I think it’s more likely that tribal emotions, behaviors, and tactics may be a consequence of perceptions regarding how high the stakes are in a political contest and anxieties regarding trends in relative power and status. That is to say, not something that can be defused by normative recommitments, but only by lowering what’s at stake, which could only be accomplished by some reliable guarantee of security for the status quo and giving up on one’s agenda for political reform in exchange for comity and peace.
He wrote that before I posted on Lilliana Mason’s book. I see her as arguing that political feelings are heated because of group-psychology factors. She cites a number of empirical studies to show that differences in policy issues do not loom so large in accounting for increased polarization. I see Handle as taking the opposite point of view. He thinks that the policy differences loom large, so that appealing to social psychology is a cop-out.
Travel day, so more later. But one quick question: if “group-psychology factors” are responsible for polarization, then why wouldn’t we expect those factors, and thus the polarization, to be more or less constant: a feature of human political nature?
Some people have suggested “new trends in media, and the emergence of social media,” but I am skeptical of that explanation, mostly because history reveals many periods of oscillating levels of polarization despite more-or-less constant media technologies.
A model in which polarization depends instead on political conditions, events, shifts in status of groups, demographic changes, tipping points, and the overall stakes of contemporary disputes, would better account for these frequent and major changes.
Group psychology factors seem to be constant, but the level they operate at is variable. They operate on an international level (US v. USSR in the Cold War), an intranational level (Republicans v. Democrats), a firm-competition level (Google v. Facebook), and a personal level (me v. Jerry. Screw that jerk), and probably other levels. Which one gets more attention can vary; it’s probably not a coincidence that Republican v. Democrat tensions heated up about the time US v. USSR died down.
I agree overall that a lowering of the stakes is what is needed; and here’s the issue that everybody keeps missing – scale. It used to be ‘spatial scale.’ It isn’t clear what should replace it.
There’s an old saw: if someone says, “I want power to do X good thing” – believe the first three words. Lowering stakes is about giving other people power to control their own – and this is the rub – communities. You can’t reach into people’s families and dictate the interior power dynamics of a family without seriously abrogating the freedoms of the family. You can’t reach into places and selectively ‘liberate’ or ’empower’ unless you have given yourself the power to control everything in that system. The moment you do that, you effectively have disempowered everyone else – even the people you (temporarily) advocate.
For the sake of everyone, local controls must be restored, even if it creates situations any given person would find intolerable and distasteful at close quarters. Each ship must be allowed its own albatross and the chance to sink or swim. They must be decoupled and externalities should be managed in a hierarchy, only at the interfaces.
In various philosophies, this is called modularity, subsidiarity, localism, self-determination, federalism.
The rub is when people get easy access to news, travel, relationships, etc. Then it gets to push their nose in things at a great distance. The question of how to manage the global community now. Spatial scale was nice because when people didn’t travel much more than 30 miles from home in their lives and 95+% of the country was agriculture, there was a certain self-similarity, a certain fractal tendency. Sure, plantation living was not exactly New England hillside farming, but each community had the doctor, the lawyer, the pastor, a shop, some trades, and a bunch of farmers.
It wasn’t until that was breaking down that the doctor predictably became the 1% on income/wealth, by the way
Now, what? Do we try to restore space? Or something else? How do we avoid some communities being 10^7 times more wealthy than others, by virtue of self-selection?
I am reminded of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake….That is why academic politics are so bitter.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this polarization is occurring after what we thought was the “End of History”, after Western liberal democracy decisively triumphed over Communism. The stakes of the 20th Century seemed higher. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the polarization seems to be most intense in social media debates, dominated by academic types and their close cousins, media pundits.
I do think that the emergence of social media has contributed to the infantilization of politics, which may in turn contribute to intense polarization over low stakes. It strikes me that memes and tweets are the 21st Century version of bumper stickers, amplified in reach and volume by technology. And also sent out faster. I don’t think anyone in the 20th Century ever thought that political thought and discourse would be improved by relying more on bumper stickers. Had longer form blog posts become the dominant form of social media, things might have turned out differently.
Admittedly, my thoughts on social media may confuse cause and effect. Perhaps, infantilization came first and led to memes and tweets arising as the dominant social media form. The high stakes of the 20th Century — defeating Nazism and Communism, avoiding nuclear annihilation, Civil Rights, spreading liberal democracy and market capitalism, etc. — may have selected against infantilized politics. Lower stakes leads to different natural selection criteria.
Just like “personnel is policy”, “audience is level.”
“Post-literate society” infantilization is a consequence of optimizing for a broader target audience. It was once quite commong to produce “condensed” versions of articles and books which were shorter and written at a lower reading level. And publishing materials for sub-academic adults in cartoon / comic-book form goes way back.
Militaries have been doing it for a while (and to be honest, “PS: the Preventive Maintenance Monthly” has many, surprisingly high quality editions.) Labor unions and civil rights organizations put out lots of extremely simplified comics which, nevertheless, get the basic messages across. Ted Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”, was hired to produce lots of comic and cartoon-level war propaganda during WWII, which, obviously, is not designed to impart a balanced appreciation of the subtle nuances of some controversy. Quite the contrary.
Even Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was released in both condensed form (by anti-Communist Reader’s Digest), and cartoon format by Look magazine. And, Road to Serfdom itself was written at a clearly lower, more “public audience” level than his more serious and substantial works.
And naturally there’s a good reason why most political campaign money is spent on television advertisements which occassionally fall somewhat short of the highest levels of sophistication.
So there are many incentives to operate at a low, infantlized level, and unfortunately, there is just very little to be gained these days by engaging in more mature and sophisticated discourse.
It was a very rare and happy coincidence that an intellectual culture emerged in which one could impress and gain status by composing comprehensive and rigorous written arguments (even in the form of polemic pamphlets, e.g., Common Sense,) and would be disciplined by threat of humiliation and loss of reputation among one’s reference social group for writing at a cruder level, and one which competitors would be similarly incentivized to attack relentlessly (but at a higher level of argument) for their own profit in the form of social currency.
But what’s left of that culture is fading fast. So people increasingly don’t bother.
Unfortunately, this incentive structure has a way of shaping the culture and the preferences and patience level of even more talented individuals, who are abandoning the world of “endurance sport reflection” for rapid-fire hot takes and the greatest gossip and social conformity-pressuring technology ever created.
The funny thing about Twitter is that smart journalists use it the most intensely, where it seems increasingly clear that for the sake of preserving a sane and harmonious society, they should be banned from using it at all.
Handle,
The best way I can think of to restore political discourse is to restore competence hierarchies. If votes were weighted according to taxes paid it would radically change incentives for appealing to political supporters.
I would also favor a Moldbuggian formalization of communications between Congressmen and their constiutients.
Doctors pay a lot in taxes, but they do so in part because their government granted monopolies allow them to extract high rents with which to pay the taxes. The West had a phase of limited suffrage based on taxes paid but moved out of it pretty quickly for that reason, it was abused.
If it were possible (and it isn’t under the current ideological climate) it would make more sense to grant votes based on certain universally achievable milestones that nonetheless both require and reinforce sound mind and good political instincts. Things like getting and staying married. Having kids. Not having criminal record. Military service. Avoiding any long term government assistance.
If the voting public were only composed of people in stable nuclear families that pay their bills…it would be far more sane and lead to better government.
We have a political system that demands that we funnel everything into a binary decision. The actual questions we need to answer to govern ourselves are getting more numerous and complex pretty quickly, and our political leaders have all learned about the benefits of approaching campaign decisions marginally.
Our system is now forcing politicians to run under an emotional identity because it is no longer possible to work out the bulk of the issues via careful public debate.
The Question: If local communities are allowed to make their own rules, does that mean a town can ban guns and free speech but allow slavery and production of noxious drugs? Does it mean a “community” can bar new members from entering?
I assert that unless society is willing to give up on eliminating such things as slavery, there will have to be “global” rules.
Therefore, there will be binary issues (if the other party wins I’ll be screwed over) and therefore the stakes will be ever higher and more bitter.
You’re on the right track. Backing up one level of generality raises a key question.
If one accepts the premise that external entities have the right and legitimate authority to boss around other jurisdictions (which nearly everyone does these days), then one has to answer the critical question of the distribution of soverignty: which rules must be be imposed globally (with forbearance being only a matter of pragmatic expediency), and which matters can be left to local discretion. Where does one draw the line? Slavery? LGBT issues? Immigration? School policies? Smoking regulations?
While most people will deny it (which is both the anti-Nihilistic moral instinct derived from human social psychology, and which also often has to be done for philosophical consistency), the hard truth is that there is no objective, empirical, purely-positivist way to answer these kinds of questions. One needs a political ideology backed by certain metaphysical assumptions and a corresponding moral vision and set of principles of justice to provide a general guide and procedure for resolving these difficulties and answering many of life’s questions.
The real strength of progressivism is that it provides exactly this, and furthermore, it is pretty much uncontested and the only game in town at this point, at least for the vast majority of areligious global elites (i.e., the people who matter.) The real weakness of progressivism is that it doesn’t map, and cannot accomodate itself, to reality and human nature in critical ways with practical consequences. And so, if implemented comprehensively and coherently, it will eventually lead to social disaster. That we continue to inexorably move in that direction with no idea how to stop the train from going off the rails is the kind of trouble we’re in.
But getting back to the intersection of moral vision with politics, what it means is that the decisions as to what subjects warrant global imposition tend to be derived from the latest beliefs as to what constitute ideological moral imperatives. Without any institution with the authority and social power to hold those imperatives constant, that set will tend to be more plastic and malleable according to which elites and ideological entrepreneurs are competing for social influence, as has been the case since the Enlightenment. (Moral sovereignty can be viewed as a kind of property which could be privately held, for example by a state-based or independent Church, or which could become a commons, which is vulnerable to certain tragic social failure modes and attempts to capture and fill the power vacuum. We are living through one of the social failure modes right now.)
(As an aside, I highly recommend Paul Rozin’s article, “The Process of Moralization” for some investigation of how this all happens in a particular context. Pay special attention to the effect on memory. What is happening to us is the “political moralization” of a growing number of matters which are gradually encroaching on everything important in life.)
Now back up another level of generality. Whichever individuals (or more accurately, decentrlaized social processes) can influence which matters become new moral imperatives (which justify new global impositions) have a significant source of real power, and so obtaining, maintaining, and exercising that kind of influence – and ruthlessly suppressing any potential rivals – is most of the game.
But the problem then becomes that if every matter can be framed as a matter which invokes an analysis from the dominant set of fundamental moral principles, then every matter is liable to become centralized and subject to global imposition of the morally “correct” position.
Any insightful person can quickly understand how this becomes the recipe for lurching to a certain kind of extreme in which there can be no tolerance of any individual or ‘local’ discretion, jurisdiction, or authority on anything that ‘matters’ (i.e., with moral significance), and has as a direct implication and consequence the crowding out and de-legitimation of any mediating institutions or sources of alternate authority or social influence. In the end, in terms of governmental authority, there can only be the individual and the single, central State, coordinated by the effective state ideology which cannot abide any rivals, and where any other entities are little more than the state’s franchisees, sub-contractors, or hollow satrapies. That’s where we’ve been heading for centuries.
If you think this through, you’ll soon realize that the stakes are neither trivial nor ‘symbolic’, but instead colossal, dealing with the fundamental question of who should rule over whom, who shall enjoy high and low status in the society, what can be said and what can be thought, and inescapably and inevitably touching upon all the most important aspects of our lives as avenues for sanctimonious social domination, which will determine whether certain lifestyles and perspectives will even continue to exist in a meaningful way.
There is no exaggeration in assessing this conflict to be one of existential importance and of the utmost urgency. At least, if one is serious about stopping that train, which at the very least means keeping the brakes in good condition, up to the task.
Most people don’t understand all this, certainly not in the terms of this explanation, but we are social animals who have been living in gossiping, norm-nudging groups for a very long time, and human social psychological instincts allow most people to sense and feel what is really going on, and provoke certain mental modes and emotions, meta-rationally appropriate to the needs of forming strong coalitions for attack on the one hand, and defense on the other.
That is to say, civil war, albeit one that does not require organized mass violence for victory, and against which any attempt at violent resistance would prove completely futile and counterproductive.
It’s a real and dangerous error to dismiss these reactions as repugnant and ‘mere tribalism’, as if standards of behavior were unfortunately and regrettably allowed to slip in a collective moment of weakness and absence of mind, and which could somehow be restored by appeals to norms of civil behavior, but without changing the factors which make our present situation so fraught.
What will defuse the situation and end the tribalism is the same thing that ends all wars: ceasefire or conquest. That is, either taking the source of legitimate fears off the table, or else, the definitive crushing of one tribe by the other. It looks to me like we’re much more likely to get the latter. So people who want less tribalism are probably going to get it (at least for a short while, before the left inevitably turns in on itself), but they aren’t going to like the price we’re going to have to pay to get it. They should be careful what they wish for.
Part of the brakes are based on the anti-reality of the progressive Democrats (who are on the ballots, not “progressives”); that their economic system fails is shown by Venezuela.
How to stop the US, or other countries, going the popular – socialist Venezuela path towards breakdown; it’s not clear.
But stopping the elite socialists in colleges from getting tax-free non-profit education benefits, and excessive student loans, seems one big step that is increasingly politically popular.
On the other hand, Sweden works pretty well. Socialism has successes as well as failures. As with most things, circumstances and implementation count for a lot.
I see her as arguing that political feelings are heated because of group-psychology factors. She cites a number of empirical studies to show that differences in policy issues do not loom so large in accounting for increased polarization.
I would tend to agree as it appears new Presidents tend to get one big item done (Clinton deficit, Bush Iraq, Obama Healthcare and Trump taxes) and then govern the center with increasing opposite Party Congress. (Reagan was close to this with Taxes in 1981 but accomplished more the rest of his term.) So I don’t see a huge tide either way in the government the last 35 years.
And really what are the issues of Trump Republican are running on? Football players kneeling and MS-13 gangs neither of which are a signficant national impact. (MS-13 gangs are 10,000 that the Obama administration went after as well.) Democrats are healthcare and everybody can benefit. Not huge issues here.
I suspect there are two reasons for the hard polarization of politics:
1) Real wages have been stagnant for the last 18 years and now I believe profits have hit a ceiling the last 4 – 5 years. The financial crisis hit average people a lot harder than most elite, both political or economic, would like to believe. I think real wages with health benefits fell nearly 8% in 2008 – 20012 which really impacted a lot of families and changed their opinions on the future. And we have a sudden labor shortage making companies very grumpy who do not want rising wages. (Note the birth rate made a surprise decrease of ~2% last year.) And everybody has a theory what went wrong and the one single issue that will fix it. (TBH I never figured why Immigration went so negative from 2012 -2016 because the number of Immigrants really did not go up those years.)
2) We are living in the first generation of people that live on-line and social changes create disruptions. I don’t think it is surprising most crime waves follow a period of urbanization growth. (1920s, 1960s and yes there other factors.) Luckily we are not seeing increasing crime and in fact most young people are following the education script. (I believe HS Graduation in 2016 hit an all time high.) But young people following the script and need to reach 30 before adulthood creates lots of grumpiness.
One of main reasons the stakes have become so high in the U.S. is the Supreme Court. 100 years ago, women were granted the right to vote via constitutional amendment. That seems so quaint now — major changes of that kind are now made by the court acting alone. The court’s makeup is, of course, very slow to respond to democratic changes, and significant turnover is almost certain in the next several years, making the stakes for the Presidency and control of the Senate enormous.
When SCOTUS tends to wield enormous power, control over its composition is seen to justify just about anything, and the stakes of each election are seen as incredibly high. It’s like two people struggling to get control over a handgun, when whoever gets it will use it to shoot the other guy. That desperation leads to “prison gang politics.”
Better to lower the stakes by reining in that power, and eliminating that control. No one fear being railroaded, because no one can railroad. Remove the ammunition from the gun, and it’s no longer a weapon.
One proposal could to be make SCOTUS (indeed, all lower courts too) into a bipartisan commission, with equal numbers of representatives from each major party, which each party can recall and replace at any time. And no holding can be effective without a majority signing on, which means nothing happens at all except in those instances of broad consensus or low political provocation (i.e., purely technical legal matters.)
Until something like that happens, every election is reasonably judged to be a make or break zero sum contest for the commanding heights.
As a tangent, it’s worth thinking about what happens if Trump gets another nomination opportunity (either with or without a Republican majority) and especially if he gets to replace one of the progressive Justices like Ginsburg. If you think things are tribal and ugly now, just wait.
I think that we’re almost to the point where a senate majority of one party will not confirm any supreme court nomination by a president of the other party without an intervening election and perhaps not even then (in the near future, seats may sit empty unless and until we have a president and senate majority of the same party).