

The church vs. the clan

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Jonathann F. Schulz writes,

Church marriage prohibitions pushed Europe away from a kin-based society and paved the way for the development of inclusive institutions. . . this paper highlights the role of kin networks for the formation of commune cities in Europe. This suggests that the seeds of the Great Divergence (Pomeranz, 2000) between Europe and other regions of the world were already planted by the Church’s incest prohibitions in late antiquity. Even today, medieval Church exposure and the absence of strong kin networks are associated with higher civicness and, ultimately, with more inclusive national institutions.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Cousin marriage is still prevalent in parts of the world. There are those, including Schulz, who see this as a source of major cultural differences.

Would forecasting tournaments reduce polarization?

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Barbara Mellers, PhilipTetlock, and Hal R.Arkes claim that they would.

We explore the power of an emerging methodology, forecasting tournaments, to encourage clashing factions to do something odd: to translate their beliefs into nuanced probability judgments and track accuracy over time and questions. In theory, tournaments advance the goals of “deliberative democracy” by incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, thus depolarizing unnecessarily polarized debates. We examine the hypothesis that, in the process of thinking critically about their beliefs, tournament participants become more moderate in their own political attitudes and those they attribute to the other side.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I have my doubts.

1. People who hold polarized beliefs are not interested in making probability statements. It’s like asking a religious fanatic to give the probability that he is mistaken. It probably would be easy to steer people to rational thinking about politics if politics were about policy. But it’s not.

2. The interesting forecasts are conditional forecasts. As Scott Sumner put it, “(Unconditional) prediction is overrated.”
If there is strict gun control, will that reduce gun violence? We can argue about that, and we can even make empirical arguments, but we cannot run the controlled experiment that allows forecasts to be tested.

What I’m reading

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Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, by Derek Leebaert. He writes,

Today it’s said habitually that “with the destruction at home in 1947, the British gave up trying to maintain a global empire” and that “a global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire” followed. . .people came to believe that some enormous transition had occurred years earlier, in 1947. It hadn’t. The events that transpired during these weeks, which surrounded the Truman Doctrine as well as the Marshall Plan, are very different from what historians believe.

His thesis seems to be that the diminution of Britain’s global role was less rapid and inevitable than we now take it to be. At the time, Britain still seemed formidable.

I think that I am well read on World War II and Vietnam. But this “in between” era is one with which I am less familiar. I believe that I am learning a lot.

My favorite elements of the book are his sketches of key officials, some well known and others less so. The story of Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, a left-wing politician who nonetheless valued Britain’s imperial prestige and came to loathe Stalin’s aggression, is new and interesting to me.

President Eisenhower made a decision not to send its forces into Vietnam (then known as Indochina) in 1954. Leebaert’s account of this decision differs somewhat from that of David Halberstam. Halberstam has Eisenhower shrewdly accessing the opinion of anti-interventionists, including Congressional leaders and General Matt Ridgway. Leebaert has Eisenhower wanting to intervene, but finding little Congressional support (one crucial opponent was Senator Lyndon Johnson!) without any help from the British. The Eisenhower Administration ardently sought British help, but the Brits declined.

There was in interesting tie-in between Vietnam and Suez. Both the Americans and the British entertained the idea of the Brits helping America in Vietnam in exchange for the Americans taking sides with the British on Suez. Had that deal materialized, events would have played out differently in both places. But in the end, neither the Americans nor the British were willing to sacrifice what it saw as its interests in one area in order to get support from the other side elsewhere.

Revisiting the Hidden Tribes poll

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Several commenters did not like the poll, and a reader suggested that I try the Hidden Tribes quiz. Ugh! What a terrible survey instrument.

I would like to believe that there is a large portion of the population that is tired of hyper-partisanship. But if there is such a majority out there, this poll is not a credible way to find it.

I would trust a survey based on my three-axes model more than I would trust the Hidden Tribes report. If the general public is more centrist or nuanced, that would show up as a lot of people not consisting aligning with any one axis.

Senator Sasse talks his book

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Ben Sasse writes,

The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. Even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections, at least our cable news tribes offer the common experience of getting to hate people together.

His book is Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal.

It seems to me that this is the year when the observation went mainstream that political behavior is tribal. We’re all political psychologists now.

My view of why the problem is severe at the moment is that the incentive in the media is to raise the stakes. Who do you think gets more clicks, a pundit who writes as if the other side’s position regarding today’s pseudo-news is dangerously evil, or a pundit who writes as if both sides have some merit or who plays down the significance of the most-talked-about current event altogether? That won’t change until (unless?) we in the general public can build up an immunity to the inflammatory political viruses.

Senator Sasse may be on the right track. It would be helpful if we could elevate the status of people who at a local level do real work to solve real problems. And we ought to lower the status of people who express and amplify outrage on the national issue du jour.

Personality, culture, and violence

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Tage Rai wrote,

Across all cases, perpetrators are using violence to create, conduct, sustain, enhance, transform, honour, protect, redress, repair, end, and mourn valued relationships.

Individuals and cultures certainly vary in the ways they do this and the contexts in which they think violence is an acceptable means of making things right, but the goal is the same. The purpose of violence is to sustain a moral order.

I’ve linked to this essay before. More recently, Charles Chu reminded me of it.

I speculate that personality and culture interact when it comes to violence. Culture signals when violence will be approved. Some violent practices have been greatly reduced over the last few hundred years, because they now meet with widespread disapproval.

But I believe that individuals differ in their attraction to violence. If you are inclined to violence, you are likely to seek out situations in which violence meets with widespread approval; or you may come up with ways to justify violence even when most people in your society would not condone it.

I suspect that there is a vicious cycle. A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence. They will engage in violent acts, which the leaders of the movement or cause will feel a need to justify. The more that they rationalize violence, the more their movement will attract violent supporters. And so on,