1. Terms that describe the current state
–Negative polarization. Political energy comes from hatred of the other side. May not even like the leaders on your side.
–Zero cognitive empathy. Unable to imagine that the other side is reasonable. Makes you inclined to want to make the other side disappear.
–Asymmetric insight. The belief that the other side does not realize what its motives are, but you do.
2. The desired state
–Widespread cognitive empathy
–Goal in political arguments is to understand the other side, not to humiliate it.
3. Three-axes model
progressive: oppressor-oppressed
conservative: civilization-barbarism
libertarian: liberty-coercion
4. example: “de-fund the police”
5. axes of demonization?
6. the Trump era–elites vs. populists
7. example: defer to health authorities on the virus?
Negative polarization is a good description for quite a bit of today; and meanwhile:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/toppling-attempt-led-by-harvard-student-ends-after-confrontation-with-statue-defenders
the clearest antecedents appear to be from the French Revolution. A game theory approach suggests a dynamic wildly out of equilibrium.
Personally, as a pragmatist I speak a fourth language of politics; I think according to a success-failure axis. So for example a libertarian might see Sweden and the USSR as statist, coercive, and bad; a pragmatist sees them as substantially different. Sweden works pretty well for the Swedes; the USSR didn’t.
Or consider the COVID crisis. East Asian societies, while greatly lacking in liberty, have managed coordinated responses that are controlling the virus much better than America does for reasons that seem to involve their superior “state capacity” (their ability to use the power of the state, which involves a superior facility for coercion). A pragmatist sees the value of state capacity in such situations (while being reasonably concerned about its dangers).
The problem with allowing efficient coercion is that the users never willingly relent, and their judgment when not to use it erodes over time.
Yes, the US might well have stopped the virus in its tracks if we had locked everyone in their homes for 6-8 weeks. There are lots of things you can accomplish if you can imprison people in their homes for any amount of time. I think it is incredibly foolish to ever give anyone in government that kind of power, including the topic of the day- the mandated wearing of masks.
We got lucky with this virus; it seems to kill a small percentage of people and permanently cripple a somewhat larger percentage. Would your answer be the same if we were discussing an equally contagious virus that had the 30% fatality rate of the Black Death? Or if we considered a similarly contagious virus that was as fatal to us as smallpox was to native Americans (~95% fatality) with the accompanying complete civilizational collapse? To the pragmatic mindset, at some point state coercion starts to look like the lesser evil. Tyranny is bad, but we’ve overthrown tyrants before.
And “mandated wearing of masks” is, to me, a non-issue. The benefits are very considerable, and the level of force being used is so mild that we’re basically on the honor system. It isn’t like the feds razed Cleveland to the ground for insufficient mask usage.
What honor system? Wear a mask or lose your job isn’t on the honor system.
As for your other questions, a plague of that sort still wouldn’t justify locking people in their homes against their will, Jay.
That’s where we disagree. I think preserving civilization does justify some levels of coercion, depending on circumstances. See also: the criminal justice system.
BTW, unless you work for the government, the government can’t fire you. It’s your employer doing the coercion there. Libertarians often assume that the absence of government coercion means freedom, but it usually just means pettier and less organized types of coercion.
But to state it according to my fourth-language-of-politics, pragmatic paradigm: I note that societies with a high level of state coercive capacity (Japan, Singapore, China, South Korea) are currently doing better at stopping the pandemic than Western liberal societies. Preserving our health is a universally-agreed good, or near enough, and success in providing universally-agreed goods is all the justification a political system needs.
Singapore had a hard time stopping COVID in its guest worker dormitories.
You need a certain pattern of living and a certain kind of rule following people to make things work. The decision of what kind of society you are going to be determines how well you can respond to the crisis more than the decisions of officials once its happened. You either decide you’re the kind of society that crams poor people into dormitories or not. Once that is how you live, its very hard to do anything about it later.
@asdf: I see your point but given the geography and population of Singapore, overcrowding is unavoidable. I don’t fault them for crowded worker dormitories. I do fault them to an extent for failing to monitor the dormitories and contain the spread of the virus. Still, I live in Florida and the effectiveness of Singapore’s response, warts and all, seems deeply enviable; my government is doing far worse with far fewer handicaps.
I have a subtopic for you to consider:
Does the theory of TLP and the reactions/discussions it spawns actually provide tools to move us towards the direction of 2. The desired state, or better, as Jay says, improve our ability to think according to a success-failure axis? Or… instead, does it actually more often tend to reverberate the effects it identifies?
As evidence, I suggest reviewing blog post responses over the past few years.
On asymmetric insight, it always seemed to me that neither side notices how incoherent their platforms are, having no real core principles, and that is why outsiders see them as having bad motives. Usually when we try to guess at motives we look at outcomes, or at least expected outcomes, and say “that was the goal”. With the entirely confused and contradictory positions of the major parties all we are left with are big meta goals like control or big corporations or whatever. When in doubt, assign the motive to the end of your axis that matches your feelings on a particular issue.
That’s because each “side” is actually a coalition of diverging interests. For example, the Democrats are a coalition of:
* Coastal professionals and “creatives”
* Immigrants and 2nd generation immigrants
* African-Americans
* The remnants of the union movement
* The finance industry (which plays both sides)
and probably a few more.
Well stated.
Probably the Democratic Party aspires to be the the party of “Visible Minorities.” It varies, but there is a rule of thumb that if you are a “phenotypically a visible minority” you may tend Democratic, independent of your class and professional status. I wonder what percentage of “Persons of South Asian descent practicing medicine” vote democratic, for example.
In contrast, people who assimilate to “generic phenotypically white” are less constrained in drifting toward Republican. I think of Eastern Europeans when I say that, just anecdotally. Poles, Ukrainians, Slavs, whatnot.
“Married with children” is a nice variable to keep an eye on, as Steve Sailer points out. Single women and married women do not vote identically, other things being equal.
The same could also be said of regular church attendance. I believe the more often you go to church, the less likely you are to vote Democratic, statistically, even though there are liberal priests / ministers and liberal sects.
With regular church attendance, it may be in part that Southern Baptists outnumber Unitarians. It also may be that the more you go to church, the less you try to change the world and the more you focus on trying to control your own weaknesses. Maybe. Maybe.
Also, regular church attendance seems to be correlated with children under 18 in household.
I enjoyed this recent article.
Not sure if it is apropos, but it demonstrates how a city like Chicago has changed in 50 years.
https://www.governing.com/assessments/Cities-and-the-Forgotten-World-of-Archie-Bunker.html
I would definitely be interested in hearing more about bullet point two. Why is that the desired state? My impression is that a lot of people just disagree about things, and understanding people who they disagree with won’t change their opinion. So I don’t see the upside to number 2. I would rather just see parties that are able to govern and implement their agenda, and let the real world results convince voters one way or another, instead of endless arguing where neither party can ever enact all that much of their agenda.
I wonder how useful a TLP approach is to understanding the positions of the three tribes—one’s own, or the other two. The approach seems more useful as a description of how the factions justify their positions than as an explanation of how they arrive at them.
Consider gun control, for instance. I could easily imagine a world in which conservatives support strict limits on possession of weapons by private citizens, and progressives oppose such restrictions. On the one hand, conservatives would want the police, as the agents of order and civilization, to hold a monopoly on the means of applying deadly force, and to keep firearms out of the hands of prospective looters and rioters. On the other, progressives could easily make a case that the police are instruments of oppression, and that oppressed groups should not be denied the means of self-defense.
So with abortion. Why wouldn’t conservatives favor access thereto, as tending to check the growth of the fecund hordes of potential barbarians, while progressives oppose abortion on demand, as a reprehensible device for reducing the populations of oppressed groups, and by regarding the fetus as a victim of opporession?
I’m afraid that the means whereby a faction comes to a position on an issue is more like: Some critical mass of opinion-leaders within the faction takes a particular position, to which position other members of the faction then default, while members of the other side default to the opposite position. Each side then uses its particular TLP language to justify its stance, as though that was the reason for their adopting the stance in the first place.
There is a whole literature that suggests people make decisions/have opinions mostly for unconscious reasons. We then use reason to justify those decisions/opinions. Two interesting books on the subject are Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard UP, 2017) and Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain (Oxford UP, 2018).
I think think the lack of cognitive empathy is the problem.
Consider, on August 16, 2017, Trump said, “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
At the time, the left called this absurd, and the NYT and Washington Post went further and ridiculed it. Not even 34 months later, it’s Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility in action. Does the left have cognitive empathy for itself?
Those on the heterodox / dissident right did, and answered Trump’s rhetorical question by saying “Of course it’s Washington and Jefferson next. They owned slaves, they represent the American past which leftists hate, and there is no compelling logical reason to stop at the Confederacy, even if the papers pretend there is. Churchill was already booted out of the White House. Next it will be not just confederates but Lincoln and Grant and Wilson too. FDR will take longer, but just wait.
I think the whole premise motivating the hope for an increase in cognitive empathy is false. The idea is that people hate each other because they don’t really understand each other, and are talking past each other.
But actually, you have only seen the very tip of the hateberg. Wait and see how much more they hate each other once they really get to know their enemy.
*don’t think
I think you are half right, and half horribly wrong.
TLP is a bad concept not because it is wrong, but because it is only an explanation for what is weak and stupid about us. Obviously, human beings can also apply rational thought to their circumstances, and can live well at times. We do figure some things out. It has always been more important to choose wisely who you want to work with, and who you want to engage with politically than it is to try to force empathy for someone who shares none of your values.
So, there is a hateberg to be found. But, there is also an even larger group out there that we can all choose to talk, listen and react to, or not. So if you have any interest in climbing out of whatever emotional bunker you’ve dug for yourself, try not to focus all of your attention on whoever upsets you the most. Try to find someone you can actually understand, and go from there.
So lets imagine what would Robert A. Dahl have said about this.
Dahl was a highly respected professor of political science at Yale most noted for his contributions regarding the practice of pluralism in politics as well as the concept of institutional process of democratization towards a utopian ideal of democracy, this process which he termed “polyarchy.” He may be best known for his study of democracy in a city, entitled “Who Governs?” but that is a rather thick book, and I think two of his shorter books “How Democratic is the American Constitution?” and “On Democracy” can be plundered profitably to comment on the outline provided in the post. (If you have time for the likes of George Will and Jonah Goldberg, you definitely have time for Dahl.) I’d no doubt add another of his books, “Democracy and Its Critics” but I can’t find it at the moment byt will resort to wikiquotes as need be.
In looking at the current state of play in the USA, he might have asked what are the driving forces behind negative polarization? From “How Democratic Is the American Constitution” we might get the idea that the inability within the USA to form democratic consensus and to have a democratic government that is effective in solving problems is rooted in the USA constitution, in particular the way in which the framers attempted to insulate the president and executive branch from the popular vote. Who can doubt that much of the hate of Trump has to do with his not winning the popular vote? If the Virginia Plan had been adopted, ironically, the president would have been even more insulated being elected by Congress rather than direct vote of the people.
In On Democracy, he lists 6 institutions required for large scale democracy: elected officials; free, fair, and frequent elections; freedom of expression; alternative sources of information; associational autononomy; and, inclusive citizenship. A correlation between the failure to meet these and the anger of negative polarization is hard to dismiss.
And from “On Democracy” we might gather that he would recognize the inequality in political resources available to various institutions in the polyarchy and would recognize further that these inequities are a necessary consequence of a market economy. “No demonstrably superior alternative to a predominately market economy is anywhere in sight.” he wrote, yet, he also wrote, “Now the inequalities in resources that market-capitalism churns out produce serious political inequalities among citizens.” I suspect that he would see these inequalities as a legitimate source of grievance and note that in more consensual democracies with greater participation through proportional representation, the strife is dialed down significantly.
As far as asymetric insight, in “Democracy and Its Critics,” he writes “Insofar as the idea and practice of democracy are justified by the values of freedom, human development, and the protection and advancement of shared human interests, the idea and practice of democracy also presuppose three kinds of equality: the intrinsic moral equality of all persons; the equality expressed by the presumption that adult persons are entitled to personal autonomy in determining what is best for themselves, and following from these, political equality among citizens.” Here again, the USA constitution provides a process designed to thwart political equality. Winner take all is a zero sum gaime. Fight or die is the rule of the game, and all is fair in war. In contrast, see constitutional orders that have produced a premium for consensuality in Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
As far as where we want to be, in On Democracy, he writes that separation may be the answer: “When cultural cleavages are too deep to be overcome by any of the previous solutions, the only remaining solution may be for cultureal groups to separate themselves into different political units within which they possess enough autonomy to maintain their identity and achieve their main cultural goals.” This anticipates the proposal for “federalism on steroids” put forth in F.H. Buckley’s “American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup.”
On the three axes model, I suspect that he would see each axis as representing three complaints about inequality of political resources. Democrats complain about the inequality of monetary political resources which is labeled white supremacy, patriarchy, etc etc., Republicans complain about their relative inability to get votes from certain identity groups, and Libertarians complain about their inability to gain meaningful representation in the legislature or executive branch.
On “defund the police” I also have nothing to quote from Dahl, but perhaps he would see this as a struggle between consensuality (everybody has a bill to “fix” the police but few if any open the police up to democratic accountability) and the ability for different powers to be exercises within the polyarchy.
On the remaining points, Dahl maybe sums it up with “To be sure, even if you are included in the electorate of a democratic state, you cannot be certain that all your interests will be adquately protected; but if you are excluded you can be pretty sure that your interests will be seriously injured by neglect or outright damage.”
I don’t see “populism” listed in the index of any of his books on hand, but I would like to believe that he disapproved of the use of the word as a slur as it is frequently is used as an all purpose smear comparable to “fascist.” and that he would concur with Ralf Schuler:
“Wherever populism is strong, people speak out because they want politicians to solve certain problems. That’s a good sign: rather than sliding into apathy or not voting, people express their voice democratically. In most cases populism leads to higher voter turnouts, since its opponents are also spurred into action.
Problems arise when the other parties don’t accept populists as legitimate competitors in the market of opinions. They try to exclude populists and restrict their access to platforms. But such cordoning off doesn’t work in the digital age: populists simply move online into their own spaces, where they build their own truths – truths that then become more and more difficult to handle when they return to the “real” political stage. The outcome is polarization and irreconcilable differences.”
And if you can read german, check his “Let us be populists: Ten theses for a new culture of debate.”
Consensual decisionmaking means listening to dissenters.
Who can doubt that much of the hate of Trump has to do with his not winning the popular vote?
I can. If Trump had won the popular vote by half a million, it would make at most a 1% difference. The vast majority of people who hate Trump hate him because he is who he is, not for how many votes he got.
There is a huge problem with these dispassionate analyses of all the sides in a conflict.
The very dispassionate tone is the problem. Since passions should follow from judgments, the dispassionate tone implies that there is truth or merit or something else good in all of the sides, and in sufficiently equal measure to warrant the dispassionate tone. This equalistic implication is impossible to swallow. Our life experience tells us that while unequal allocations may be just or unjust, even extremely unjust, equal allocations always mean that good guys are getting shafted and bad guys are getting away with crap.
Does agency fit in there somewhere? As in, are there differences in how the three groups think about agency and how it relates to outcomes? I’ve been wondering lately if how one thinks of agency is a (or the) critical factor in which of the three axes a person tends to be on. Maybe that’s a given and I just missed it.