The interview is here. It gets to a lot of the points in her book, which still tops my list of non-fiction books this year. Also, recall my review of her book.
The interview is here. It gets to a lot of the points in her book, which still tops my list of non-fiction books this year. Also, recall my review of her book.
I can only assume that her ignorant and inflammatory remark about African Americans not being safe at a NASCAR event was performative art to illustrate the points she was making about biased information and polarization.
I stopped listening after this. Up to that point the most useful observations of her studies seemed obvious to me; and the least obvious had to be taken — as usual in social science — with a grain of salt. I find it disappointing (may be even frustrating) that most of these appeals to curb incivility/bias/ignorance must rely — disproportionately — on examples of incivility/bias/ignorance right of center. Sensationalism from the far Right; simple partisanship from the right of center. We all calibrate off a biased mainstream. Those writing these papers must recognize their biases and balance the zoo of abominables.
I’m still not impressed with the notion that we are all slaves to some concept of “identity,” that we are all wind up toy tribalists. At least they discussed independents. People change all the time and nobody is wedded to whatever stereotype the ruling class wants to impose on them. Just look at African-American approval ratings for Trump: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/08/16/trump-approval-rating-african-americans-rasmussen-poll/1013212002/ Maybe it is just the ersatz intellectual class that is mechanical and incapable of change.
An even more stark counterexample to Mason’s thesis that “party is all” is the nearly two decades of history of Republican voters repeatedly revolting against a GOP establishment determined to loosen immigration restrictions and enforcement via the euphemistic “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, culminating of course in the nomination of Donald Trump, due in no small part to his being the only one in a field of fully seventeen candidates who signaled he intended to do what most Republicans wanted the candidate to do regarding the matter.
What actually happened doesn’t fit into Mason’s narrative. Instead of people identifying with the GOP and going along with whatever the party leadership and conservative press kept trying to do and telling them was part of their political identity, they had their own priorities, ideas, preferences, and interests and rejected the entire party mainstream in favor of a complete outsider with no track record of loyal commitment to the so-called “identity tribe”, as soon as they got the chance.
Mason and Roberts discuss the example of Dixiecrats abandoning the Democratic party and switching sides, which also makes the point that they had their own distinct interests apart from any tribal identity affiliation with the Democratic party and which also caused them to abandon any such loyalties when the tensions became too taught.
Both of these examples tend to demonstrate that loyalty to and identification with political parties is a more complicated phenomenon than knee-jerk “tribalism”, and that parties must still be a channel for pursuing member interests and ordinary coalition strategies of power politics.
Amen. Adroitly articulated.
There was a lot of bemoaning of increased polarization and some silly suggesting for what we might try to do about it. But a more productive approach would be to simply accept that we live in a highly polarized era and try to discover and implement new institutions to mitigate the worst consequences of that reality.
Other countries – especially diverse and multi-ethnic ones like Lebanon and Singapore – have had to develop or adjust their systems to accommodate similar tough realities and suppress various kinds of unrest, and we should be thinking about doing the same, even though these measures will be somewhat alien to our history and current political instincts.
Roberts and Mason did discuss proportional representation and the advantages of a parliamentary system, which would, I believe, increase the quality of governance as well as citizen satisfaction and tolerance.
Along with Mason’s ludicrous and ignorant floating of a “national military service requirement”, I confidently put those other proposals in the “silly suggestions” category as well. I believe they would do exactly the opposite of what you say if attempted in the American context (and I’m not really convinced it works well for this particular purpose in other countries when tensions run high and gaps between elites and ordinary voters start widen to chasms.)
The failure in analysis here is that what works best depends on the particular distribution of political positions, and that distribution has changed over the past few decades from a Gaussian one to a Bimodal / Bifurcated one (which is far from a unique situation in American history, just not one that was a major and long-standing feature of the post-war political landscape until now.) This once against rubs against the thesis that it is parties leading to a tribal-identity system leading to polarization. Instead it is increasingly inescapable government intervention in personal affairs leading to extremely high political stakes leading to polarization leading to parties moving towards where voters prefer them to be, however much established party elites would prefer otherwise.
Mason is just wrong about how politics works in the established parties in a two-party system in our current distribution, in which there is a lot of effort at filtering out candidates who are far from the median voter in swing districts, much to the frustration of most of their base of voters, and in which the structural incentive works towards compromise and moderation and cooperation for the sake of collective victory – and tension the party system is always working to address, and indeed this function is now one of its primary existential purporses.
In the US, under the current political distribution, these institutions would produce more, not less, polarization and we’d see constant outbreaks of brinksmanship with enough rish of seriuos constitutional or governmental crisis that it would only be a matter of time until one of those things actually happened.
That’s not to say that such a crisis would be a bad thing in the long-term if the timing and balance of power was right such that the resolution established a stable equilibrium of acceptable insulation of rival groups from each other’s efforts at domination. That’s probably the best outcome we can hope for, actually. I think if it happened in the short term, the result would be positive, if in the middle term, explosively dangerous, and in the long-term, totally futile.