In every case, the signature of the new populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off the bullies in any form they appear—illegal immigrants, rapacious elites, menacing foreign nations, and so on.
. . .Nor is Trump alone in functioning as a super-daddy in a world where more and more children and former children grow up without an ordinary father in the home.
I recently read Eberstadt’s new book, Primal Screams, in which she argues that the sexual revolution resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of children growing up in intact families with siblings, creating identity crises for such children, with identity politics stepping in to provide a substitute for the loss of strong family identity. I will re-read her book, which includes interesting reaction essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel (you can think of them as representing the three axes, respectively). But at the moment I would describe her thesis as at best speculative.
I had the same skeptical reaction to the essay on populism. Does the causal analysis hold up under scrutiny? It seems to me that authoritarian “father-figure” leaders have emerged at different times and in disparate countries without being preceded by a sudden increase in broken families. I think that she needs to make a more rigorous attempt to demonstrate the validity of her causal model if she wants to avoid the accusation of practicing right-wing normative sociology.
The psychological mechanism is plausible. But there are many mechanisms that can increase the probability of populist government. To move from conjecture to explanation, we would need evidence that super-daddy psychology changes the voting behavior of citizens (explanatory power) in numbers sufficient to tip elections for populist candidates (explanatory scope); and that the mechanism also has such explanatory power and scope in a variety of national cultures.
In every case, the signature of the new populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off the bullies in any form they appear
That would seem to be true of innumerable leaders throughout history, on the right, left, or wherever.
This doesn’t sound particularly plausible to me, Trump’s base is white non-hispanic, and the group with the lowest rates of single parent homes is exactly white non-hispanic. The group with the highest rates of single parent households went the softest for Trump, and he got the worst % of black voters for any republican that wasn’t running against Obama since Bush 1.
Well a lot of leaders became ‘Father Figures’. My liberal Mom in the 1980s held that Reagan was a bit of a father figure to a lot Boomers at the time (he was fun to make fun at the time) and Obama held a lot of ‘Father Figures’ to Progressive voters.
So where has the authoritarian populist leaders come from? When all else fails, blame hard economic times and the reality that the Great Recession:
1) Cut real wages more than economist charts because of High Deductible Insurance plans for a lot of workers. (That change was $1K – $2k in our family.)
2) Effected the middle and younger voters a lot more. (Think AOC here working as a Bartender for graduates after 2008.) Smart college educated people in the past did not work as a bartender at age 28 in past decades.
Anyway, most of the populist authoritarian leaders are most passing small trolling ideas and oddly enough are more peaceful than our past leaders. Look at them:
1) Trump does not crave power but popularity most. (Oddly enough if acted like 2 nd term Reagan he would be over 50% approvals.)
2) Trump is really slow to use military against Iran….I suspect he fears oil prices going to $150/barrel and losing support fast.
3) Orban in Hungary stops women studies at universities
4) They are not uniquely popular. Trump’s approvals stay 41% – 43% on 538 for most 2018 and 2019. Literally at this point his approvals won’t move even if Trumps shoots five people on 5th avenue or personally completely cures cancer.
5) Look at Netanyahu who had a small loss in the latest election. So we see these leaders are both not popular and can lose an election. (He suspects he runs again and has a good shot of winning.)
Not sure what past decades you’re talking about, but I remember a cartoon in the 70’s that showed a guy complaining at a hot-dog stand, and the hot-dog guy saying something like, “What do you mean it’s not done? I have a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, and if I say it’s done, it’s done!” This particularly resonated with me because I was a physics student at the time.
p.s. collin — it would really help if you would proofread your comments before submitting them. At times it is very difficult to figure out what point you’re trying to make.
Maggies Thatcher was a bit of populist, then Joan of Arc and possibly Queen Victoria. AOC is a populist leader. The father figure of our illusions used to be in religion. The identity crisis is real in the Yellow Vesters, Hong Kongers and Brexiters. The common thread government out of balance and stifling the native middle class.
I feel like a broken record. Judith Rich Harris’ Nurture Assumption is as close to fact as anything in the social sciences. Any social phenomena based on parenting has to explain either why the Nurture Assumption does not apply or supply new/any evidence that Judith Rich Harris is wrong.
I wish this kind of Freudian mumbo jumbo would just go away. Enough with the focus on parenting; the contribution of any measurable environmental factor associated with parenting is effectively zero (in a non-abusive environment).
The argument might be exempt from the nurture hypothesis if it were made more general: that many people in general are prone to seek a powerful father figure under certain circumstances, and that it’s not era-specific.
I don’t think this works regarding Trump anyway though. He really doesn’t strike me as a proxy father figure. He’s more the eccentric, irresponsible uncle who says whatever he wants and the kids kind of like him because of his contrast with their boring, straight-laced father. Trump seems to me like the least father-like presidential candidate in recent memory.
Very true but the chain of causation in Kling’s summary was very clear: sexual revolution => more fatherless homes => greater appeal of populous leaders. Given that all non-anecdotal evidence supports Judith Rich Harris, this formulation is not plausible. It is plausible that a more general argument could be made, as you rightly point out, but I’d be skeptical of its importance. Eberstadt’s claim is only plausible in a world that ignores/denies Judith Rich Harris which is sadly the state we find ourselves in.
The Nurture assumption built the theory that peer effects dominated parenting effects, an increase in one parent homes would shift the peer effect and would not contradict TNA directly.
That is also very true but I think it would be very hard to tease out the negative peer effects of one-parent homes within the trend of greater educational attainment over time (i.e. 1950 vs. 2016).
Regardless, I admit not being as charitable as you and Mark Z are; I read Eberstadt’s argument as being about parental influence not indirect socioeconomic neighborhood influence.
Arnold, your call for ‘a more rigorous attempt to demonstrate the validity of her causal model’ suggests you may still be influenced by the MIT training you have rightly rejected.
Cultural interpretations can be valuable even if difficult or impossible to quantify.
Just what we need: TradCon Freudianism. This is the most hilarious “This is how you got Trump” ever. Macro-socio-economic Daddy Issues.
“Maybe the progressives hate Trump So. Much., we can freak them out into helping dial back the sexual revolution by terrifying them with the prospect that, if they don’t, by the latest politico-psychoanalytical wisdom, it’ll be populist brownshirt rabble with pitchforks and macho-fascist latter-day Trump-“Twitlers” forever!”
The subgroups which have the highest rate of paternal absence at lowest rate of stable nuclearization didn’t vote for Trump, and tend to elect plenty of women in districts where their concentrations are highest.
It’s perfectly obvious that history is filled to the brim with “masculine authority figures”, father figures, Big Men, Big Brothers, etc. almost regardless of the level of civilization, ideological character of the society, or the methods by which leaders are selected or people come to have power. Even the character of the organization doesn’t matter much; consider CEOs. News flash: all American Presidents have been men, mostly fit, mostly tall, mostly confident and assertive types. It’s almost like it’s human nature or something.
(By the way, this is yet another reason to deduct ten debate points from anyone annoyingly using the boo-word “Populism” without defining precisely what they mean. Old SNL Coffee Talk: “The only alternative to ‘Populism’ is necessarily just some form of Elitism. Everyone hating on ‘Populism’ is just arguing about which form of Elitism should prevail. Discuss.”)
As an interesting “father figure” historical note, Robert Conquest wrote about Stalin being initially upset that Allied propaganda offices in anglophonic countries referred to him as “Uncle Joe” and described him as having other avuncular characteristics trying to improve his image (or “optics” of his actions) and out of a belief that it would be effective in improving the general population’s feelings toward him – which by many accounts it was.
But Eberstadt’s motivated folk-Freudianism isn’t an isolated case, and part of a bigger problem. Let me explain.
The suffocating blanket the progressives throw over our intellectual life tends to prevent any fresh air from getting to discussions that happen even between those on the ‘right’.
And, for a long time now, there’s been a tension between two camps that never really got to have it’s “full day in court”, so to speak.
You have two groups on the ‘right’ who mostly agree that traditionalist social institutions, conventions, relations, attitudes, norms, form of organization, etc. are (1) very important, (2) hard to improve upon, and (3) fragile and prone to entropic decay without sustained and active maintenance.
But they strongly disagree on the model, reasoning, and explanation of all that. Which turns out to be really important, because those different frameworks of interpretation and analysis come to very different conclusions about the cause of important social phenonema and trends, and what can be done about them, if anything at all.
On the one hand, you have the Realist Reconstructionists. That is, Pessimists. You might call them the “Null Hypothesis Right”. A lot of human outcomes and individual and group-average differences are the natural consequence of genetics, and there’s nothing anybody can do about that aside from shocking stuff like human selective-breeding programs or genetic engineering. It’s not all nature, there’s an important role for nurture and social influence, but there are important and hard limits, and quickly diminishing marginal returns on any efforts at amelioration.
On the other hand you have the “Optimistic Hypothesis Right.” They tend to chock up most differences in outcomes to personal or cultural failings, which could, in principle, be remedied without hitting any hard-wired stumbling blocks. Success and failures for these people are largely derived from personal responsibility and the result of good or bad decisions to be conscientious, conform to bourgeois virtues and conventional moral restraints or not. “Focus on education and study diligently, get a job, work hard, be thrifty, save, get married, provide for and raise your kids right, abstain from void and avoid even the appearance of impropriety, be religious and humble yourself before the Lord, etc.” Success or failure on an individual basis is thus mostly deserved, and if there are innocent victims they are the children who have to suffer the consequences of the bad decisions of their parents, and also anyone living in a society that isn’t teaching and sending the right messages and incentives regarding right and wrong behaviors.
Perhaps as a footnote to TLP, A lot of political groups comes down to the question of “Who is our Devil?”, that is, who do we blame?
Libertarians tend to blame The Government, The State.
Progressives tend to blame Privileged Oppressors.
The Optimistic Hypothesis Right tends to blame Corrupted Individuals and Cultures.
The Null Hypothesis Right tends to blame God / Nature / Spontaneous and Impersonal Forces of Aggregated Human Action. That is, no one really.
This puts the NHR at a terrible disadvantage in terms of social psychology, because building coalitions is much easier when there are personal targets that can be assigned the blame for everything. And there’s an obvious way to solve that issues – stop those people or institutions from doing all their evil deeds which are causing all the problems. How to stop them when they don’t want to stop? That’s where things get uglier.
As someone who has become very sympathetic to the NHR (I read Sailer every day, first thing in the morning!) I still wonder how to explain the explosion in black single parenting starting in the 60s:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-todays-black-problems-welfare-did/
Yes, it was high relative to the white rate before the massive explosion in the welfare state, but clearly the welfare state seems to have had an impact which suggests that public policy matters.
The crazy extreme position of “only nature matters” is a strawman which no one propounds.
On the other hand, the crazy extreme position of “the blank slate” where only nurture, environment, resources, and social influences matter is, alas a mainstream view with zero empirical support that is nevertheless still advocated for by the majority of elite progressives.
A good example is height. If you malnourish a child, you will stunt his growth and he will end up short. If you increase the calories, you get a lot of improvement per calorie early on. But as you start to reach normal metabolism and genetic potential, you are in the realm of quickly diminishing marginal returns and you are going to plateau. After that, no matter what you do with calories, it isn’t going to do any good.
After that, if you notice different groups of people have different average heights, you can’t claim it’s because of unfair privilege and calorie inequality or something.
With behaviors, it is a fundamental conservative insight that human animals are bundles of instincts, emotions, and volcanic impulses which are completely incompatible with anything approaching functional, pleasant civilization, and so we might find constant war on all fronts against those urges to engage in vice if we are to have any hope of incentivizing people to conform those behavioral patterns necessary and proper to personal success, human flourishing and social harmony.
If you take the lid of that pressure cooker, humans will behave in their instinctive ways in precisely the same way that pets will go feral.
No doubt, “human animals are bundles of instincts, emotions, and volcanic impulses…” However, it is completely untrue that these are “completely incompatible with anything approaching functional, pleasant civilization.” Quite the opposite.
Humans did NOT evolve in a “war of all against all.” They evolved in groups that succeeded because the members co-operated. (Humans are unique in two ways: smarts and co-operation.)
Of course, there is always the temptation (“incentive”) for short-term gain by cheating/shirking, even if everyone would be worse off if everyone did it. Prisoners’ dilemma and all that. But human groups that succeed, which include most of the humans who survive and reproduce, have kept the problems to a manageable level. That can only happen if humans have a lot of pro-social, moral “instincts, emotions, and impulses.”
Sigmund Freud was absolutely wrong in Civilization and Its Discontents. Humans are not built for a solitary life and forced to live in groups. They are built for living in groups.
How big a group? In what context?
Surely, we can agree that our modern context is sufficiently novel that we can’t automatically say if a stable equilibrium can be found or not.
People in the field frequently talk about “Dunbar’s Number”, something between 100 and 250, often put at 150, as the effective size of hominid groups–though exogamy leads to ties between groups. This would be true from some time in the pre-human past to the time people lived in villages larger than Dunbar’s Number (or had significant ongoing contact with people outside the village), which for many people is not very long ago.
Much is different today and a stable equilibrium can’t be guaranteed. My point was that, contra Freud, civilization is largely working with human nature, rather than against it.
They evolved in groups which used software (“social technology” – culture, social pressures, etc.) to override the hardware defaults. The “secret to our success” and one of the things which separates us from mere animals is that we are extremely culturally flexible and the software can be updated quickly and with wide variation in function, though, it can’t make the hardware any better, taller, faster, etc.
Respect for traditional norms, mores, and restraints is a basic prudential position that warns one to be wary about messing with the software overrides. We get some insight into what happens when you relax constraints by looking for “canaries in the coal mines” – people who for whatever reason are more impulsive, less personally sensitive to social pressures, or less constrained by limitations of resources.
One group of people who make good canaries are rich celebrities who were once more or less normal people but who can (1) suddenly get away with a lot of bad behaviors because the people around them give them a pass, (2) their wealth allows them to have access to and afford to buy all kinds of vice-enabling goods and services.
And so, for example, when it comes to propensity to overdose from drugs, we have Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, Michael Jackson, Prince, Lenny Bruce, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bruce Lee, Sid Vicious, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, Dee Ramone, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joan Rivers, Tom Petty (and his bass guitarist, Howie Epstein, also Beetles manager Brian Epstein, and do I need to mention Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth-enabled unleashed-by-norms behaviors … )
And this list goes on and on and on. And as soon as similar drugs become widely available, cheap, and popular, well, as the canaries showed up, “opioids crisis” and “deaths of despair”.
Likewise we can learn a lot from canary-in-the-coalmine population groups. The Moynihan Report foreshadowed the family chaos and breakdown and other social pathologies which would become widespread in a generation, and at the other extreme the Japanese (“residents of developed Asian Megacities”, more broadly) were showing us the future of urban fertility collapse and basement-dwelling, video-game and anime obsessed, locked-in ‘failsons’ and grass-eater soshoku danshi a decade before we started to see them pop up all over here.
“[G]rass-eater men [or herbivore men or vegetarian men] is a term used in Japan to describe men who have no interest in getting married or finding a girlfriend. The term herbivore men was also a term that is described as young men who had lost their ‘manliness’.”
from wikipedia
An alternative to Freud is Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism. A recent post discusses Paul Bloom’s Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013), which argues that even one-year-olds have an inborn sense of morality. A five star Amazon review of the book by Herb Gintis ends:
“When I began studying social theory, the accepted wisdom was that we are born purely selfish, with morality being a convenient social veneer that hides are fundamentally sociopathic selves. The only reason people act morally, I learned, is because they are afraid of getting caught acting immorally. Moreover, I learned that every society has is own moral rules, and such rules have no communality across societies. The bulk of research in the past twenty years has shown that both of these notions are incorrect. There is a such thing as human morality, this morality has a common substrate across all societies, and we (sociopaths and other wrong-doers excepted) are predisposed by our nature as human beings to express and affirm these moral principles. Indeed, as Samuel Bowles and I show in our book A Cooperative Species (Princeton 2011), and Edward O. Wilson shows in his The Social Conquest of Earth (Norton, 2012), our success as a species depends integrally on our moral constitution. There is no better place to start in appreciating the psychological side of human morality than Paul Bloom’s fine book.”
It is certainly true that the Blank Slate is a mostly progressive point of view but the current Both-Nature-And-Nurture consensus is not fundamentally so. One could claim that Noam Chomsky was the first champion of the modern view (as I think Steven Pinker argues).
I think the better generalization is C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures model that pits the humanities against the sciences. Evidence prevailed.
Pinker’s “Blank Slate” outlines three modern denials of human nature and the third, The Ghost in the Machine (i.e. religiosity) is now mostly associated with cultural conservatives but again I think The Two Cultures is a better model.
There are some problems with the welfare hypothesis.
1) We still see huge drop-offs in two parent households amongst those not on welfare (or at least cash welfare). Marriage is increasingly something the lower middle class/working class doesn’t do, but these people make too much money to benefit from cash welfare.
2) I guess we could talk about non-cash welfare…but what is the proposal here. That we should withhold medical care or education from poor mothers in the hopes that they…have fewer children (or surviving children?) or somehow do more to attract and retain men within their class?
I mean, that could work, but the incentive needed would probably need to be large enough we’d be talking about dead children in large numbers.
3) The fundamental issue is that a single women, even a lowly paid one, can support herself and her kids from a cash goods perspective. Cash goods got a lot cheaper. She isn’t going to starve. So she’s not going to go out and do whatever it takes to get a man just so she doesn’t starve.
So the idea that if you eliminate cash welfare it’s going to cause a behavior change that will get woman to attract men into long term relationships just doesn’t hang for me. While I’m in favor of welfare reform, there is a lot more to this issue than “cut off the EBT and they will start Leave it to Beavering it up”.
I’d propose something else.
1) In every culture men have relative status.
2) If a man’s relative status is too low, women won’t do what it takes to attract him long term unless it literally means life or death.
3) In a modern economy nobody, even the poor, are faced with life or death material deprivation in non-medical contexts.
That is indeed where it gets tricky because people on each of Kling’s three axis have pet “evils” that they are determined to reduce/prevent. Some are willing to break the Golden Rule to achieve this reduction/prevention. It is the willingness to violate the Golden Rule that troubles me more than the ideological alignment.
The Golden Rule is not for the context of conflict. For disputes, it’s more like “the law of war” or “Marquis de Queensbury Rules”.
I was thinking specifically about prohibiting acts between consenting adults for the greater good. Sexual acts in the bedroom. Commercial exchange over a barrel, or vice versa 🙂
There is a whole set of rules that apply once the Golden Rule has been violated and a great deal of grey area in between, but I don’t think we’d disagree over more concrete examples.