And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.
We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.
Etc. I prefer Levin’s view of the world, but I recognize that I could be wrong about that. It would be interesting to see a debate between the two viewpoints that is empirical rather than merely rhetorical.
James A. Lindsay And Helen Pluckrose write,
When polarization is deep, the large and only slightly differentiated middle that normally has nothing to do with anti-modern extremists is repeatedly forced to take sides against whichever is, from their perch, easier to see as the greater existential threat. Thus, we see those leaning left largely internalizing the message of postmodernism and those leaning right widely embracing the message of premodernism. Everyone knows on some level that the anti-modernists are a threat to Modernity itself and thus the other side’s anti-modernists must be massively and directly resisted. This results in nearly everything becoming yet another political battleground, every election is an existential fight for the “soul” of the nation, and extremists on one’s own side are repeatedly excused and defended in the name of the Greater Good.
. . .A New Center is therefore the wrong way to bypass existential polarization. For most individuals on too many political choices, the stakes are just too high. As political events of 2016 showed, when forced to choose consequentially between representatives of two apparent existential threats, mostly everyone just loses their mind and digs in a little deeper.
Thanks to a reader for the pointer.
1. The title of the piece is “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity.” They characterize the noisy left as post-modern and the noisy right as pre-modern.
2. Much of the essay strikes me as good, but some of it strikes me as daft. The attempt to squeeze Hayek into their pre-modern category was not persuasive to me.
3. In the quoted paragraphs, I think they come close to an important observation, which is that as the stakes of politics come to be perceived as high, centrists get thrown off balance. Michael Anton’s infamous flight 93 election essay is a case in point. In conversation, Yuval Levin has argued vehemently against the thesis of that memo. He prefers a point of view that says, “Wait, things are not that bad. The political process works very slowly. We are not on the verge of total defeat at the hands of the left.”
4. Part of the support for extremism comes from the view of each side that it has been losing. Ask someone on the left what has been the most important political development of recent decades, and they will answer “neoliberalism.” For them, policy has been taken over by free-market economic ideology. Ask someone on the right the same question, and they will answer, “the rise of the administrative state.” For them, policy has been taken over by technocratic interventionist ideology.
5. Both sides may suffer from over-simplification bias. If you believe that social problems have simple causes and obvious solutions, then the fact that the problems persist is evidence that some ideological demon has taken possession of the nation’s soul. If only they would let go of their free-market ideology. If only they would let go of their technocratic elitism.
6. I think that the media environment reinforces this tendency toward apocalyptic thinking. In the context of polarization, “If it bleeds it leads” translates into “If the issue can be used to illustrate in an exaggerated way the transgressions of the other side, it leads.” This accounts for the attention paid to a story of professional football players kneeling that otherwise belongs about 300,000th on any rational news-consumer’s list of concerns.
7. Perhaps the antidote to polarization is the attitude, “Things are not that bad.” And perhaps that applies even to the phenomenon of polarization itself.
causes for worry on this front are by no means limited to the presidential contenders. They are evident in our institutions, and not only those dominated by the Left. Indeed, the willful weakness of the Congress (which has been largely run by Republicans for two decades) and of the state governments (most of which are run by Republicans) may be the most significant problems our system confronts. Congress routinely delegates its power and abides executive overreach for policy or political ends. And while some state leaders have certainly pushed back against federal overreach at times, on the whole the states have accepted the bargain of “cooperative federalism”: From healthcare to education to transportation and beyond, federal dollars flow to the states in return for power flowing to Washington.
I am inclined to look at structural reasons for this. On states vs. the Federal government, I think that the big fact is that the Federal government can borrow to fund its operations. If we had not broken the balanced-budget norm that prevailed up until the Second World War, we might have a more balanced relationship between Washington and the states.
Congressional weakness comes from the imbalance between accountability and authority. Senators and Representatives hear from their constituents very day. They are lobbied by interest groups that hold the power of the campaign-finance purse over them. This makes our representatives in Congress feel very accountable. If they exercise authority, they fear the consequences.
For the executive branch, the situation is reversed. The agencies that issue regulations and administer programs have relatively more authority and relatively less accountability. The courts also have gained in authority with less accountability. That creates an incentive to exercise ever-increasing power.
Another factor is mass media. This concentrates the public’s attention on the President, who is much better able to gain popular support. In a mass media age, we have tended away from separation of powers and toward elected monarchy.
I recommend reading these three pieces in their entirety.
I think his natural instinct will be to look for some quick symbolic victories to satisfy supporters, and then pursue mass popularity with a lot of government benefits, debt and free-lunch thinking. I don’t think the Trump presidency will be recognizable as traditionally conservative or right-wing.
this election is at the very best a mixed blessing. It is less a show of strength of any sort than a cry of resistance and outrage. It is a cry that our politics clearly needed to hear and will now be forced to take seriously. But by itself it has not charted a way forward.
I had no idea that the Democratic party was so thoroughly alienating it’s own voters. Hillary is will likely end up with almost 10 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008. She’ll end up with almost six million fewer votes than Obama in 2012. Those voters didn’t move to the GOP. People just stayed home. Given our growing population and the enormous media interest in this campaign, those numbers are simply astounding. The Democrats alienated roughly 14 percent of their 2008 voting base.
The Republicans tend to do better in off-year elections, because Democratic turnout is lower. I am tempted to say that Mrs. Clinton managed to turn this into an off-year election.
[UPDATE: David French takes back his earlier analysis, because it was based on incomplete vote totals.]
Let me speak to the significance of Mr. Trump from the perspective of the person, the party, and ideology.
As a person, his victory is astounding. Like any Republican, he had the liberal media against him. But they were less restrained and balanced than they have been in the past. On top of that, he had some mainstream conservative media (including Yuval Levin and his colleagues at National Review) against him. You can argue that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity with the establishment actually helped to firm his support, but even so you have to give him credit for pulling off such political jujitsu.
As for the party, I expect the schism within the Republican Party to heal quickly. I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s reaction to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I’ve spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.
I do not expect that the Republican establishment will unsay any words that they have spoken about Mr. Trump. But I expect all that will fade away once he is engaged in political combat with Democrats in Washington.
I also think that those progressives who are predicting that the election will have dire consequences for women, gays, and people of color are making a tactical error. They are setting a very low bar for Mr. Trump and the Republicans. When four years from now we still have civil rights laws in place, mostly-legal abortion, and widely-legal gay marriage, these putative victim communities will be wondering what all the fuss was about.
Going forward, the Republicans desperately need to catch on with one or more of the demographic groups that currently is in the bag for the Democrats. Read David French’s piece again. My takeaway is that if the Republicans stand still, then all the Democrats have to do to win the Presidency is find a candidate who does not turn off the weakly-attached voters.
On immigration, I agree with Tyler that Mr. Trump’s border control efforts may prove mostly symbolic. I do not think he needs to make much progress on the wall. He could simply ask ICE to make a regular public display of rudely and forcefully deporting people. I am cynical enough to guess that if every night on television there are scenes of suffering and humiliated deportees, this will satisfy the anti-immigrant crowd without having to build the wall. (For those of you new to this blog, I am against causing suffering and humiliation among deportees. I am not even in favor of deportation in the first place–if it were up to me, the most we would do to deter anyone wanting to take up residence here is charge some sort of one-time fee.)
Assuming Mr. Trump succeeds in creating the impression that our border controls are tight, some of his supporters might countenance giving long-time undocumented residents a path to citizenship. What is unacceptable to those who make an issue of illegal immigration is giving a path to citizenship without much tighter controls.
As for ideology, Mr. Trump is not a man of strong principles. He will not treat his victory as a conservative mandate, nor should he.
On health care policy, pundits are talking as if a Senate filibuster is inevitable if the Republicans try to repeal Obamacare. I would bet against this. For one thing, I don’t think Democratic pollsters are going to be advising their clients to fall on their swords to keep Obamacare. For another thing, I would not put it past Mr. Trump to work with Democrats on a new law. You may have forgotten that before Mr. Obama, whose idea of talking with the other side was to say “I won,” we had Presidents who were able to negotiate bipartisan bills. Do not be shocked if Mr. Trump does this. That would, however, result in health care policy that is at best a mixed bag for those of us with a preference for market-oriented solutions.
Still, I am more optimistic than Tyler that conservatives will win some victories during the Trump Administration. After all, we do have a Republican Congress that is licking its chops. In particular:
1. I would bet that the courts get packed with a lot fewer strongly progressive judges than they would have been under Mrs. Clinton.
2. I would bet that the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor pursue a much less expansive regulatory agenda.
3. I would bet that some of the regulatory red tape that impedes infrastructure projects will go away.
The error at the heart of all libertarian thought is that the individual is the smallest and primary unit of society. The libertarian consistently frames social and moral imperatives in terms of individual needs and desires and freedoms. He posits that society is the sum total of individuals pursuing self-interest.
This is not true. The smallest unit of society is the relationship between two individuals. One, two, or a thousand individuals do not comprise a society until there are relationships connecting them to each other–agreements, customs, laws, values. The connecting relationship, not the individual, is the atom of human society. It is impossible to have a society of one man.
A commenter supplied this quote, with vague attribution. If you put the whole thing into Google, it will provide a couple of forum posts by “Pleasureman.”
I believe that there is a weakness in libertarian thought, but I am not sure that methodological individualism is the culprit. Consider an analogy. Chemists want to talk about atoms as being fundamental. But in the spirit of the quote above, one could argue that we do not have a substance until we have many atoms bound together. The relationships binding the atoms are what is really fundamental in chemistry. It is impossible to have a substance with just one atom.
I would say that it is useful for chemists to think in terms of atoms, and by the same token it is useful for social theorists to think in terms of individuals. But it is important for chemists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among atoms, and it is important for social theorists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among humans.
I think that what makes conservative social theory of the Burke/Tocqueville/Yuval-Levin sort distinctive is its emphasis on multiple modes of human interaction and bonding mechanisms, including families, organized religion, civic associations, and business enterprises. Libertarians tend to focus almost entirely on free trade as a mode of interaction, and progressives tend to focus almost entirely on the central government as a bonding mechanism.
It is called The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. I just received an advance copy, and it went straight to the top of my queue. It is due out May 24, which means that I will probably have written a review three months earlier. No point in publishing a review so early, of course.
Meanwhile, here is a quote from the middle of the last chapter (I started reading the book at the last chapter, and then I’ll go back and read the rest).
Our highly individualist, liberationist ideal of liberty is possible only because we presuppose the existence of a human being and citizen capable of handling a remarkably high degree of freedom and responsibility. We do not often enough reflect on how extraordinary it is that our society actually contains such people. . .
liberty arises when we want to do more or less what we ought to do, so that the moral law, the civil law, and our own will are largely in alignment, and choice and obligation point in the same direction. . .
It requires a commitment precisely to the formative social and cultural institutions that we have seen pulled apart from above and below in our age of fracture. They are where human beings become free men and women ready to govern themselves.
If you are familiar with his thinking, then you can predict that he will proceed to extol the virtues of civil society. If Yuval Levin were sitting in front of a caricaturist, I would tell the artist to draw Levin carrying around a hammer labeled “Burke’s ‘little platoons'” and seeing nails everywhere.
You also can predict that his writing will be clear, insightful, and persuasive. Above all, Levin exemplifies being charitable to those who disagree, without stooping to Brooksian obsequy. This is about as harsh as he gets:
In domestic affairs, the power of the executive branch is now wielded out of the White House to a greater degree than at any point in our history, not only because of President Obama’s distinctly belligerent overreaching, but because of the efforts of presidents (and the willing collusion of Congresses) of both parties over several decades.