Ideology as identity

Michael Huemer writes,

do you basically have the personality traits that people with your political orientation usually have? If so, you’ve probably done the awful thing that I’ve been complaining about. On the other hand, if not, then you might be among the few objective people.

He suggests that people select an ideology based on personality traits and a desire to affiliate, rather than on an objective basis. I put much more emphasis on the affiliation factor. I know plenty of people with conservative personality traits who are very comfortable reciting progressive talking points.

24 thoughts on “Ideology as identity

  1. “The 39% of U.S. adults identifying as political independents — regardless of their political leanings — in 2020 is down from 42% in 2018 and 41% in 2019. A decline in independent identification is typical in presidential election years, having occurred in all such years in the past three decades except 1992 and 2012. The declines have usually been between three and five points compared with the year before the election, so the two-point decline this past year is smaller than normal.”
    -https://news.gallup.com/poll/328310/party-average-2020-winds-similar-prior-years.aspx

    The 39 percent plurality of USA adults who identify as independent (30 percent identify as Democrats and 29 percent as Republicans), thankfully, serve as a rebuttal to Heumer’s narcissistic cynicism.

    If one were to poll the public on ideological purity and moral superiority versus producing pragmatic results, (Is it more important to you that a candidate be ideologically consistent and morally superior to their opponent, or is it more important that the candidate produces pragmatic results?) I would hazard a guess that the masses prefer results and the elites are more into moral superiority. The masses are much more objective on matters of substance.

    Huemer’s “objective” sounds more like morally narcissistic. Libertarians in the USA, never having had the opportunity to actually govern, are particularly prone to confusing the objective with a self-serving contempt for the masses. As a radical I suffer the same tendencies. Yet the independent plurality demonstrates an authentic objectivity.

    The dismal festival of moral narcissism that we were subjected to yesterday was telling: don’t expect anything that matters to improve was the message sent loud and clear. As a plain garden variety narcissist, Trump offered a unique target for the moral narcissists to take the opportunity for preening and fluffing their feathers. If we make it to another election before China takes formal control of the country, the candidates who step forward with concrete ideas to produce substantive results are likely to find popular support from the masses.

    • I also read the article as moralistic. For example, he cites veganism as an example of an objective position that a [rare objective] Republican might hold, based on caring for animals, which is a moral position. (Yes, he claims, as do all progressives, that his moral position on veganism is based on “reason and science,” but doesn’t cite any.) In the final section on shifting ideologies he cites only conservatives as examples of people who have been changing their positions. Has he been paying attention to the constantly shifting demands of cancel culture?

      • To be charitable to Huemer, I think what he was getting at is not that going vegan is a rational decision per se, but rather this vegan Republican is a guy who clearly isn’t just going along with his team and thinks for himself.

        A Democrat against gay marriage would serve equally well as an example: whatever else you may say about him, he’s probably not against gay marriage due to his tribal loyalties.

        • “is a guy who clearly isn’t just going along with his team and thinks for himself.”

          Can you make that claim unless the decision to be vegan is rational per se?

          If it’s not independently rational, then is this guy really thinking for himself? Is the more likely explanation that he has a mix of tribal affiliations, and he’s following veganism for a different tribal affiliation (maybe a girlfriend) than his other tribal affiliations (Republicanism)?

          • “Can you make that claim unless the decision to be vegan is rational per se?”

            I think so. We can’t reasonably expect all rational people to converge to the same position, due to most people only being exposed to a small fraction of the relevant information, so I think eclecticism often is genuine evidence of willingness to deviate from one’s tribe when they think the evidence contradicts the tribe.

            E.g., a free market conservative (or libertarian) who supports the minimum wage because he read studies convincing him of the prevalence of monopsonies in labor markets, or a progressive who goes in the opposite direction after being convinced by research that employers rarely have monopsony power are both indicative of someone willing to buck tribal consensus in favor of reason, even if one of them is necessarily wrong due to the incompleteness of the evidence he’s considered.

          • “We can’t reasonably expect all rational people to converge to the same position, due to most people only being exposed to a small fraction of the relevant information…”

            So what we’re saying is its not unreasonable for people to make decisions based on incomplete information? How does the example of the Republican vegan guy differ from pretty much any other person then?

            More fundamentally, do we think that 99.9 percent of the Republican base or the Democratic base holds identical positions on every single existing issue? If not, then why don’t they all get the same benefit of the doubt that our hypothetical vegan dude does?

            The world is a lot more complicated than this simple example.

          • “So what we’re saying is its not unreasonable for people to make decisions based on incomplete information?”

            I think so. Otherwise we would all just have to be radical skeptics about everything (at least everything other than whatever area you’re an expert in).

            Most people I’m sure do have some difference with their tribes. It would indeed be even more concerning if they all did believe exactly the same thing. I think the ‘vegan republican’ is just one example. It could just as easily be a pro-choice republican or a republican who supports legalizing pot or anti-gun control democrat what have you.

          • –“Is the more likely explanation that he has a mix of tribal affiliations, and he’s following veganism for a different tribal affiliation (maybe a girlfriend) than his other tribal affiliations (Republicanism)?”–

            That’s an interesting angle. We definitely have social tribes as well as political tribes and religious tribes. A pro-life Democrat might also be part of the Christian tribe and a socially liberal Republican might be part of the elite tribe.

  2. No doubt, there is some truth to the personality interpretation of ideology. But it explains too much.

    Political entrepreneurs and parties update and adjust their rhetorics in electoral competition for the median voter’s allegiance. (A wrinkle: The median voter in primaries differs from the median voter in general elections.)

    In the USA the two main parties usually have roughly similar electoral support at the national level. It would be amazing if the distribution of personality types mirrors the electoral splits. At the regional level, the parties have very unequal support. It would be amazing if the distribution of personality types in California and in Texas mirror the very different voting patterns in the two States. (A wrinkle: Yes, there are selection effects in migration — say, from California to Texas — that probably correlate partly with personality.)

    I suppose I’m agreeing in a roundabout way with Arnold Kling’s emphasis on the general desire to affiliate (rather than on specific underlying personality types). Conformity.

  3. “Then, over a period of years, I gradually realized that, for the rest of the world, it wasn’t really about ideas and understanding the world. This remains surprising and disappointing to me.”

    With a fair amount of confidence, I’m guessing that Professor Huemer’s assessment (incorrect, in my view) stems in large part from the inability to see beyond those who live an academic life–most people live ordinary, busy lives, and probably do their best within normal time constraints to arrive at their beliefs and refine them when possible. Not everyone is paid as a professor to sit around and think big, deep, philosophical thoughts about their and others ideologies.

    • “Not everyone is paid as a professor to sit around and think big, deep, philosophical thoughts about their and others’ ideologies.” Busy (and less intelligent) people should be held to a lower intellectual standard than college professors, but at least they can benefit from getting profound ideas at second hand. Huemer is notably generous in sharing his “big, deep, philosophical” thoughts with the general public via blog posts; he deserves our commendation for it.

      • Not sure that the busy are (or are more likely to be) less intelligent and should therefore be held to a lower standard.
        Merely, that people are optimizing with the constraints presented and to suggest (based on observation, anecdote?) that a large proportion of the population’s beliefs are ill-reasoned or irrational (as compared to what or whom?) seems a bit presumptuous.

        As for getting profound ideas second hand, if the tenor of the posts are to moralize about how the rest of us only get to our views of the world based on personality traits or status/mood affiliation, then I’m not yet ready to offer my commendation.

  4. –“That’s from a debate when Bush and Reagan were competing for the Republican Presidential nomination. Both of them talk about how essential immigration is, and how many decent people are illegal immigrants. No Republican today would do that.

    This is part of why I say ideology isn’t about ideas. If people actually cared about ideas, a party couldn’t just radically shift its positions and still have pretty much the same people supporting them and the same people opposing them.”–

    I think Huemer is missing something in some of his observations.

    Bush and Reagan were competing for the Republican nomination in 1979 or 1980. The immigration population hit a low of 9.6 million in 1970 (I’m using data with a decade frequency), rising to 14.1 million in 1980 and is now up to 45 million in 2020. As the surge in immigration was still fairly new in 1980, many of those 14.1 million were likely not eligible voters. Also, back then I believe the parties were more of a mix of liberals and conservatives (e.g. Rockefeller Republicans and Southern Democrats) and there wasn’t quite the sense that the wrong party would permanently ruin our way of life.

    Fast forward 40 years, we now have two camps very divided on ideology, it has become obvious to everyone that immigrants were largely and durably in the blue camp. There’s now a political interest for the red camp being tough on immigration. I think many individual Republicans are still okay with immigration per se. They get along well with immigrants they know, and aren’t rushing to call ICE when they suspect they may have encountered an undocumented immigrant. But wishing for high immigration and naturalizing undocumented immigrants also has the effect of getting your other priorities nuked via the political system if it happens to turn Texas blue.

    Without quoting Huemer again, you can say something similar about Christians wanting a pious Christian candidate. In terms of being a pious Christian, it’s important to remember that Christians are divided into differing denominations and even the denominations are divided amongst themselves into small-o orthodox or heterodox groups. A pious Catholic may not be that likeable for Evangelical voters, and vice versa. But beyond wanting a pious Christian candidate, Christians do have other priorities. They want a candidate who also is charismatic, electable, tough enough to effect the changes they want to see, and who won’t abandon them whenever it uncomfortable to take sides in a conflict, and they’re even willing to settle for someone who doesn’t seem to openly despise them. Trump received a lot of Christian support because he seemed to check many of these boxes.

    While I do think there are people who are deeply tribal and have drunk the Kool Aid, changing their beliefs as soon as a politician on their side gives a speech, I think people can legitimately change their point of view based on different facts on the ground.

  5. Humans are tribal animals, not objective robots optimizing for the greater good. Thank you Captain Obvious.

    • “The left will continue to defend their behavior by projecting it onto the right.
      Don’t believe them. Show public support for others like you. Totalitarians
      win when those opposing them believe they are alone in that opposition.
      We are not alone. There are more of us than they know.”
      http://ornerydragon.com/projection/

      That is the end paragraph of her post on projection as the radical leftists’ strategy.

      Please, Arnold, stop rambling and focus on your enemies’ strategy. And talk to Don Boudreaux who is now realizing what is going on (read his yesterday’s post on liberalism on peril).

    • In 1931, Keynes published an essay entitled “The Restroom Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

      By 2028, he predicted that the standard of living in the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. Rather, we could spend our time debating the proper room in which one should eliminate one’s waste because <1% of the population felt offended and oppressed by simple binaries.

  6. I’d like to echo Arnold’s point about most of the Dems I know. They are all extremely conservative in their personal lives. But they toe the lefty line.

    • This just doesn’t match what I’ve observed in my life. People who vote democratic have, generally speaking, had wildly different lifestyles then people I know who are conservative. To describe a few:

      1) Seriousness and actual starting of families
      2) Number of children concieved
      3) Attitudes towards sexual activity
      4) Attitudes towards drug use
      5) Manners and respectful behavior
      6) Various gauges of personal responsibility (monetary, punctuality, etc)

      This seems like a dramatic night and day difference to me. It’s especially strong amongst actual leftists, rather than politically disengaged people who happen to vote Dem for some random reason.

      When people say that liberals act conservative in their person lives, its just not something I’ve observed in real life. Then I go look at statistics and I don’t feel like its just my personal anecdotes but an actual pattern.

      Is it some sort of self selection mechanism? “Liberals from my socioeconomic environment aren’t all that different from conservatives from my socioeconomic environment”. Is it that they don’t care about certain metrics “yeah they have way fewer kids, but that’s not what I mean by difference.”

      I don’t know. I’ve never understood this statement.

      • Did you not read “Our Kids” or “Coming Apart”? It’s pretty much all class, which is primarily IQ and passing the marshmallow test. Seems like this would be right within your wheelhouse.

  7. The quote… “do you basically have the personality traits that people with your political orientation usually have? If so, you’ve probably done the awful thing that I’ve been complaining about.”

    Here the “you” (that has probably done the awful thing) is presumably randomly drawn from a pool if the author has not affected the selection of his readership. The uncertainty arises from the draw; not from the inability to obtain perfect knowledge of any reader.

    From the reader’s point of view “you” refers to himself always. There is no uncertainty; no random draws. It would have made more sense to write “most of you reading this are trait driven”. Better yet, leave out “you” and say “most people are trait driven”.

    Another quote… “Here, for example, is a good test of objectivity. If you meet a right-wing (conservative or libertarian) person who is a vegan, then that person might actually be rational”. No this is not a good test because if half the population is conservative the test is useless for the other half of the population. If the probability a person is vegan is low in the general population, the test will give too many false negatives for the conservative half.

    Another quote… ” over a period of years, I gradually realized that, for the rest of the world, it wasn’t really about ideas and understanding the world. This remains surprising and disappointing to me”.

    I thought everybody knew by the time they were out of high school that people are tribal and trait driven and hopefully much earlier than that.

  8. >I observed in an earlier post (https://fakenous.net/?p=1674) that people who profess Christianity often don’t attend church, or read the Bible, or follow its teachings. Few of them really turn the other cheek, nor do they seem to eagerly anticipate death (as one should if one expects to go to heaven).

    Golly, I must have an old version. None of those things are listed in my copy of Ephesians or the Nicene Creed.

    (PS Chickens are the most successful avian organism on earth.)

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