Category Archives: Politics

The Best Post-Election Piece So Far

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From Joshua Mitchell.

“Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.”

…When you start thinking in terms of management by global elites at the trans-state level and homeless selves at the substate level that seek, but never really find, comfort in their “identities,” the consequences are significant: Slow growth rates (propped up by debt-financing) and isolated citizens who lose interest in building a world together. Then of course, there’s the rampant crony-capitalism that arises when, in the name of eliminating “global risk” and providing various forms of “security,” the collusion between ever-growing state bureaucracies and behemoth global corporations creates a permanent class of winners and losers.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Read Mitchell’s whole piece, as well as the earlier essay to which he links. I find his thoughts congenial, because I agree that the election pitted cosmopolitan vs. anti-cosmopolitan.

However, this is far from the last word. In fact, I would say that the longer you take to react to news, the better off you are. In general, I like to schedule my posts several days in advance. (This one is being drafted 3 days before it is scheduled to appear.) That gives me time to revise or delete a post before it appears. You may have noticed that when stock futures plummeted the night of the election, Paul Krugman predicted that the plunge would be permanent. I bet he wishes he had scheduled that post for a few days later, in which case he could have deleted it before it became public. In fact, I rarely have to revise or delete, because scheduling a post in advance forces me to be less reactive and to think ahead.

A lot of social media lacks the “schedule in advance” feature. I don’t think Twitter has it (I only use Twitter automatically, to announce blog posts, so I do not know how Twitter actually works.) Facebook does not have it. Software for posting comments does not have it. (If you like to comment on this blog, feel free to hold back for a few days. Old comments on old posts show up for me to read just as well as fresh comments on fresh posts.)

Thus, for the most part, social media leads people to be reactive and trigger-happy, as opposed to reflective and sober. It is something that one has to be aware of and push back against.

Election Over-read

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.

Read the whole thing. He is delicately suggesting that Democrats might have a notion of diversity that is too narrow. However, I doubt that he would have written that post if the election had gone the other way. Moreover, the election easily could have gone the other way. Maybe if it had been held a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later the outcome would have been different. Maybe if the Democratic ticket had been more attractive the outcome would have been different. Maybe if Rubio or one of the other Republican establishment favorites had won the nomination the outcome would have been different.

I should note that all election-reading, including my own, tends to be self-serving. One crude way to describe the social order in this country is that straight, white progressives are at the top, conservatives are in the middle, and various presumably oppressed groups are at the bottom. Progressives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the bottom. Conservatives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the top. I might add that some progressives see a social order that includes two layers on the left, with centrist Clinton Democrats on top of true progressives. In this view, the centrists are the ones who received the kick in the pants.

Elections prove much less than we are inclined to think they do. I would say that if progressives and Democrats were right about policy issues before the election, then they are still right. If they were wrong, they would still be wrong, even if they had won.

What I take away from recent elections is that other people bought into Barack Obama and Donald Trump much more than I would. I am not sure what else I should read into the results.

TLP watch

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Sean Blanda wrote,

Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug [jerks] than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.

In The Three Languages of Politics, I also discuss political discourse that is designed to close the minds of the people on your side, as opposed to opening their minds or those of the opponent.

Blanda linked to another piece, from 2015, written by self-described leftist Fredrik DeBoer, who wrote,

Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction — surveying the people who are just like you and trying to come up with ways in which that social connection is actually a political connection.

The essay ended with a plea

You have to be willing to sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you.

Now, apply those thoughts to libertarians.

Martin Gurri Watch

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Jim Newell writes,

The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.

I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was [baloney sandwich].

Once again, Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public seems to be the best guide to events. It seems as though the Democratic Party is ripe for the sort of anti-establishment revolt that hit the Republicans this year.

Speaking of Gurri, prior to the election, he wrote,

In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war bands, each focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause – feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, racial or sexual grievance. This process, scarcely veiled by the gravitational attraction of President Obama and Clinton herself, will become obvious to the most casual observer the moment the Democrats lose the White House.

That moment has come, and we’ll see how the prediction plays out.

Two Types of Beliefs

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Kevin Simler writes,

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don’t lie awake at night fearing that we’re massively deluded.

But when we consider the beliefs of other people? . . .

Later,

I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been “hired” not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.

Still later,

The trouble with people is that they have partial visibility into our minds, and they sometimes reward us for believing falsehoods and/​or punish us for believing the truth.

My thoughts:

1. One might suggest that incentives apply only to beliefs that you espouse. You can choose your private beliefs on merit. However, it is hard to maintain a private/public disparity. You might have to reveal your true beliefs at some point. Also, when you espouse something, I think it makes you more inclined to believe it.

2. Of course, all beliefs are socially communicated. One way to rephrase Simler’s thesis is that some beliefs are transmitted via reason and others are transmitted via incentives.

3. It might be hard to avoid proceeding from the insight that beliefs can be affected by incentives to go on to say that well, my beliefs are based on merit but yours are based on incentives. Simler, too, is worried about this. His solution is to recommend embedding oneself in a community where the norms of behavior go against maintaining confidence in beliefs that are affected by incentives. Such a community will create good incentives to counteract bad incentives.

My concern is that we are prone to deceive and to self-deceive. Suppose that economist X at Yale and economist Y at GMU are each convinced that he or she is part of a community that creates good social incentives for shaping one’s beliefs. Yet their beliefs differ. What should we do then? I think Simler would say that in that case we should reward those who have low confidence in their beliefs and punish those who have high confidence. But what if neither the Yale nor the GMU economics department effectively does this?

What Will be the Significance of Mr. Trump?

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I recommend reading these three pieces in their entirety.

1. Tyler Cowen wrote,

I think his natural instinct will be to look for some quick symbolic victories to satisfy supporters, and then pursue mass popularity with a lot of government benefits, debt and free-lunch thinking. I don’t think the Trump presidency will be recognizable as traditionally conservative or right-wing.

2. Yuval Levin wrote

this election is at the very best a mixed blessing. It is less a show of strength of any sort than a cry of resistance and outrage. It is a cry that our politics clearly needed to hear and will now be forced to take seriously. But by itself it has not charted a way forward.

3. David French wrote,

I had no idea that the Democratic party was so thoroughly alienating it’s own voters. Hillary is will likely end up with almost 10 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008. She’ll end up with almost six million fewer votes than Obama in 2012. Those voters didn’t move to the GOP. People just stayed home. Given our growing population and the enormous media interest in this campaign, those numbers are simply astounding. The Democrats alienated roughly 14 percent of their 2008 voting base.

The Republicans tend to do better in off-year elections, because Democratic turnout is lower. I am tempted to say that Mrs. Clinton managed to turn this into an off-year election.

[UPDATE: David French takes back his earlier analysis, because it was based on incomplete vote totals.]

Let me speak to the significance of Mr. Trump from the perspective of the person, the party, and ideology.

As a person, his victory is astounding. Like any Republican, he had the liberal media against him. But they were less restrained and balanced than they have been in the past. On top of that, he had some mainstream conservative media (including Yuval Levin and his colleagues at National Review) against him. You can argue that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity with the establishment actually helped to firm his support, but even so you have to give him credit for pulling off such political jujitsu.

As for the party, I expect the schism within the Republican Party to heal quickly. I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s reaction to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I’ve spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.

I do not expect that the Republican establishment will unsay any words that they have spoken about Mr. Trump. But I expect all that will fade away once he is engaged in political combat with Democrats in Washington.

I also think that those progressives who are predicting that the election will have dire consequences for women, gays, and people of color are making a tactical error. They are setting a very low bar for Mr. Trump and the Republicans. When four years from now we still have civil rights laws in place, mostly-legal abortion, and widely-legal gay marriage, these putative victim communities will be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Going forward, the Republicans desperately need to catch on with one or more of the demographic groups that currently is in the bag for the Democrats. Read David French’s piece again. My takeaway is that if the Republicans stand still, then all the Democrats have to do to win the Presidency is find a candidate who does not turn off the weakly-attached voters.

On immigration, I agree with Tyler that Mr. Trump’s border control efforts may prove mostly symbolic. I do not think he needs to make much progress on the wall. He could simply ask ICE to make a regular public display of rudely and forcefully deporting people. I am cynical enough to guess that if every night on television there are scenes of suffering and humiliated deportees, this will satisfy the anti-immigrant crowd without having to build the wall. (For those of you new to this blog, I am against causing suffering and humiliation among deportees. I am not even in favor of deportation in the first place–if it were up to me, the most we would do to deter anyone wanting to take up residence here is charge some sort of one-time fee.)

Assuming Mr. Trump succeeds in creating the impression that our border controls are tight, some of his supporters might countenance giving long-time undocumented residents a path to citizenship. What is unacceptable to those who make an issue of illegal immigration is giving a path to citizenship without much tighter controls.

As for ideology, Mr. Trump is not a man of strong principles. He will not treat his victory as a conservative mandate, nor should he.

On health care policy, pundits are talking as if a Senate filibuster is inevitable if the Republicans try to repeal Obamacare. I would bet against this. For one thing, I don’t think Democratic pollsters are going to be advising their clients to fall on their swords to keep Obamacare. For another thing, I would not put it past Mr. Trump to work with Democrats on a new law. You may have forgotten that before Mr. Obama, whose idea of talking with the other side was to say “I won,” we had Presidents who were able to negotiate bipartisan bills. Do not be shocked if Mr. Trump does this. That would, however, result in health care policy that is at best a mixed bag for those of us with a preference for market-oriented solutions.

Still, I am more optimistic than Tyler that conservatives will win some victories during the Trump Administration. After all, we do have a Republican Congress that is licking its chops. In particular:

1. I would bet that the courts get packed with a lot fewer strongly progressive judges than they would have been under Mrs. Clinton.

2. I would bet that the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor pursue a much less expansive regulatory agenda.

3. I would bet that some of the regulatory red tape that impedes infrastructure projects will go away.

Changed My Mind

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Walking to the polling place, I changed my mind and decided to write in Paul Ryan. That is what I felt like doing today. I wasn’t feeling that way before.

I think what influenced me was a column predicting that the Republican Party after the election is likely to split between the populists who support Trump and the non-populists who support Ryan. My mood affiliation today was with non-populists.

By the way, there was no line at all at the polls. That is because our precinct when nuts for early voting–lines were out the wazoo the first few days of that.

Final Meditations on the Election

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Now, social media make it possible for a candidate’s reach to far exceed his or her internal capabilities to formulate policy. Even at this very late stage, we still don’t have much sense who Trump’s advisors would be or what his cabinet would look like.

I recommend the whole column. Meanwhile, here are my final thoughts.

1. I can think of two positives for Mrs. Clinton. One is that she strikes me as more capable then Mr. Trump of reading and digesting information. Another is that she will have access to the best and the brightest among Democratic advisers. On the Republican side the best and the brightest are NeverTrumpers, and I don’t see Mr. Trump reaching across those burned bridges. I do worry that Mrs. Clinton is so personally insular that instead of relying on wise figures on her side she will remain ensconced with her immediate entourage of unimpressive long-time aides.

2. Unfortunately, the best and the brightest on the Democratic side are not as good as they were two decades ago, because the whole country has moved to the left. Indeed, Mr. Trump strikes me as more like Huey Long than Barry Goldwater. When Bill Clinton was President, a lot of leading figures in the Democratic establishment had genuine respect for markets. Today, that is not the case.

3. I can think of one positive for Mr. Trump. He would sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare with a more market-oriented alternative. Instead, with Mrs. Clinton, government will try to fix the problems it has caused by exerting more control, which is likely to make things worse.

4. I think that the main theme of the election is cosmopolitan vs. anti-cosmopolitan. I take the cosmopolitan side, which alienates me from Mr. Trump and his supporters.

5. Another theme is elite vs. anti-elite. There, I don’t have a dog in the race. I would generally side with an elite, but it needs to be a humble elite. We mostly have an arrogant elite, which I fear is even worse than a non-elite.

6. When I was in Boston last week, I overheard a concierge in an apartment building claim that Mr. Trump is one of the greatest businessmen of all time. Similarly, I have seen Facebook posts from supporters of Mrs. Clinton extolling her long career in public service. I get the sense that there is a tendency to vastly over-rate the candidate that one supports. I find that sad and troubling.

7. As the campaign has progressed, my impressions of Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump, and Gary Johnson have all suffered declines. Still, I plan to vote for Mr. Johnson.

Defining Culture: A Good Question

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From a commenter.

if you read a book from another culture, or even an older time period, and it influences you, is it part of your culture?

In everyday use, the term “culture” usually connotes thought patterns and behavioral tendencies that are widely shared within a community, and they may be unique to a particular time and place. The definitions I have been proposing do not included this connotation.

For now, I am willing to stick to the simple definition of culture as socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. I would remark that these patterns are almost always shared within a community, because most communication takes place within a community. When you are influenced by a source outside of your usual community, you are going to be a bit of an oddball, unless you can convince your close associates to adopt the novel influence.

I would add that an interesting issue within a community is the kind of alternatives and alien influences that people are willing to tolerate among other members. I do not think that “tolerance” is a purely scalar variable, with some communities having more and some having less. Rather, I think that tolerance is multidimensional, with some communities more tolerant along some dimensions and less tolerant along others. So if in 1950 the typical American could tolerate the N-word but not the F-word, and today it is the reverse, that fact does not tell us that people today are more or less tolerant along some non-existent scale.

Joseph Henrich Defines Culture

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Since I was talking about the challenge of defining culture, we should look at how Joseph Henrich defines it in The Secret of Our Success, an important book that I have referred to often (most notably in this piece for National Affairs). On p. 3, he writes

By “culture” I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.

That’s all he has to say in terms of definition, which leaves some questions unanswered.

1. Why the qualifier “while growing up”? It implies that we reach an age at which the receipt of cultural transmission stops, which seems odd. What empirical or theoretical problems does Henrich think he is avoiding by including the qualifier, rather than taking the view that cultural transmission can be received at any age?

2. Why the qualifier “mostly”? If it were me, I would be tempted to partition our personalities into three components: biologically innate; acquired through our own experience with nature; and learned from other people. Of course, any single behavioral tendency or thought pattern can be the product of all of these components, so that the precise partition may not be readily applicable. Still, I would make the general point that much of our behavioral tendencies and thought patterns are learned from other people, either directly or indirectly. In fact, that might serve as a one-sentence statement of the thesis of Henrich’s book. But in the definition of culture, I would drop the “mostly” and say that to the extent that a behavioral tendency or thought pattern is not learned from other people, then it is not cultural. In that case, it is mostly innate and/or learned through our own experience. If culture includes more than what we learn from other people, then what does it not include?

3. Note the inclusion of “tools,” which goes beyond my shorthand of “behavioral tendencies and thought patterns.” While we are at it, why not include consumer goods, or at least say that consumer goods are included as “tools” that help satisfy our wants? If we are going to include tools, then don’t we have to include institutions? Note that “institutions” is another term that gets used to mean many things, so we would do well to define it, also.

But perhaps instead of broadening the definition of culture, why not narrow it? Tools and institutions in part act as channels for socially communicating thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. But why not define culture itself as socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies (which I think covers everything other than “tools” in Henrich’s definition)?

Anyway, I think that if Henrich were to embark on another edition of the book, I would encourage him to spend several pages discussing the definition of “culture” and related terms, rather than leaving it to one off-handedly casual sentence.