Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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Greg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.

Excerpts:

“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”

. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.

One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.

Continue ReadingGreg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

An Inert People is “the Greatest Menace” to our Republic

Voting is obviously important. But as citizens of these United States, one of our most sacred obligations is to work hard between the elections.  We need to talk with each other or else we will not be a united community, but only an ugly place were "factions" fight each other. For the Founders factions were one of their biggest fears.  Here are Madison's words from "The Federalist No. 10":

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments, never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail therefore to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished . . .

By a faction 1 understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. ...

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects....

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

Madison viewed "pure democracy" as a dangerous thing.

[More . . . ]

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Dissolve all Political Parties. Do it for the Founders

We need to dissolve all political parties in the United States. I don't know how to make this happen.  It might be impossible. In their place, I would like to see hundreds of elected officials voting entirely by their own conscience after vigorous discussion with all other elected officials, each of them making their decision independently, unswayed by tribal instincts (and unswayed by the tribally-based money currently gushing through our system). I would like to see each senator and representative voting on each issue independently, not feeling any pressure on Issue A based on how someone else voted on Issue A voting against his or her conscience on Issue A in exchange for convincing another representative to vote against their conscience on Issue B.

What did the Founders of the United States think about political parties? They abhorred them. Here are a few quotes from "What Our Founding Fathers Said About Political Parties":

George Washington:

[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests. . . .Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party .

- Letter to his “friends and fellow-citizens.”  It was published in newspapers throughout the country and later came to be known as his Farewell Address.

John Adams:

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.

-Letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.

Thomas Jefferson:

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.  If I could not go to heaven but with a political party, I would decline to go.

-Letter to Francis Hopkinson, 1789

Thomas Paine:

Party knows no impulse but spirit, no prize but victory.  It is blind to truth, and hardened against conviction.  It seeks to justify error by perseverance, and denies to its own mind the operation of its own judgment.  A man under the tyranny of party spirit is the greatest slave upon the earth, for none but himself can deprive him of the freedom of thought.”

-The Opposers of the Bank, 1787.

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How the Political Left Rejected Foucauld

Insight-filled article by Ross Douthat of the NYT: "How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right." When institutional sense-making power shift, tactics shift. Douthat persuasively identifies this shift. An excerpt:

The impulse to establish legitimacy and order informs a lot of action on the left these days. The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world.

To this end, the categories of identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.

Meanwhile, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies.

This is a temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the ironies — however rich and telling they may be.

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