Lifted from the comments

Handle, who is a popular commenter here, wrote a long essay on this post.

I’ll start with my outline/interpretation of Handle’s comment, and then reproduce the comment.

1. Political movements need to coordinate. This requires simplifying messaging. (This may explain why my three-axes model seems to work. While there may be all sorts of subtle nuances to individuals’ thinking, it is easiest for progressives to signal to one another by invoking the oppressor-oppressed axis, or for conservatives to signal using the civilization-barbarism axis, or for libertarians to signal using the freedom-coercion axis.)

2. In a complex world, this sort of simplification can have adverse consequences if one group becomes dominant and tries to cram every issue into its simple framework. We are better off in a society where no one ideological framework takes over.

3. However, the progressive movement seems dominant today. The more that the progressive agenda becomes implemented, the more damage it will cause. Paradoxically, this will lead progressives to become more adamant and less tolerant of dissent.

If you combine Sanders and Warren, what you get is socialism combined with demonization and intimidation of anyone who does not support left-wing views. This is the country that the Democratic left wants to live in?

I take this as a rhetorical question to try and make mainstream elite democrats, who would not be comfortable admitting that they side with Socialist bullies, a little ashamed of not speaking up against them and of belonging to a party increasingly characterized by those types of characters and behaviors.

However, I think the accurate and unfortunate answer is ‘yes’ for a good portion of Democrats, and the reasonable, enlightened and moderate folks for whom the answer is ‘no’, still have no desire or ability to resist it.

Which raises the question as to why that should be, which I think is the most important question about social-psychological dynamics of our era, especially since it could give us some insight into how the near future will unfold.

Please allow me to speculate a little on it.

The answer to that question, I think, is a combination of the one given by Schelling 55 years ago in The Strategy of Conflict (officially respectable source) and Auster (officially very non-respectable and infamously irascible source) starting about 15 years ago but here’s a summary of the idea.

The Schelling component is that in any kind of complicated game or bargaining / negotiation process (a category of which the perpetual open-contest of ideological jostling of modern politics is a member), and even with explicit communications, if the participants are to concert, they often do so on the basis of recursive and reflexive cross-expectations similar to what would emerge in coordinating a solution to a tacit circumstance without communication.

These solutions tend to be characterized by a psychological ‘special magnetism’ related to simplicity, prominence, common conspicuousness, uniqueness, and non-ambiguity which will likely reflect shared values and usually take the shape of already well-known established precedents.

One consequential manifestation of this process in the context of political or ideological bargaining seems to be a very ‘low bandwidth’ in terms of the low number and high level of abstraction of major principles. Too many principles, and they could too obviously contradict each other. Too much detail, and there are suddenly too many ‘degrees of freedom’ which creates too many possibilities and makes mind-reading guesses too unlikely, with too much to lawyerly argue about.

This is related to the role that simple, instinctive norms of ‘common sense morality’ play in coordinating social interactions and setting boundaries on behaviors in any situation of a conflict of interests. The evolutionary social psychologists would say that this is the adaptive reason moral sense evolved (or ‘prevailed’) in the first place, but the mental tendency seems to be vulnerable to ‘hijacking’ by ideological movements that demand social arrangements that are no longer adaptive in our modern circumstances.

So ideological movements that are able to garner any following rely on this mechanism to generate the kind of agreement necessary to form a coalition, and thus tend to arise out of an incredibly simplistic set of vague and abstract basic principles, with ‘the details to be worked out later’ by some kind of ‘experts’ who have ‘jurisdiction’ over such matters.

For the contemporary progressive left, that principle is essentially a social-justice universalism informed by a dogma of absolutist egalitarianism, most famously expounded upon by Rawls in his A Theory of Justice. Two people may agree on something simple and vague like ‘social justice’ but wouldn’t be able to agree on details about, say, the minimum wage or tax schedules.

These few, abstract principles necessarily reflect or contain a certain good-vs-bad worldview and thus logically imply – and naturally give rise to – a certain semi-fictional narrative about the way the human social world currently works, the way it should work (perhaps in a ‘Utopian’ vision), and who the good and bad guys are in the story. And that narrative tends to be expressed in terms of just a few core themes, symbols, ‘explanations’, recurring patterns, and words that form a ‘political language’ about which our host has added a very insightful contribution.

The progressive language leans heavily on a class-warfare framework (or identity-based variations on that theme), with the explanation that inequality is caused by exploitation on the one hand and privilege on the other, which makes everything a struggle between oppressors (bad guys) and the oppressed (good guys).

The trouble is that just like any simplistic model informed by a few empirical observations will eventually diverge from complicated reality outside of its ‘operational envelope’, any over-simplistic narrative of human social dynamics cannot capture all the complexity of reality, or otherwise it may refuse to accept some ‘ugly’ facts about that reality..

My own personal opinion (your mileage may vary) is that some of the most successful civilizations – such as the British and Roman empires – at their height were managed with a minimum amount of ideological interference with everyday politics or distortion away from more optimal or traditionally evolved solutions and were thus characterized by a special degree of pragmatic reasonableness and a commitment to the balancing of various, equally compelling interests, without everything being swallowed up by some ‘One Big Idea’.

But, if the big idea is implemented by true-believers who have gotten hold of the reigns of power in the form of naive coercive policy, it will produce lots and lots of undesirable results and unintended consequences, leading to ever more reactive interventions to attempt to remedy the problems created by the last intervention.

But all the policy implications of these novel ideologies and movements are hardly ever implemented all at once (or when they are, they tend to lead to rapid disaster). It takes a lot of work to gain power and to keep it, and if your policies bring bad results they can be counterproductive in terms of staying in charge if you have any serious threats or competitors. There is always the threat of outsiders (or ‘insidious’ influence of insiders) of the constituencies of those whose interests will be harmed by a new policy more in keeping with the movement’s purported fundamental principles.

There is also the ‘frog-boiling’ effect to consider. People can adjust to slow changes, and even lack awareness of substantial change over time and have a kind of ‘amnesia’ about yesterday’s normalcy. But if you throw radical changes at them too fast, they notice and react and stick in their heels.

One might expect this political game to reach some kind of social equilibrium in a stable balance of conflicting interests. But the implications of Schelling’s insight tells us this is impossible when there is no established authority over political ideas that can establish a ‘stable orthodoxy’, and people can thus still argue and ‘bargain’ in public about the details. If the arguing need not stop, it will always go on, arguing for more consistency with the framework.

There isn’t enough ‘cognitive bandwidth’ for people to both know and agree upon the whole Talmudic case-law of the detailed ‘solutions’ of any current equilibrium. There can only ever be the few basic, abstract, vague principles, and there will always be plenty of things to point to in reality that diverge significantly from the moral mandates of those few principles.

The trouble is that there is just no articulable, logical stopping point at some place of reasonable moderation, or some counter-vailing and limiting principle, and thus no place to really, genuinely settle the negotiations at some particular social and legal state of affairs. This is a key point. Without that natural stopping point, ambitious ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ hoping to raise their social status in games of competitive sanctimony will always find something ‘objectionable’ (in the terms of the simplistic moral framework of the principles) to leverage in a demand for amelioration.

It’s a slippery-slope situation that will continue to try to ratchet in one direction only. Every pause or seeming cease-fire is, necessarily, merely a temporary hiatus and ephemeral modus vivendi in a long war. This is because the ideological salience of progressively more extreme positions can never dissipate, because there is simply no ‘room’ left in the box of principles that people can concert around.

That being the case, ideological movements that wish to radically alter the fabric and structure of existing society (because it’s ‘unjust’ or something) tend to keep working in an intermittent and piecemeal fashion at the margins in finding the contemporary path of least resistance to bringing social reality into accord with their politics (according to the limits of their power and legitimacy, and if the limits are relaxed, the pace will surely increase.)

But the obvious problem is what to do with the ‘temporarily too hard to change’ remaining instances of social injustice, i.e. ‘unprincipled exceptions’ to the framework principles of the coalition’s ideology. It’s not enough to simply leave them alone, because interested parties will know about the incompatibility between the reality and ideology and thus be alert to the possibility of eventual ‘rectification’. So the ideological movement must hand-wave and assert some affirmative denial that there is anything to worry about, before finally reversing themselves and implementing the rectification anyway. This is Rod Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility”.

Furthermore, to the extent their own constituents and coalition members feel the need to violate the clear implications of the ideological principles where they conflict too painfully with reality and demand too much from ordinary humans, they must even come up with some rationalization that allows for temporary tolerance of hypocritical behaviors under some socially acceptable excuse. These excuses require their own fictional narratives for support (for instance the non-null hypothesis of education), which layers one delusion on top of another.

However, the sum of all these unprincipled exceptions and rationalized hypocrisies is what makes life tolerably pleasant and society reasonably functional and non-obnoxiously intrusive and tyrannical for the average individual, who is granted a form of temporary reprieve and ‘indulgence’ to continue ‘living in sin’.

But eventually the day will come that the balance of power will shift slightly against people trying to preserve the ‘status quo agreement’ equilibrium, and then some political entrepreneur will point out this long-standing hypocrisy and tolerance of injustice, its inconsistency with good, and then demand it be eliminated, and no one will be able to point to anything within the coalition’s constrained framework of ideological principles to argue against yet another initiative.

And, as Auster said, the movement will work its mischief by eliminating the unprincipled exceptions one by one. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually life becomes increasingly unpleasant, and society works less and less well as the true believers try harder and harder to make it fit to their particular Procrustean bed. The slide ends in disaster and/or emergence of a new order under a different framework where these ‘entrepreneurs’ are no longer free to make their cases.

Looking at contemporary progressivism and its robust hold on power, and its principles, narratives, language, and values, if one accepts the mechanisms described above, I just don’t see how one could not expect them to eventually continue to move in the direction of Socialism and Intolerant Bullying of any Opposition.

Old societies were only able to survive the potential (and sometimes real) collapses implicit in similar phenomena by evolving various techniques to stabilize against these particular ideological failure modes. But many were eagerly abandoned in the zeal of the enlightenment and the spread of norms of free political expression and democracy, but without a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the danger inherent in this system of a freedom that could sow the seed of its own destruction the minute the norms of tolerance free expression came under unrelenting and successful attack.

Our inheritance of several of these social features in the unwritten constitution of Anglo-American culture that slowed things down or occasionally reversed them in the past has now been practically exhausted and/or circumvented. So Warren-Sanders seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of an accelerating trend.

Their kind are going to do some damage to the culture and to the economy, no doubt about it. But again, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and we can absorb a certain amount of redistribution and regulation an dead-weight loss without things getting too bad or unlivable. But the trick will be to prevent them from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and keep them away as much as possible from the foundational engines of our prosperity: innovation and markets.

Keeping them distracted on mostly orthogonal cultural matters (the more irresolvable the better) might be the best way to do this for the time being, but there will always be the danger of there coming a point where they are tempted to take things too far, and when no one will feel able to try and stop them. Especially if they can’t express an opinion contrary to the new, ever-ratcheting, mainstream orthodoxy without losing respectability and being excommunicated from polite society or otherwise having their lives ruined.

12 thoughts on “Lifted from the comments

  1. This leads in my theory of why and how Bill Clinton Governed so well. Professional politicians like him tend to be con artists and he was among the best at the con. He would have these speeches with long lists of left wing proposals but he would then govern conservatively. Of course it is pretty sad when the best that you can hope for is a con artist.

    • A Straussian might say (or rather, ‘hint’) that there is simply no alternative to some ‘big con’ or ‘noble lie’ to the extent that any stable social equilibrium is based on some constructed metaphysical ideology, which helps add the reliable bonds of a little social glue to the community.

      And since political coalitions can only be based around a few core abstract principles and focal points, they will tend to go to extremes if in power and not otherwise tempered by some institutional constraints.

      The best governing strategy in such circumstances would indeed seem to be something of a noble con-job that is a kind of inside joke for the elites and ruling class, “Pay lip-service to ideology but govern pragmatically.” I.e. ‘enlightened hypocrisy’.

      The trouble is that it is extremely hard to transmit the wisdom of this inside joke about the hypocrisy to all the potential boat-rockers of the social-equilibrium, especially in the next generation raised on the con, and especially when your social structure permits – even encourages – a lot of boat-rockers.

      There are two big problems. First, it’s really hard to keep the ruling class’ morale up and dedicated to the leadership responsibility of this sort of noblesse oblige when they believe that they are engaged in what is, at root, a giant fraud. It’s not impossible, and sustainable examples do occur, but it’s very hard and rare.

      The second problem is that you’ll get a whole new generation of ruling class or potential boat-rockers who take the ideology completely and deadly seriously with fanatical piety, and start agitating for and demanding radical social changes to make the real world conform to the vision. For any genuinely ‘open society’, there is no good and easy way to rein these people in and/or let them in on the inside joke and command their allegiance to it, without spoiling the joke itself and thereby breaking the essential social spell.

      A lot of people hoped for a long time that it might be possible to maintain a functional organized society in a pleasant high-trust equilibrium that was both ‘open’ and ‘spell-less’, but that was naive and ignorant of the nature of the mechanisms by which social organizations preserves themselves.

      My read of things is that the Straussian Neoconservatives hinted that the trick would be to settle on the best (or least-bad), and most benign spell (at least by the historical judgment informed by the catastrophes of the early 20th century – i.e. the Anglo-American traditional institutions) and create mechanisms by which the elite classes could signal each other about the pressing need to continue paying lip-service to that spell and avoid rocking the boat.

      But except for a very small set of surviving adherents, that mission seems to have faltered due in part to the passage of time, generational and demographic turnover, and the end of the Cold War, among other reasons related to signalling and social status.

      But notice the ‘neo’. Why not just be unprefixed (or ‘paleo’) conservatives and use the ideological principles of the American Founding and original Constitution as the alternative focal point (especially to Socialism), and which still commanded a good amount of affection and allegiance?

      But the Straussians and Neoconservatives realized that to have any chance of keeping their project alive even temporarily and accomplishing even a little bit of their mission, they had to maintain at least some respectability amongst the elite intellectual class (not to mention a somewhat wider public audience), who were already vigilantly looking for any reason or any way to oust them from polite society and their academic perches. And that simply required some ideological accommodation and compromise with the academic left, the minimal amount of which seems to have been accepting the New Deal revolution as a fait accompli. Lately, one would have to accept a lot more than that to avoid being identified as an obvious heretic and member of the hated enemy camp.

      And so today, with progressivism dominant, barely opposed by any effective counter-coalitions, and deeply-entrenched in all the opinion-influencing institutions, the time is ripe for a rapid shift in the direction of their ideological mandates and moral imperatives. Their coalition is full of true-believers who were never let in on the joke, and who aren’t very loyal to Anglo-American traditions when they are seen as unworthy, obsolete, and frustrating obstacles that get in their way.

      But worse than that, we seem to have lost some of those institutions and social mechanisms by which this sort of inside joke could be transmitted within the elite-mind-molding intelligentsia with anywhere need the effectiveness necessary to keep it going.

      But we need not lose all hope entirely. For one, Conquest’s First Law means there are still plenty of expert people whose job it is to actually know the real consequences of making some ideologically-motivated and potentially catastrophic change, and when faced with some new proposal, they will tend to use what leverage, authority, and influence they have to keep things on the right track. Many of these people are bureaucrats of one type or another, and bureaucracies are famously averse to change for change’s sake. Sometimes that’s very frustrating, but don’t underestimate how valuable it can be as well.

      And also, if I’m not mistaken, a small number of exceptionally special people are keeping that Straussian flame going in new ways, maintaining friendly relations with the academic elites and members of the ruling class and paying lip-service to the progressive spell in order to deliver subtle nudges of influence at the most important points, and run interference for their heterodox comrades, and sending inside-joke signals to the savvier among them.

      But I’m just some guy on the internet, so maybe I’m just imagining it, right?

  2. As a proud proponent of the “Civilization-Barbarism” axis, the last three or four paragraphs undervalue the barbarizing aspects of this problem. The infinite quest to eliminate all non-conforming institutions is ultimately a quest to eliminate all institutions. The rebellions of the socialists are explicitly anti-civilizational. Rousseau’s dictum that men are born free, but everywhere found in chains seeks a return to a pre-society state of nature.

    Hobbes could have told him how that ended. No chains, just fear. All that Hobbes missed was the fear of the mob. Socrates could have told him how that ended.

  3. This is brilliant. Though the dynamic works somewhat differently, I suspect the same blinders work for extreme libertarianism as well.

    I agree that progressive ideology is the dominant force in western society and is the largest current danger. Extreme conservatives (religious types) would scare the hell out of me if they were in charge of all our institutions. But they simply aren’t. It is extreme progressives I fear. They are gaining ubiquitous control of schools, bureaucracies, media, and are using their power to re-engineer society to meet their narrative. Non progressives of all stripes need to balance this before great harm is done.

  4. I think there are some counter-balancing forces that the esteemed Handle did not discuss which make the situation a bit less hopeless. For example, as people stake out more extreme ideological positions, the gap between reality–at least as experienced by most people–and the rhetoric of the ideologues is likely to grow, perhaps to the point of absurdity. This will have the effect of alienating honest and intelligent people, reducing the coalition’s raw numbers and making it more reliant on the stupid and the cynical.

    • To paraprhase Keynes, the regime can stay crazy longer than you can stay alive. There is an insanity escape velocity such as with dictators where they use crazy as a means to root out and eliminate the realistic people you refer to.

      • True. Cultural norms also play a role, though. Mugabe can get away with hacking dissenters’ limbs off in Zimbabwe because he has supporters willing to wield machetes on his behalf and not nearly enough people who are willing to fight back. That situation is nigh unthinkable here in the US. There are very few people willing to even pick up a machete for political reasons, much less use it, and even if they did, there would be a well-armed opposition group they’d have to contend with. You could pick other examples here.

        And I think the rhetoric does matter in this equation, too. A century ago, you could probably make a plausible case that a system that allowed Andrew Carnegie to amass as great a fortune as he did whilst his employees sweated their way through 12+ hour shifts in the blast furnace for a few dollars was evil and needed to end. Today, of course, seizing a steel mill and turning it over to the workers isn’t exactly a quick path to riches. Alternatively, the idea of seizing, say, Mark Zuckerberg’s assets seems absurd to almost everyone. Who did he exploit, exactly? So the idea that socialists are going to kill the golden goose through excessive redistribution here I think seems like a bit of a stretch. Doing so would violate too many people’s common sense moral intuitions.

  5. It’s an interesting argument, but I don’t understand the sniping at the Enlightenment. I happen to think the continental side of the Enlightenment was sorta messed up, but even there on the continent, it wasn’t obviously qualitatively more messed up than your average changing-more-slowly political system before or nearby. There were lots of old-style less-Enlightenment-ish rivals of national scale running around from 1750 to 1900, and they got spanked by even the continental Enlightenment types rather more often than the other way around, and they got roflpwned by the Scottish Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution types far more often than the other way around. And although since 1900 the old-style rivals have been rarer and weaker, various newer-style rivals have contended too, sometimes with respectable results but not with obviously superior results. Given the old non-Enlightenment rivals falling behind so consistently over a reasonably long term (ten or so generations), it seems as though the proposition that the Enlightenment is particularly dysfunctional should be supported by careful argument (or at least other explicit arguments, like the classic of defining its worldly successes as vulgar or wicked, or attributing them to witchcraft/vampirism/exploitation/sellingsouls/whatever), not bald assertion with no explicit argument.

    Also, merely the furnace blast of extreme prosperity itself could be sufficient to destabilize a lot of old institutions, independent of the fact that it seems to have been created by the Enlightenment or at least many of the same currents that created the Enlightenment. Until the Industrial Revolution, in almost all times and places a lot of different kinds of silliness would naturally burn out quickly because people would starve or otherwise hit absolute constraints. Once innovations have doubled GDP per capita once a generation for several generations, a society has a lot more slack to explore dysfunctional weirdness deeply in elaborate expensive ways before being pulled up short by reality. People criticizing the weirdness that has accumulated since the Enlightenment do have a point, but blaming it directly on the Enlightenment without acknowledging how staggeringly richer we’ve become doesn’t seem to follow logically. (Especially if the use weak coincidence arguments to justify the obvious causality from Enlightenment, but aren’t impressed by the similar coincidence that would suggest the Enlightenment might be causally connected to the extreme prosperity.) How weird would things have become if instead of being generated by changes in mundane institutions, that much wealth had simply fallen as manna from Heaven? Has Handle really made the case that that much wealth falling from the sky would have been qualitatively less destabilizing than the destabilization observed over the period of the Enlightenment (showering us with wealth)?

  6. Only a conservative could possibly view progressivism as dominant, likely because they disagree as heavily among themselves as much as progressives, and so ideological that any compromise is considered an act of treachery, an opposition so loyal they can’t recognize themselves in power or conceive what being in power means, and can only view themselves as threatened outsiders beholding the eschaton with anything less than absolute power.

    • I am not a conservative — indeed I don’t even grok what conservativism is about — but I think progressivism is becoming the dominant ideology in education, academia, the media, and most government institutions.

      We need a resurgence of diversity in ideas.

      • Maybe we only assume we know what progressivism is all about. It seems like it is about whatever the latest fad that trolls conservatives the hardest happens to be.

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