Category Archives: Politics

Civil Society in a Narrower, Deeper, Older World

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A commenter writes,

the Little Platoons may not be feasible. It seems to me that the world has professionalised, with more technical, domain-specific knowledge, which is a barrier to those with moderate interest or casual observers.

The strongest institutions of civil society used to be broader and shallower. Churches were more important when more people lived in smaller communities and more people attended them. Trade unions used to be larger. Schools used to be less segregated by income class (although more segregated by race). Organizations like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and the NAACP were much more welcoming to Republicans. Such organizations have become narrower, deeper, and older. They are less capable than they once were of representing or mobilizing large numbers of people.

Let me suggest that civil society still exists (it is wrong to say that we are bowling alone), but that there are now many more associations, each with a narrower constituency that is more deeply committed. Think of television. “I Love Lucy” dominated the culture of the 1950s. “M*A*S*H” was pretty well embedded in the 1970s. I don’t think any program comes close today, even though people still consume a lot of TV-like media.

Recently, my wife and I were guilty of going to the Everly Set, a tribute duo playing a house concert setting. The whole concept exemplified narrower, deeper, older. It was also very enjoyable.

The commenter raises the issue of what it means for our role vis-a-vis government. As the shallower, broader institutions of civil society become weaker, this makes people more willing to defer to government expertise. Yuval Levin expresses similar concerns in The Fractured Republic, which I am confident that the commenter would enjoy reading.

I do not see the broad, shallow institutions making a comeback. I do not see how the narrower, deeper organizations can provide viable alternatives to government. Fifty years ago, Charity meant the United Way. Now, it means GoFundMe. Will the narrower, deeper model really work, or will we continue to think in terms of government as the primary distributor of charity? Yet I do not see how government can be sufficiently competent to handle the responsibilities that people are willing to cede to it. It looks as if we are stuck.

Moderates fall by the wayside

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HaAretz reports,

Two former heads of the Israel Defense Forces formally launched a new movement Monday designed to bring together a million Israelis against the forces of division they say are racking the country.

…The main problem of Israeli society, Piron said, is hatred of those who are different  − as a result of alienation, ignorance and a lack of familiarity.

I think that such a movement also is needed in the U.S. Hating the other–and feeling smug about it–is where we seem to be headed. But I think this is an uphill battle.

In a way, I think it gets back to narrower, deeper, older. In politics, as in other interests, people with only a moderate commitment tend to be left on the sidelines, while the more militant players take the field. Consider:

Would there be much of an audience for a talk radio program that was moderate?

Would Paul Krugman have the following he does if he were moderate?

Would readers of the WaPo reward it for being even-handed?

Would celebrities bring attention to themselves by being moderate?

Do lots of people use social media to share thoughts that are moderate?

I rest my case.

Some Pro-Trump Intellectuals

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Joshua Mitchell writes,

What binds globalism and identity politics together is the judgment that national sovereignty is not the final word on how to order collective life. This judgment against national sovereignty—let us state the matter boldly—was the animating principle of the post-1989 world order, an order that is now collapsing before our eyes. Citizens who came of age after 1989 scarcely know how daring this project has been and, thanks to the American university, can scarcely conceive of any alternative to it. The post-1989 world order, however, is not fixed and immutable. It is, moreover, a rather bold historical experiment.

These are from a new journal called American Affairs. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I will put some more quotes, from this and other articles, below the fold.

A few random thoughts from me:

1. What is Michael Lind doing on the masthead? I do not think of him as a natural Trump supporter. Of course, the mission statement for the journal does not say anything about Mr. Trump. It says, for example

We seek to provide a forum for the discussion of new policies that are outside of the conventional dogmas, and a platform for new voices distinguished by originality, experience, and achievement rather than the compromised credentials of careerist institutions.

2. We have National Affairs (Yuval Levin’s journal) and now American Affairs. What’s next? Playoffs? A college draft?

3. I find it easier to be anti-anti-Trump than to be pro-Trump. Left-wing campus activism repels me. The Democratic Party’s identity politics repels me. The outrage-manufacturing machine that is the Washington Post front page repels me. The arrogance of those in power regarding ordinary citizens repels me, although I do not think that American’s citizenry is blameless when it comes to the health care mess, for example.

4. I think that most of the policy ideas to help working-class Americans that are floating around these days are beside the point. I feel that way about trade restriction, immigration restriction, minimum wage increases, support for unions, education–pretty much every hobby horse, left and right.

I think that deregulation could make a positive difference, although the difference might be small. That is an area where there is some alignment between President Trump’s agenda and the needs of working-class Americans.

However, if it were up to me, I would focus on reducing the implicit taxes on labor demand and labor supply.

a. Get rid of “employer-provided” health insurance, which is an employment tax on healthy workers to pay for health care costs of workers with chronic illnesses, and instead provide support for the chronically ill with government funds. On health care policy in general, I continue to prefer the approaches that I suggested a decade ago in Crisis of Abundance to the Obamacare and ObamacareLite choices currently in play.

b. Reduce or eliminate the payroll tax.

c. Substitute a basic income grant for means-tested programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. However, reduce overall spending on poverty programs. That probably means setting the BIG below the level required to sustain a household. Leave it to charities and local governments to find the households that need and deserve more assistance than a low BIG can provide.

d. Fund (a) and (b) with a tax on consumer spending.

5. On foreign policy, if Trumpism means nothing more and nothing less than treating governments that work with us better than governments that work against us, then I am on board.

Continue reading →

Narrower, Deeper, Older

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Phil Moss writes,

But the plethora of new dances comes at a cost. It increases our fragmentation. It creates a barrier to entry for both veterans (who come and go at various points in their lives) and for newbies who have to “drink from a firehydrant” in order to become regulars. For veteran non-regulars it becomes daunting to come back and see so many dances they haven’t learned. Unless one attends regularly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land instead of feeling comfortable when “coming home.”

The article is about Israeli folk dancing, which I know interests me a lot more than my readers, so I won’t say “read the whole thing.” Instead, I want to talk about the general trends I see in the way people engage with their interests. You can become engaged with any number of interests, including your religion, a sport, a hobby, your profession, a charitable cause, etc.

I want to offer some observations that apply to the entire class of interests, and I will suggest that “matching technology” (Tyler Cowen’s term) plays a role in these trends. Then I will come back to Israeli Dancing.

My central claim here is that the nature of engagement has changed over the past fifty years, in these three ways:

1. Narrower. There are fewer people casually engaged.

2. Deeper. Those who are engaged are more committed and have deeper knowledge.

3. Older. For any interest that has been around for a long time, the demographics of those interested now skews older.

For example, consider the game of bridge. A social bridge game is four friends getting together in someone’s house to play. A bridge tournament is many strangers competing against one another in a large room. In high school and college, I played a lot of social bridge. In college, I also played some tournament bridge. I then stopped playing for decades.

Fifty years ago, I believe that there were more social bridge players than tournament players. Today, it is closer to the reverse.

When I tried to get back into tournament bridge a few years ago, I found that the “barrier to entry” had gotten much higher. Players expect you to know a plethora of new tactics, which in bridge are known as “conventions.”

The other point to notice was that the median age of players at the tournament seemed to be about 70. Not many young people are willing to get past the barrier to entry.

As another example, consider people with an interest in baseball. Fifty years ago, many casual fans knew the batting averages and home run totals of well-known players. Today, there are fewer fans with that knowledge. Instead, there is a relatively small group of fans whose knowledge includes arcane statistics that did not exist when I was growing up.

Also, I think that interest in baseball skews older, in spite of marketing efforts aimed at the young. My sense is that in the ballpark it is mostly people over age 50 who are paying close attention to the action on the field. The younger people are on their cell phones and/or watching the JumboTron.

I believe that religion is becoming narrower, deeper, and older. A smaller fraction of the population is affiliated with a place of worship, but there may be an uptick among those deeply committed, such as Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, many congregations are thinning out as their populations age and die off.

I suspect that what Tyler Cowen calls “matching technology” (the Internet) plays a big role. Instead of settling for a lowest-common-denominator activity, like a game of social bridge, you can find something that really excites you and connect with people who share your excitement. With better matching technology, the total number of viable interests goes up, and the share of people who settle for activities in which they are only moderately interested goes down.

“Matching” means that any given interest draws a narrower set of people. Those people are more committed, so that the interest becomes deeper, with a higher barrier to entry in terms of study and practice. Finally, as new interests emerge, the population engaged in traditional interests gets older.
Continue reading →

And a Lot Less Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Peter Beinart thinks we need a whole lot more religion.

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

My thoughts.

1. He is not the first to suggest that bad things happen when politics comes to fill a void left by a decline in religion.

2. I am glad that there are people on the left who would like to see the heat turned down in politics. The Three Languages of Politics is my attempt to help with that project. The revised edition is due out soon.

3. I hope that the left did not discover that political warfare is ugly only because of their shocking defeat in November. Instead, I would prefer to believe that Beinart would have written the same essay decrying politico-religious movements on both sides even if the requisite thousands of votes in key states had gone a different way and Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency.

The Winner of the Charles Murray Thread

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Is it Andrew Sullivan?.

And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual — a secular exorcism, if you will — that reaches a frenzied, disturbing catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone engaged. Then they recite a common liturgy in unison from sheets of paper. Here’s how they begin: “This is not respectful discourse, or a debate about free speech. These are not ideas that can be fairly debated, it is not ‘representative’ of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas.” They never specify which of Murray’s ideas they are referring to. Nor do they explain why a lecture on a recent book about social inequality cannot be a “respectful discourse.” The speaker is open to questions and there is a faculty member onstage to engage him afterward. She came prepared with tough questions forwarded from specialists in the field. And yet: “We … cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech.” They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.

Or is Sullivan’s apocalyptic rhetoric just another example of the sort of outrage politics that is dominating the media these days?

Martin Gurri on President Trump and His Opponents

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He writes,

The fact that established institutions have felt compelled to berate a newly-elected president, and benefited materially from it, shows how deeply the way of the web has penetrated the real world. Aggression garners online attention. Persistent and outrageous aggression will build a following. Every incentive pulls you toward the promotion of outrageous antagonists as worthy objects of aggression. The ideal is perpetual combat with the most extreme opponents, aggression on aggression, outrage against outrage. To a casual glance, this will resemble the behavior of two scorpions in a bottle. A closer look will reveal a finely-tuned symbiotic relationship, in which both players benefit so long as they continue to move ever farther out, to opposite extremes.

When cultivating outrage becomes the dominate strategy, expect to encounter the outrageous.

Dan Sperber on Culture

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He says,

The classical view of what culture is, very simply, that which is transmitted in a population by non-genetic means: by communication, imitation, and all forms of interaction. In the human case, imitation is an important factor which has been overplayed. Humans imitate better than any other animal, (except maybe parrots, but parrots have a narrow range of things that they imitate).

Later,

to explain the success of bits of culture, of practices, of rituals, of techniques, of ideologies, and so on, the question was not how do they benefit the population in which they evolve; the question was how do they benefit their own propagation? Dawkins was saying that much better than I could have done at the time.

He argues against the System 1, System 2 framework of Kahneman.

[Humans] exploit reasons in our cognitive work. This is not a second system; it’s just an ordinary cognitive capacity among others, which has important implications for interaction because that’s what drove its very evolution. It’s an ability to understand others, to justify ourselves in the eyes of others, to convince them of our ideas, to accept and to evaluate the justifications and arguments that others give and be convinced by them or not.

…the basic functions of reason are social. They have to do with the fact that we interact with each other’s bodies and with each other’s minds. And to interact with other’s minds is to be able to represent a representation that others have, and to have them represent our representations, and also to act on the representation of others and, in some cases, to let others act on our own representations.

The Basis of Moral Outrage

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Zachary K. Rothschild and Lucas A. Keefer write,

we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity.

Pointer from Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who nicely summarizes the studies. Brown writes,

Ultimately, the results of Rothschild and Keefer’s five studies were “consistent with recent research showing that outgroup-directed moral outrage can be elicited in response to perceived threats to the in-group’s moral status,”

In other words, you lash out at Trump in part because of your own status anxiety.

My thoughts:

1. Be cautious. Remember the low replication rate of these sorts of studies.

2. Counter-intuitive? Not so much. I think that many people suspect that expressing moral outrage is a cheap way of trying to raise one’s status.

3. When I was younger, psychological reductionism (e.g., Freud) was quite popular. There was widespread suspicion that the “true believer,” in Eric Hoffer’s terminology, was wrestling with personal demons. Back in those days, if you were to suggest that, say, a politician who spoke up for family values was probably plagued by guilt about his own sexuality, everyone in the room would have nodded their heads.

The Making of a Quagmire

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Concerning the new official Republican House health care proposal, Michael Cannon writes,

The leadership bill therefore creates the potential, if not the certainty, of a series of crises that Congress will need address, and that will crowd out other GOP priorities, in late 2017 before the 2018 plan year begins, and again leading up to the 2018 elections. If Congress gets health reform wrong on its first try, health reform could consume most of President Trump’s first term. Pressure from Democrats, the media, and constituents could prevent Republicans from moving on to tax reform, infrastructure spending, or even Supreme Court nominees.

Avik Roy is more favorably disposed to the proposal, but with significant misgivings. I tend to agree with his “cons” and disagree with his “pros.”

The WaPo story on the proposal says

four key Republican senators, all from states that opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA, said they would oppose any new plan that would leave millions of Americans uninsured.

It would take a lot of nerve to say: Our plan is to hold households responsible for obtaining health insurance. Some households will “lose” coverage that was heavily subsidized by the government. But if you cannot stand up and say that, then you cannot change the direction of health care policy away from socialism.

As I wrote recently, the Overton Window has moved, so that responsibility for health insurance is strictly with the Federal government, not with the household. Along similar lines, Philip Klein writes,

Barring radical changes, Republicans will not be passing a bill that ushers in a new era of market-based healthcare. In reality, the GOP will either be passing legislation that rests on the same philosophical premise as Obamacare, or will pass nothing at all, and thus keep Obamacare itself in place.

After digesting these and other analyses, I am inclined to think that Obamacare will not be repealed and replaced during the Trump Administration. Instead, it will be repealed and replaced by the Democrats the next time they are in power. And the replacement will not look very market-friendly.