Yascha Mounk calls this 180ism.
For a long time, I have struggled to understand why so many of my old friends and colleagues have embraced the reductionist worldview that is now taking over public discourse, in some cases even turning themselves into enthusiastic enforcers of the new “moral clarity.” The key to the answer, I have come to believe, lies in a phenomenon that, at the suggestion of my colleague Emily Yoffe, I propose to call 180ism: the tendency of many participants in public debate to hear what their perceived enemies have to say and immediately declare themselves diametrically opposed.
Later,
This is the world of 180ism. According to the logic of the moment, you must either think that Dr. Seuss never made a cringe-worthy drawing or that we should cheer when public libraries remove his early books. You must either believe that antifa is a major threat to national security or defend the right of a bunch of extremists to beat up anyone they consider a fascist. You must either cheer when state legislatures tell teachers what they can say in the classroom or celebrate that a growing number of them are telling students to make their racial identity central to their lives.
I recommend the entire essay
It’s a good essay, except for the contention that the Left has ever been less about “truthiness” than the Right. The vogue some years ago for calling themselves the “reality-based community” was always laughable, and even more so now. Many on the Left are completely out of touch with reality these days. This is not to say that the Right is necessarily realistic, but they are closer to the truth on many of the issues that I care most about.
So the first comment is already basically confirming his theory… I assume you are on “the right”, so obviously the right is better etc.
So yeah, you prove his theory, and it is funny to watch to say the least…🤔😀
This can be explained by a prisoner’s dilemma model. The cooperate-cooperate state is everyone is searching for the truth, or the best policy, so arguments are judged on their merits. Defection is when arguments become simply rhetoric to achieve a goal, and opposition to an argument is based on which faction the speaker represents. We are currently in a defect-defect state, and everyone loses.
I congratulate Mounk on recognizing this as a problem, but his essay is not wholly free of my-side-is-always-right-ism, and moves the dialogue toward the lose-lose situation he decries.
I find it next to impossible, these sullen days, to include the Left or the Right in a thought or a proposition unless it’s GPS related.
One area where 180ism has greatly aggrieved me lately has been in prophylactic measures over COVID-19. I think simple precautions — hand-washing, social distancing, wearing masks in high-traffic/high-mixing areas, and getting vaccinated — are prudent, even now, given the more-transmissible variants of the virus. But I am a conservative-leaning libertarian, and conservatives have applied 180ism and oppose those measures, especially masks and vaccines. I definitely noticed the effect (although I had no catchy name for it!) in what I see as motivated reasoning by people I usually align with.
On the other hand, Mounk starts with The Colbert Report and truthiness. That bit of Colbert rather directly presaged Michael Wolff’s response to factual errors in his book on the Trump White House: “If it makes sense to you, if it strikes a chord, if it rings true, it is true.” Trump must be all things evil, so facts must be malleable in service to the cause of truth(-iness).
Lockdowns and school closures were the lefts 180 to whatever trump said, which are a lot worse then anything on the right in the pandemic. I also found the insistence in blue areas of wearing masks outdoor or forcing them on children to be asinine.
Vaccines would have gone either way based on the election, with California and New York saying they would block the Trump Vaccine right up till he lost the election.
Even in red areas like Florida or say Carroll county md near me vaccinations are extremely high amongst 65+, so it’s mostly signaling amongst those with low stakes.
Sure — except people mix across age groups, so vaccination rates among 65+ doesn’t determine herd immunity. A younger person with (expected) little to lose from a case of covid can still pass it on to an older friend or relative.
The two people I know who had covid are both mid-50s males, one a pretty healthy but moderately overweight major in the USAR, and one a borderline obese software engineer. Both had to be hospitalized, the former relatively briefly (but early, before a standard of care was well established) and the latter for several weeks (in December, so the healthcare workers knew what to watch out for and what to do). Just being below 65 doesn’t mean it’s comparable to the flu.
Anyone who is afraid of the virus can get vaccinated*. So if you are worried about getting it you can protect yourself almost 100% from the severe negative affects of people transmitting it to you. If you haven’t done this, you can’t blame others for getting it, and it’s insane to lockdown society to protect yourself when you’re already protected.
*rare Health conditions preventing vaccination are a rounding error and not worth shutting down society over.
You are awfully callous about the lives of people who you acknowledge can’t get vaccinated. Plus those whose vaccinations don’t take, or for whatever reason don’t get a robust immune response, or catch the virus and die of it anyway.
People should get vaccinated. But they’re not, because of arguments like the one you are making. I already listed the kind of protective measures I support, so your “lockdown society” claim is the worst kind of straw man.
We can’t operate society on a zero risk basis.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die this decade from automotive collisions, the vast majority of which could be prevented by reducing speed limits for the general public to 20mph or 25mph.
Because cars have been around for a longtime and we have social norms around them, no one judges it callous to accept the trade off of having many extra deaths for the extra convenience being able to drive faster.
Indeed, despite the fact that obesity is expected to kill millions of Americans this decade, societal pressure is trying to eliminate ‘fatphobia’, so that obese people can feel comfortable despite their unhealthy weight level. As a society, we’re apparently willing to let people die so that people can feel good about themselves.
I thought certain things like mask wearing, trying to keep things outdoors, and hand washing made sense when the pandemic was still raging (in some cases, the restaurant masking approach was always security theater). However, now that new cases are low, and the annualized death rate is below that of the flu, such interventions are no longer justified.
Mounk reveals his bias when he refers to conservatives merely feeling that President Trump won the election, as if there could be no question whatsoever about its validity. Anyone who has rationally examined the extensive evidence of impropriety would have no such smug assurance that those who doubt the election’s validity are merely expressing a feeling without regard to the facts. The tactic of the Left is to dismiss such concerns out of hand, but they never provide any specific answers to the many issues raised; they simply persist in the bald assertion that there could be no question.
Nope. You reveal your bias. There is absolutely no proof for the election claims…
Mounk missed what may be the most obvious and egregious example of “180-ism” in the plethora of executive orders immediately issued by Biden on taking office methodically reversing previous orders of President Trump without any process of analysis or publlic discussion.
Yeah, it’s not like actual transfers of power based on 51% don’t result in actual huge swings in policy that might explain people seeing these things as a power contest and not a meaningless college debate team exercise.
I understand what you’re saying but it’s not a good example of 180-ism at all. All Trump’s EOs that Biden’s team canceled had been exhaustively analyzed (“””analyzed”””) and publicly discussed (“””publicly””” “””discussed”””) in the mainstream press, blogs and so on, for four years, numbered, weighed, pronounced racist-undemocratic-illegitimate-what-have-you and condemned to the dustbin on the first day After We Take Power. If it is an example of anything, it is of the phenomenon Handle writes of below, the lack of good faith etc., which I indicated by triple quotes.
Oh boy, here we go again. It’s just like “Scout vs Soldier” and all the rest of the ‘tribal mentality’ stuff.
It’s not that this kind of thing doesn’t happen – it does – but all these things fall flat for the same fundamental reason. They are all setting up a framework in which there is a good, valid kind of disagreement on the one hand, and a bad, illegitimate kind of opposition on the other hand, but the nature of the whole mess we’re in is that we don’t have – or at the very least certainly can’t agree upon – a generally trustworthy way to distinguish between the two cases.
What that means is that every time someone promulgates these categories, people think that they are on the side in the reality-based-community which F’ing Loves !Science! and which relies on the valid, principled arguments, whereas their opponents are the dumb ones just being knee-jerk tribalists, mindless parrots, soldiers, 180ists, “if your love it then I hate it”-types.
These categories are only useful in terms of convincing people to elevate the standard of public discourse and general comity if many people recognize illegitimate opposition as something they are also guilty of; but of course no one does, that’s always the other guy. The brain is a rationalization engine, and so everybody always has plenty of explanations ready for why that other guy is guilty of it, but they never are. It just becomes an excuse to engage in “asymmetric insight” into the other guy’s bad motivations, as if you understand him better that he does himself, because he is just brainwashed, in an epistemic bubble, and practicing self-delusion about it.
To the extent any of this gets traction, it’s always to further denigrate the value of disagreement and debate and further erode the good faith presumption that counterarguments deserve a fair hearing on the merits. Why not preemptively dismiss and deplatform, if the only consequence of giving an opponent a platform is to put hateful, tribal soldiering on the stage, which will just waste time and hurt feelings?
Mounk is just wrong about this. The American progressive left stopped even pretending to really believe in a classically liberal principle of genuinely free speech for a long time – two generations at least – but only that it is illegitimate to discriminate against the good speech they like, but perfectly legitimate to penalize the bad speech they don’t. You can almost hear them respond to these points, “No, *that’s different*!”
One final point is that I suspect this kind of analysis is biased against small-c conservatism: the desire to keep things the way they are and a presumptive wariness about proposals for radical change. It gives radicals a kind of “first-mover advantage” when prior to making some demand there was no social disagreement on the matter.
So, to use Mounk’s example, if a nutty wokester initiates and says, “Cancel Dr. Suess!”, they would not be accused of 180ism, because they aren’t adopting an opposite position in reaction to some previously articulated position. If a conservative reacts and just says, “No, there is no good reason to do that, things are fine as they are and should stay that way,” it can easily be framed as being “Typical brain-dead, tribal 180ish. Anything a progressive proposes, a conservative is just reflexively against, even though they don’t have any good reasons for it.”
Handle, many of your recent comments seem to be saying (I paraphrase), “We are doomed. A better situation is impossible.” Yet they also seem to say that things were once better. If so, how was that possible? Was it just a lucky confluence of factors?
Path dependency is a thing, epitomized in the saying that you can’t turn back the clock. Sometimes social dynamics shift, and require a much sharper shock or different magnitude of threat to go back to the previous state of things.
I’m not as pessimistic as Handle, but I am gravely concerned about the trends and how we keep primary and secondary schools from adopting Marxist dogma as doctrine.
Maybe American intellectual culture really was better in the recent past. In the study of American history, for example, the 1619 project is a huge drop in quality from Gordon Wood and Edmund Morgan.
We seem to be in a period of steep intellectual decline. Why should this be difficult to accept?
How doomed we are depends on what outcomes you are willing to accept. If you happen to idealize any particular point in American history and would like to shoot for that, then sad to say we are indeed 100% doomed. This would be true even without the additional factor of rapid technological change, but that just dumps some extra straw on the camel after its back has already been crushed.
If you are open to other options that include the possibility of innovative markets and general prosperity, epistemic security, and social comity, then I am maybe only 99% in the “we are doomed” camp. I am perhaps too cheery in that regard, but that is by personal disposition, and I can’t help it. French authors have always been the best at going all the way to 200 proof fatalistic hopelessness while maintaining a certain admirable poise about it all, but that ain’t me.
I think there are some moon-shot possibilities at the sub-1% or even sub-0.01% level of probability which could have a tremendously positive impact in the unlikely event they had any success, such that they are worth trying as existential long-shots despite their severe riskiness. “So you’re telling me there’s a chance! Yeah!”
To answer your question, Michael P has it right below. Things were indeed better in the past, part of a glorious inherited legacy that’s been spent down, and now the bank account is finally running dry. Our political formula always had baked within it the seed of its own demise.
Like I said before, the best way to understand it is as a kind of security problem, in which a piece of software can run and work great for a long time until someone finally figures out how to crack it, and then it’s compromised for good. If you try to run it again, someone will just immediately crack it again the very same way.
Handle, so you really think there is a 99% chance “we are doomed.”? I, too, have a wonderful ability to convince myself that “there is no way out” but I just can’t be that pessimistic.
In the “everything old is new again” department:
“Thomas [Aquinas] believed that when rightly understood, science, philosophy, and revelation or theology are harmonious. … Not all medieval savants accepted the Thomanian doctrine of the perfect concordance of faith and reason. Duns Scotus and some other members of the Franciscian order contended that theology is the true teachings about spiritual and moral principles. … Theology is … infallible, whereas science and philosophy, the products of human thought, contain errors, since the mind of man is finite and fallible. There is much truth but also some fallacies in reason. Consequently, theology and reason are not completely compatible because the revealed truth of God cannot, and does not, contain errors. In case of any conflict between human and revealed teachings, reason must yield to the unquestionable truths of revelation.” [Virgle Glenn Wilhite, Founders of American Economic Thought and Policy, p. 17]
One can accuse CRT and creationism of this. But perhaps more important, because more common, is the faith that most people have that Nature is good, that the Universe is fair. Since a good Nature would not have any important differences between groups, such differences cannot exist.
Doomed could simply mean things will get much, much worse before they can ever get better. This could also be a description of optimism.
That’s a big conversation, heh, maybe in the comments to some other post.
But essentially it’s a matter of understanding the social mechanisms at work, and comparing the expected relative strength of your headwinds and tailwinds.
So, as a metaphor, let’s say you are a few hundred yards upriver from the Niagara Falls and drifting. If you know about the current, and you know it’s a lot stronger than your ability to row the other way, then you know you are doomed.
Perhaps, if you acted with maximum effort and with enough time to spare before passing the point of no return, if you row sideways as hard as you can, you might have a 1% chance of making it to shore before tumbling into the rocks of your watery grave. You will avoid doom, but at the same time, the cost was to ditch the boat and the whole idea of river navigation altogether, and accept a completely different path on shore.
Yeah, things were once better, before social media started to systematically produce sociopaths.
As Twitter’s Chas. Wetherel put it, “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds”.
Well, I guess I won’t be popular with this comment here, considering the vast majority of commenters here are right-wing ones, but anyway…
The problem with conservative attitudes is obvious: something works, do don’t change it – sounds reasonable.
But, there will always be people who are not satisfied with what has and/or is working “just fine”. For example, some humans were not satisfied with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, do they decided to settle down and become farmers. In the beginning, this might not have seemed like the best strategy, but in the long-term it was…
So, basically, if every human throughout the history of humanity were conservative, humanity would still be living in caves… possibly without fire too…🤔
This essay suggests that the two political parties are taking completely unreasonable extremes and you have to pick one. This isn’t necessarily true. Often one party does take a reasonable position.
In Texas, bill HB 3979, seems moderate and reasonable:
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03979I.pdf
I have professors at UT Austin claim that Republicans are passing legislation to ban teachers from mentioning slavery, but that isn’t true. If you read the bills such as the one I just linked, it’s actually quite reasonable.
The quote, on its own, is idiotic. He seems to object (in the equivocal, understated way typical of older “liberals” with doubts about woke-ism) to the racialist claptrap being force-fed kids in the public schools. At the same, time, he seems to think the state legislatures (which have ultimate authority over public school curricula) should not take any steps to stop this pernicious indoctrination. But why shouldn’t they? This is not a first amendment issue, the teachers are employees and do not have a right to teach whatever they want in the classroom (they can post whatever they want on Twitter or FB when they’re off the clock – at least, if they’re not conservatives).
I agree with you. To reiterate: The government already sets lots of limits on what teachers can say in the classroom. That’s the status quo. What is unusual is the political right pushing back on the left in this area. Normally the political left sets all the rules and the right stands down. It’s genuinely shocking to see the right attempt to do otherwise.
It’s outrageous that figures like David French suggest that the political right is abandoning their small government principles by pushing back here. The right pushed for school choice; so far they have lost. The right are expected to pay enormous amounts of money for a government run school system, that all but the very wealthy will send their children to, and the expectation is that the right basically forfeit all control of these schools to the left and not push back. That’s really quite outrageous.
How often has French been anything, other than a NeoCon tool?
The problem with your argument is that many people don’t agree with the “right-wingers”, even in red states…so I guess a solution would be for all schools to be private, but then there are many people who cannot afford private school…so you are saying that republicans should indoctrinate them?🤔
I’d trade teaching kids about Tulsa for having them read any book about what happened to major American cities with lots of blacks 1970 to today (Detroit for instance) or The Bell Curve.
But we know they don’t want to teach, they want to indoctrinate.
You want to teach de-indistrialization? Cool.
Another perfect example of the theory by mounk … you right-wingers just keep the hits on coming…🤔😬😀
Time for Arnold to remind us about the commenting rules.
180ism on steriods: The Wuhan lab leak story.
When you rule out the possibility of checks and balances or of give and take, all you have left are these various schemes for better mental hygiene.
When you’re a monist, obsessed with purity, and you’ve cleansed the campus of any diversity, then there’s nobody to oppose you. Once you’ve built your one-party state, and the party never gets voted out, then you can only police yourself, and try to be your own intellectual watchdog.
It’s become so unthinkable, on the left, to allow a platform to critical voices and to dissenting voices that all the burden is on these left-wing thinkers themselves to try to stay intellectually fit and to come up with these exercise plans because what they cannot allow is a little intellectual competition to take place, allowing outsiders to provide some scrutiny or some pushback.
Publishing needs to be all left-wing, all the time. The media needs to be 100% free of diversity. Lockstep groupthink instead of the adversarial system. Accusation is sentencing. Nobody outside the tribe gets a hearing. Everything is inside the party, and there is no second party.
It’s not intellectually healthy to eliminate every dissenting voice and to strangle in its crib the heretic and the outsider.
When you get rid of all that outdated due process stuff and replace it with the unlimited power of some Witchfinder General at Facebook, then the intellectuals on the left are going to make these intra-party arguments about trying to be a little intellectually rigorous.
It would be a lot easier for our friends on the left if they just allowed other people to make arguments against them, but that’s unthinkable. Having denounced all their critics as pariahs and expelled them, the left-wingers can only write these self-help books about toning their thinking muscles and trying to get into shape that way.