The Problem with Ideology

Will Wilkinson used to be a fairly rigid libertarian, but several years ago he decided that his ideology was blinding him to reality and stopped calling himself by that label. I just discovered an essay he published in October 2017 in which he argues that any "ideal theory" of politics – libertarianism, communism – is a fantasy:

Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next?

The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. This sort of political ideal actually can’t help us find our way through the thicket of real-world politics into the clearing of justice.

To illustrate why this is so Wilkinson compares two lists of countries, one the "Freedom Index" of the libertarian Cato Foundation, the other the Social Progress Index, which is based on progressive assumptions. It turns out that these two lists of the top twenty countries in the world, based on what purport to be radically different notions of the Good, are very similar. The top twelve countries on the Social Progress Index are:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Iceland
4. Norway
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Sweden
9. Australia
10. New Zealand
11. Ireland
12. United Kingdom

Nine of those countries also rank in the top 12 of the Freedom Index, and Sweden and Norway rank 13 and 14; only tiny Iceland fails to make the Freedom Index top 20. So while libertarian theory predicts that a large social welfare state should limit freedom, the libertarians' own list shows that Social Democratic countries have more freedom.

The world is just far more complicated than your theory, whatever it is, can comprehend. And the farther your ideal world is from things as they are, the less you actually know about how it would work.

The crazy thing about the current political climate is that millions of people are losing faith in both democracy and mixed capitalism despite overwhelming evidence that this is the best system humans have ever devised. The distance that our world falls short of utopia seems to grate harder and harder on our psyches, and the longing for some kind of radical change swell.

All the evidence, though, argues that revolution is usually a disaster, and maintaining systems that have proved to work so well, with a bit of tinkering, is the best course.

Who do you Trust?

Or whom. Results of a poll from Georgetown University taken over the summer. The most trusted institution among Republicans in the military.

Among Democrats, it's . . .  Amazon.

Political Jesters

George Hawley:

In its online discourse, the Alt-Right often presented its racism in an ironic manner, raising questions about its sincerity. It was not always clear if an Alt-Right supporter spreading a racist or anti-Semitic message was being genuine or just saying outrageous things for shock value. Many of the young men posting images of Swastikas and gas chambers online appeared more interested in breaking society’s ultimate taboos than in making genuine threats.

At times, elements of the Alt-Right presented themselves as edgy right-wing court jesters, rather than serious ideologues. This provided an element of plausible deniability about the movement’s radicalism. Such sensibilities allowed the Alt-Right to make inroads among young people who despised so-called political correctness, but who were otherwise not especially ideological.

I remember asking one of my 4-chan native sons why I kept seeing memes about reconquering Constantinople; he said, "it's a way to advocate killing Muslims without being taken too seriously."

So, indeed, this ironic distancing from truly radical positions seems to be a hallmark of the online Alt-Right. As Hawley says, when this kind of politics has emerged into the non-digital world, the humor is lost and it is revealed as just a new sort of white nationalism. But it started with an ambiguous smile.

And none of this is new. Consider the Ku Klux Klan, with its silly name, absurd costumes -- the white hood is just one variant of a range that has included Indian war paint and dressing in drag -- and ridiculous titles for its leaders, like Poobah and Grand Dragon. According to Hawley, this was quite deliberate, and it had the intended effect of persuading many northerners not to take the Klan seriously.

Hawley's recent book is about the right, but of course there have also been political pranksters on the left. The Yippies are the first to come to mind. They were clowns who attracted attention by saying ridiculous things and nominating a pig for president, but it one sense they were completely earnest: they really wanted to radically change western civilization. As it turned out their leaders were not violent, but that wasn't clear to many people at the time; when Jerry Rubin said, "You have to be willing to kill your parents," was that a joke, a metaphor, or a call to action? The ambivalence was part of the appeal.

I've been pondering this, wondering if there is some general point. Do the jokes serve as trial balloons, sussing out who laughs and who doesn't? Are they a deniable way to toss out radical ideas that might get you hissed or jailed? And if others nod along,do they serve as a sort of bridge from personal fantasy to group action?

Climate Change and the French Protests

A lot of people in France have been unhappy with the government of Emmanuel Macron, but the issue that caused protests to finally erupt was a modest increase in the fuel tax intended to fight climate change.

In the US, anger over Obama's plan to effectively phase out coal use helped launched the Trump-ization of the Republican Party; denying climate change might be at the moment the core unifying value of the Republicans. The environmentalists and the economists agree that the most sensible way to fight CO2 emissions would be a carbon tax, but just try to pass one.

Meanwhile in Maryland the issue that did the most for the Republicans in the last governor's race was a modest tax on impermeable surfaces like asphalt parking lots, designed to protect the Chesapeake Bay and reduce the sort of storm runoff that keeps trashing Ellicott City. People hated it and called it the "rain tax."

The people, whatever they say, are not on board with environmentalism. It's easy to get a majority to blame big corporations for our environmental problems, but hard to find one for the problems that are the result of the million things we all do every day. It isn't just the Koch brothers or the oil industry or whatever villain you can dream up; it's that people hate being told how to live their lives, and they especially hate being hectored by environmental moralists.

RIP George H.W. Bush, the Last Patrician

George Herbert Walker Bush was the son of a Senator and grandson of a Federal Reserve Bank Governor, and he married a descendant of President Franklin Pierce. He was about as close to an aristocrat as an American could be. He had a fine war record and a great resume. Nonetheless his early attempts to get into politics never amounted to much, for reasons that he explained best in 1989; asked why he did not seem more excited about the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said, “I’m just not an emotional kind of guy.”

It was master politician Ronald Reagan, looking for some solid mainstream legitimacy, who lifted him to the heights of power. On his own he was not able to win re-election, the last president to fail to do so. He was scorned by the right for flip-flopping on taxes and on the left for flip-flopping on abortion, and loved by hardly anyone. He would have been a better Secretary of State, if he had served under a president willing to listen to him.

While in office Bush accomplished two remarkable things: he put together the coalition that ejected Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait with minimal fuss, and he smoothed the way for the unification of Germany. It is easy to forget what a storm of nervous protest greeted the prospect of a united Germany. The Prime Minster of Israel demanded that it be stopped, lest it lead to a new Holocaust. Margaret Thatcher traveled Europe with a Nazi map of "Greater Germany" in her handbag, saying things like, "We've defeated Germany twice, we can't let them come back." The one important non-German leader who was 100% pro-unification for the beginning was Bush. He threw America's full weight behind the plan that eventually became reality, a unified Germany that was recognized by the world as the successor to West Germany, assuming its membership in NATO and seat on the European Commission. As a side effect of all that, Bush achieved the formal end of World War II. The treaties signed at Potsdam had a clause saying that they would not be fully ratified until there existed a stable successor government of Germany able to sign them, and both sides of the Cold War refused to accept the other's Germany as that state. Bush made sure that all the WW II combatants accorded that status to the new united Germany, so they could sign the Potsdam accords. It was the sort of thing he cared deeply about, even if it would have elicited only a shrug from most leaders and most Americans did not even know it had happened.

After Saddam Hussein conquered Kuwait, many Americans complained again that Bush was not emotional enough or emphatic in his denunciations. People compared him unfavorably with Thatcher, who made a show of stomping her foot and announcing, "This will not stand." Bush was comparatively reticent in public because he was already playing a different and longer game. Instead of making speeches he was working the phones to make sure that 1) the army that ousted Saddam would include many Arab soldiers, and 2) Israel and the Soviet Union would stay out. He never had  any doubt that the US military could oust the Iraqis when called on to do so, so he left that to the generals. His focus was on making sure that the Middle East was not destabilized in the process.

To my mind Bush's performance during the Gulf War was a model of how a civilian leader should behave in wartime. As the leader of a balky coalition, he calibrated his every utterance to promote unity, working to make it as easy as possible for all the other governments involved. He defined the overall goal of the war but left the fighting up to the generals, asking only the broadest questions and insisting only that they work cooperatively with the other members of the coalition. In public he was very calm and dignified.

I think one can get a good taste of his leadership from a speech he gave on January 19, 1991, after the first night of the war was greeted in the press with wild enthusiasm and on Wall Street with a chest-thumping rally. I remember an 8-inch newspaper  headline crowing, 100 PERCENT SUCCESS!!! Which is in fact what Centcom announced, but the headline missed the narrow meaning of "success" in an air attack; the announcement just meant that all of the planes had reached their goals, identified a target and released munitions in its general direction. Anyway, here is Bush:

We're now some 37 hours into Operation Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait, and so far so good. U.S. and coalition military forces have performed bravely, professionally and effectively.

It is important, however, to keep in mind two things: First, this effort will take some time. Saddam Hussein has devoted nearly all of Iraq's resources for a decade to building up this powerful military machine. And we can't expect to overcome it overnight, especially as we want to minimize casualties to the U.S. and coalition forces, and to minimize any harm done to innocent civilians. And second, we must be realistic. There will be losses. There will be obstacles along the way. War is never cheap or easy.

I say this only because I am somewhat concerned about the initial euphoria in some of the reports and reactions to the first day's developments: No one should doubt or question the ultimate success, because we will prevail. But I don't want to see us get overly euphoric about all of this.

Our goals have not changed. What we seek is the same as what the international community seeks, namely, Iraq's complete and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait and then full compliance with the Security Council resolutions. 

After the war ended, Bush received a standing ovation from both parties in Congress; I wonder when another American president will see that?

Coming Together on Criminal Justice Reform

Criminal justice reform, with the aim of getting less dangerous convicts out of prison and thus off the public dole, has been gaining strength across the nation since Texas enacted a major reform in 2007. The cause is not hard to seek: the great decline in crime we have seen since the peak in the mid 1980s. People are less afraid and therefore more willing to consider the downside of locking them up and throwing away the key. Change has been pushed from both from civil libertarians on the left and two groups on the right, fiscal hawks and Evangelicals who have invested heavily in prison ministries. Post-Ferguson exposés of the ways some local jurisdictions use fines and the threat of jail time to extort money from poor citizens have also played a part, especially in moves to reduce bail for non-murderous offenders.

Now even President Trump is on board:

President Trump threw his support behind a substantial revision of the nation’s prison and sentencing laws on Wednesday, opening a potential path to enacting the most significant changes to the criminal justice system in a generation. . . .

“In many respects, we’re getting very much tougher on the truly bad criminals — of which, unfortunately, there are many,” said Mr. Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers and law enforcement officials. “But we’re treating people differently for different crimes. Some people got caught up in situations that were very bad.”

The key elements of this reform are using separate drug courts or other means to keep drug users out of prison, and reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences. This is where I have always put my own emphasis. Criminals are not all the same, but mandatory minimums required judges to lock up even those who didn't seem dangerous for very long terms. Legislators cannot take the differences between people into account, so instead of trying to specify the appropriate sentence in advance they should leave it up to judges who have actually seen the defendant and reviewed the case to do that. Obviously judges will make mistakes, but it seems to me that leaving open the possibility for clemency for hard luck cases is important to achieving anything like real justice.

Simone Weil

There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.

Revolution does not necessarily correspond to a higher, more intense and clearer awareness of the social problem. The opposite is true. . . . In the torment of civil war, principles lose all common measure with realities.

More here.

Not Much Interest in the Economy

Robert Samuelson:

One lesson of the midterm elections is that economic growth is losing its power to unite the country and to reduce explosive conflicts over race, religion, ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality. . . .

Despite many problems, the economy in 2016 seemed strong enough to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. When voters went to the polls, the unemployment rate was 4.6 percent, annual inflation was only 1.7 percent and median household income had increased 5 percent in 2015 from 2014. Nope, not enough.

Similarly — and despite the usual midterm bias against the party of the incumbent president — the economy seemed healthy enough to help Republicans retain control of the House in last week’s election. Unemployment was lower than in 2016 (3.7 percent), inflation was only a tad higher (2.3 percent). Median income has continued to advance. Nope, not enough.

It does strike me as interesting that the economy did not help Republican more this time, but that is hardly new: Nixon beat the sitting vice president in 1968, a year of economic boom, because the Vietnam War and cultural upheaval overwhelmed economic concerns. Which makes me wonder: what is it about our time that is intensifying political divisions? We have no issue like the Vietnam War to fuel the fires, but partisan hatred seems to be at record levels.

Some liberals think the underlying issue is white angst about becoming a minority, exacerbated by having a black man in the White House. I remain unconvinced; it just doesn't seem to me that racism is any worse than it has been throughout my lifetime. There is certainly economic uncertainly and unfairness, but, again, this does not seem to me to have gotten worse, and if this were the driver you would think our current economic boom would help.

I keep going back to the intense, widespread anxiety that seems to pervade our society. I find this deeply mysterious; I just can't see any reason why more people should be crippled by anxiety than ever before. If somebody figured out that the cause was some ubiquitous chemical, I would not be surprised, because nothing else makes sense to me. But wherever it comes from I think that when added to our already existing partisan divides over race, sex, sexuality, the economy and so on the result is the level of hate and fear that we suffer from now.

Moderation Wins

Vox:

Moderate Democratic candidates were the big winners of swing congressional districts in the 2018 midterm elections, flipping most of the 28 key House districts from Republicans’ control and winning key gubernatorial races, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Illinois. Democrats’ net gain in the House was 26 seats.

Progressive candidates flipped few of those seats. For the most part, the biggest upsets for the left occurred during the summer primaries; most of those districts were already blue and primed to elect Democrats. Many of the left-wing candidates who tested the theory of turning out their base, even in more conservative districts, lost on election night.

Still Divided in America

The split election result seems to me to perfectly illustrate our national condition. Democrats won the House by taking suburban districts where many people, especially women, find Trump appalling; Republicans expanded their advantage in the Senate by winning big in rural areas and across the South. Many races were decided by one or two percent; 49.6 to 48.4 for governor of Wisconsin, 50.7 to 49.3 for the hotly disputed House seat in Charleston, SC.

We are closely divided. We are also charged up about it; preliminary counts show that 114 million people voted, up from 83 million in 2014.

Considering that the economy is booming like it hasn't since 1999, this is an impressive win for the Democrats. But it may actually be the best possible result for Republicans other than Trump himself. Holding the Senate means they can continue to appoint conservative judges. Losing the House means they cannot advance any legislative agenda, but really with their tax cuts in place they had no agenda to advance, so that hardly matters. Trump can "triangulate" like Bill Clinton, claiming credit for successes while blaming Democrats in the House for anything that goes wrong. The only danger for Republicans in this scenario is that, unable to pass liberal bills, House Democrats will throw their energy into investigating the many scandals of Trump and his people, and that something really bad will turn up.

The election provided more examples of people who vote for Republican candidates but for Democratic issues. For example, big increases in the minimum wage passed in Missouri and Arkansas. Even more interesting to me is that despite a hard Trumpian turn in Florida the electorate rescinded the state's lifetime ban on felons voting; can anybody explain that one?

And once again we see that in America extremism is a dangerous game. The Democrats won the governorship in Kansas, the homeland of "what's the matter with Kansas?", not because the people are any more liberal but because the Republicans simply pushed conservatism too far.

My forecast: many more years of ugly division and partisan struggle.

Larry Hogan's Re-Election and the American Electorate

Among the least surprising results in yesterday's election was the easy re-election of Maryland's governor Larry Hogan. Hogan is a Republican in a very Blue state, and he faced a credible opponent in NAACP president Ben Jealous, but he got 56.2% and that was closer than a lot of people expected.

I think this says something important about American politics. Voting for president seems to get people passionate about abstract issues like "Change" or "Make America Great Again" and especially about our personal visions for the nation. It often seems that what the government actually does plays little part.

Gubernatorial races seem in contrast to be much more about what people what from their governments, so they seem to me to tell us more about the sort of government people want. What people in Maryland seem to want is strong civil rights protections for minorities and gay people – Hogan repeatedly stressed his support for the state's strong civil rights laws while campaigning and in office has left the state's professional prosecutors and regulators alone to enforce them – but otherwise just a government that runs smoothly and efficiently, without raising taxes. Ben Jealous has what Matt Yglesias called "the most serious and well-considered version of a Medicare-for-all plan that I’ve seen," but this has absolutely not caught fire except among the very liberal, and even in Maryland the very liberal are a distinct minority.

You may recall that a few years ago Vermont Democrats did try to enact a Medicare for all plan but there was a rebellion over the proposed tax increases – which experts said were still not enough to really fund it – the plan was abandoned, and although Vermont went very strongly for Hillary in 2016 they also elected a Republican governor who ran mostly on his opposition to the health care plan and taxes in general.

Despite what Bernie and his allies keep saying, I see no evidence that there really is support in America for Social Democracy. What the majority even in Vermont and Maryland seems to want is as little change as possible.

Individualism and the 60s

One commonly heard analysis of the culture of the 1960s is that it was fundamentally about self-empowerment and thus led inevitably, not to socialism, but to libertarianism. Reason, the libertarian magazine, found a good example in the "statement of purpose" for the Whole Earth Catalog of 1968:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

That Out of Touch Elite in Congress

Yet another study shows that politicians are largely indifferent to what the public wants:

In a research paper, we compared their responses with our best guesses of what the public in their districts or states actually wanted using large-scale public opinion surveys and standard models. Across the board, we found that congressional aides are wildly inaccurate in their perceptions of their constituents’ opinions and preferences.

For instance, if we took a group of people who reflected the makeup of America and asked them whether they supported background checks for gun sales, nine out of 10 would say yes. But congressional aides guessed as few as one in 10 citizens in their district or state favored the policy. Shockingly, 92 percent of the staff members we surveyed underestimated support in their district or state for background checks, including all Republican aides and over 85 percent of Democratic aides. . . .

Aides usually assumed that the public agreed with their own policy views.

This has to be taken with a grain of salt. All good politicians know that what people tell pollsters about issues and how they vote are two different things. A good example is that most Republicans will tell pollsters they care about the deficit, even though hardly any have voted as if they did since Eisenhower's time. Likewise many democrats support integration as long as it it doesn't involve their own kids' school. So this could be a case of politicians understanding the complexity of the links between policy choices and votes better than pollsters do.

But my dealings with politicians have impressed on me that they are not analytical people. They are people people who thrive on fact-to-face interactions. The opinions that matter to them are the ones their friends and supporters express when they meet. Many of them seem to have serious attention deficit issues when it comes to policy, especially reading about policy. Some are obsessive readers of polls, but not all are; as you may have noticed some of them regularly denounce polls as silly and say the size of their rallies or their mail bags are better signs of what the public really thinks. I don't think they are all just trying to change the subject; I think many of them really form their view of "the public" much more from what they see and feel than what they read.

Rick Perlstein, "Nixonland", Part 1: Division

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008) is the best book I have ever read about American politics. Perlstein sets out to explain how the nation went from a landslide for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to a landslide for Richard Nixon in 1972. His answer is the reaction to the 1960s, and Nixon's ability to ride it. I am going to set aside Perlstein's analysis of Nixon himself for a second post and focus in this one on the broader question of how American politics changed.

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson got 61% of the vote and carried 44 states on a platform that featured Civil Rights, Workers' Rights, and a raft of new programs to combat poverty. Coastal pundits crowed that America was united as never before; everyone but a few "extremists" was on board with the liberal program. In his first State of the Union address Johnson said that Americans were more unified than any other people in the history of freedom.

It wasn't true. Goldwater was a strange, cranky man and a weak candidate, but he still got 38% of the vote, and his supporters included an army of energized young conservatives determined to stop those changes that so excited liberals. As Richard Nixon among many others saw, the position of mainstream liberalism was actually weak. Reforms had already gone too far for many Americans but not nearly far enough for a noisy minority that began to command increasing attention through street protests and riots. Looming in the background was Vietnam, a war few American leaders wanted but almost all were afraid to give up on.

Perlstein begins his narrative of the reaction with the Watts Riots of 1965. On August 11, 1965, a fight between a black motorist and two white policemen ignited an explosion of rage that ran for six days, leading to 34 deaths, more than a thousand serious injuries, and fires that destroyed dozens of buildings. Fire fighters trying to put out the blazes were attacked by rock-throwing mobs who seemed determined to let their own neighborhoods burn to ashes. Eventually 4,000 National Guard troops were deployed to support 1,600 police officers enforcing a strict curfew. Historians estimate that at least 30,000 adults participated in the riots. All of this was broadcast every night into American homes using a new innovation, the news helicopter.

In Perlstein's narrative, the Watts Riots was the first in a series of events that fed fear of chaos in "Middle America." Crime was surging, partly but not entirely because the huge baby boom generation was entering the prime mischief years. New drugs spread, and with them drug abuse. Bombs were set off by a dozen kinds of extremists, of both the left and the right; Puerto Rican nationalists bombed the House of Representatives. More riots broke out, especially after the assassination of M.L. King in 1968. Protests against the war led to repeated confrontations between demonstrators and police, and the mass of the public was not on the side of the protesters; a poll taken the day after National Guard soldiers shot four students at Kent State found that 78% of Americans thought the protesters were to blame.

The country seemed to be spinning out of control. The hippies, the yippies and the radicals were not really very numerous, but they got outsized attention both from those excited by the prospect of change and those horrified by what looked like squalor and barbarism. Fear of communism had eased since 1962 but was still a powerful force, and that some on the left embraced Maoism enraged millions. Families broke up over long hair and beards.

One result of all this, says Perlstein, was a new kind of politics in America. Instead of economic issues that divided the workers from the bourgeoisie, elections would now be fought over cultural issues that divided the hippies from the squares. One of the famous events of those years was the Hard Hat Riot in New York, when 200 construction workers attacked anti-war protesters and were joined by a few dozen Wall Street guys in suits; the workers and their bosses were uniting to fight the revolutionaries. Some Americans these days seem to think that our politics of identity and culture are something new, but Perlstein produces dozens of statements from both the left and the right that could have been made today. In fact one is tempted to say that although the issues have changed, the parties and their attitudes toward each other are exactly the same now as they were in 1968.

What makes the events of the 1960s more tragic than those of our own time is the Vietnam War. All the smart people in America knew by 1966 that the war was an unwinnable mess, including Nixon and his top diplomat, Henry Kissinger. It went on because no way could be found for the US to exit without its tail between its legs. Millions of Americans believed that the war was a test of our resolve as crucial, for us and the world, as World War II; millions of others believed it was a crime and a blunder. The division ran through the whole society, including the military; the prosecution of William Calley for the My Lai massacre led to fist fights in officers' clubs. Vietnam was so big, so important, that it made sensible centrism impossible; you were either for the war or against it. To those who supported the war, those who opposed it were traitors; to those who opposed it, its supporters were murderers. Not that politicians didn't try to fudge the issue; Hubert Humphrey ran for president in 1968 with positions so muddled that nobody really knew what he thought, and Nixon ran by proclaiming that we had to fight the war harder to get to peace faster. But the war was one issue that could not be finessed or swept under the rug, and it kept boiling up to upset any attempt at compromise.

So the stage was set for 1972. The Democrat was George McGovern, a midwestern liberal who came out wholeheartedly against the war. McGovern was for women's rights, Civil Rights, and peace. Nixon was for order and the flag. Nixon was a widely despised figure with few real supporters, and key news about the Watergate break-in and his army of dirty tricksters was breaking throughout the campaign. But in an atmosphere of riot, protest, sexual liberation, and rapid social change, order and the flag won easily.

One of the interesting things about Nixonland is that although it is a book about politics, it says very little about political ideas. This was the criticism made by George Will when he reviewed it in 2008; the conservative movement, he said, was rich in ideas, not just some gut reaction to hippiedom. And that is true. But Perlstein, who wrote a whole book about Barry Goldwater, knows this very well; he simply isn't very interested. He feels, as many people feel about the politics of our own time, that ideas don't seem to matter. What matters is emotion, especially the hate and anger that American factions pour out toward each other.

Which brings me to this question: what did the revolutionary years of the late 1960s and early 1970s accomplish? It is easy to argue that they accomplished nothing. After all the immediate result was a landslide for Nixon, whose downfall only set the stage for Ronald Reagan. Electorally the radical spasms of those years were a disaster for Democrats. What's more they spawned or at least intensified the division of the nation along cultural lines that still bedevils us, making some question whether our democracy can survive.

But I don't think that is the whole story. Politics, as someone once said, is downstream from culture. And culturally, the radicalism of the 1960s had gigantic effects. Women's rights, gay rights, environmentalism, sexual liberation, no-fault divorce; these things have moved into the mainstream and become major parts of our world.

This seems, I guess, to be the modern condition: on the one side the lovers of strangeness and change, and the other those who long for stability and order. On one side the mixers who revel in the multicultural and the multiracial, on the other the people only comfortable when everyone around them is the same. And maybe these things are really ancient, going back to two genetic types that must be mixed in every successful population. But if so, the rapid changes of modernity have brought this to a boil, and we are all living with the consequences.

Nixonland is a great place to read about how all this has happened.

Conservatives Like Realistic Art

From a new paper in the British Journal of Sociology:

Following the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016, there has been considerable interest from scholars in understanding the characteristics that differentiate Leave supporters from Remain supporters. Since Leave supporters score higher on conscientiousness but lower on neuroticism and openness, and given their general proclivity toward conservatism, we hypothesized that preference for realistic art would predict support for Brexit. Data on a large nationally representative sample of the British population were obtained, and preference for realistic art was measured using a four‐item binary choice test. Controlling for a range of personal characteristics, we found that respondents who preferred all four realistic paintings were 15–20 percentage points more likely to support Leave than those who preferred zero or one realistic paintings. This effect was comparable to the difference in support between those with a degree and those with no education, and was robust to controlling for the respondent’s party identity.

Via Marginal Revolutions

American Politics in One Graph

All you need to know is right here. Via Jonathan Haidt.

Small Farming and Big Bureaucracy

Kentucky farmer/poet Wendell Barry has long advocated an extreme sort of conservatism built around small farms, traditional rural life, and a profound relationship to the land. I was fascinated by the program he put forward in a recent interview that focuses on the farm bill currently before Congress. That bill, says Berry, will not even begin to address the real problems of agriculture:

Those problems, as you know, are soil erosion, soil degradation, the pollution of waterways by sediment and toxic chemicals, various ecological damages, the elimination of small farms, the destruction of the cultures of husbandry and the ruin of country towns and communities. And maybe we should add specifically the curse of overproduction, which at present, as often before, is the major and the cruelest problem.

Those problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the life of the living world. The preferences and choices of industrialism do not imply a limit of any kind. They rest instead upon the premises of limitless economic growth and limitless consumption, which of course implies limitless waste, and finally exhaustion.

Nothing can take form except within limits.

Asked what sort of farm bill he would like, Berry says:

A farm bill sincerely intending to help rural communities might begin by proposing a program of production controls and price supports for every product of farming and forestry. At present, for example, the dairy “industry” is increasing milk production by millions of gallons every year, thus reducing prices and driving small dairies out of business. This of course serves the interests of large dairies.

A bill intending to help rural communities, furthermore, might forbid the large chain stores to underprice their goods in order to destroy locally owned small stores. I don’t see why the government should not enforce honest prices for the same reason that it enforces honest weights and measures. I am sure that a lot of conservatives would object loudly to such “regulation.” But for small farms and small businesses, the “free market” is not a “level playing field.” . . .

Recently, for example, 100 family dairy farms have been put out of business in this region, two of them in my county, because Walmart is building its own milk-bottling plant in Indiana. And so 100 self-employed, self-supporting, self-respecting farm families are being severely damaged or destroyed in order to increase the wealth of a family already far too rich.

So the only way to preserve the sort of slow, conservative way of life Berry loves is to create a vast Federal system of price controls and production limits, a huge addition to the bureaucracy of our already bureaucratized nation, staffed by people in cities living the sort of high-stress, office-job, divorced-from-the-land lives that Berry thinks are so harmful to our souls. Contemplating this, I get the feeling that what Berry wants is simply impossible, or at least that we, the people of the 21st century, are just not doing to do it.

As you might expect, Berry is not impressed by our current president:

Both of the political sides, so far as I am concerned, have to accept responsibility for the emergence of Donald Trump, the autonomous man, the self-made man, economically “free” and sexually liberated, responsible only to himself, starting from scratch and inventing his own way of doing things. To get outside the trajectory that produced Trump, we will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional.

This is the modern world: it delivers material abundance and great freedom to most citizens of the wealthy states. But millions are left cold by its bounty and long for something else, something more authentic and real. Sometimes I find these calls for a slower, more meaningful life deeply moving. But when I start to ponder what it would take, I shake my head and think that maybe we are stuck with our post-industrial world pretty much as it is.

The Mysteries of Right-Wing Populism

I've been trying to sort out what our current wave of right-wing populism is all about. We have been discussing here the idea that it is anti-meritocratic, a "revolt of the losers" that feeds on the resentments of ordinary people against the successful, or especially against the entitled attitudes of the successful. The problems with this notion start with the populist in the White House, whose whole career has been an exercise in flaunting both his success and his entitlement. I've been reading some lately about Brett Kavanaugh, and he comes across as even more a scion of privilege who has coasted from one great job to another without actually accomplishing very much; really he sounds like one of the most obnoxious Georgetown Prep-Yale-Yale Law sort of entitled jerks one could meet. Kavanaugh is not really a populist, but populists are perfectly willing to support him, which says to me that their real concerns are elsewhere.

Commenter Szopen says that the problem with Anne Applebaum's take on Polish politics is that supporters of the right wing Law and Justice Party are not really less wealthy or successful than its opponents. Reading around, I have not been able to find anything that contradicts this. It is possible to show statistically that support for right-wing populism correlates with economic trouble in both the U.S. and western Europe, but that is different from saying that the cause its root is the anger of losers toward the successful. Trump has plenty of rich fans.

So if populism is not about resentment of the elite in any simple sense, what is it about?

Let's consider that it might just be a non-elite version of conservatism. A right-wing populist is focused on preserving, not high culture or grand tradition, but the patterns of ordinary life in his or her own social class; "the world I grew up in," as John Boehner and others have put it. I think this is an important component, and it explains why right-wing populists usually end up allied with other sorts of conservatives: they are nostalgic for a time they think was better than now.

A sense of being under attack by powerful enemies seems to be another key component. Our reader David gave the example of Modi in India, whose program is all about how Hindus have been attacked by outsiders for centuries: Muslims, the British empire, the Americans, international bankers, historians who question his version of history, geneticists who dispute his claim that the Hindu people have lived in India for 40,000 years. The rhetoric of Trump and his supporters is full of this: "the enemy has stolen from America for decades and it stops now."

It may be that the reason economic troubles promote populism is that populism is fundamentally about grievance, and economic troubles give people good reason to be aggrieved.

But who is this unnamed enemy?

I don't have any problem with the assertion that somebody has been stealing from ordinary Americans, but to me the obvious culprit is the titans of capitalism; if, over the past 40 years, you had held the top 1% of our society to the same income gains as the rest of us, and distributed the money evenly, we would each have an extra $2,000 a year. One of the mechanisms through which upward income redistribution has been managed is, I think, globalism: by moving jobs around the world in search of ever cheaper labor

So why does the rage of right-wing populists end up directed, not against capitalists, but against minorities and university professors?

I have to think that the rage against professors goes back to the sixties. Above is a famous photo of the "Hard Hat Riot" that took place in New York on May 8, 1970, when about 200 construction workers from the World Trade Center Site attacked anti-war demonstrators. They were joined, as the picture shows, by some suit-wearing men from Wall Street. Many people think our culture war politics were born then, when workers and bosses came together to fight hippies.

In the 60s there really were prominent voices calling for a social revolution; it is easy to find professors of that era who said our society must be "destroyed." Tom Hayden told students at Kent State that they must be ready to "kill your parents."

So to me the culture wars of the 60s make a certain amount of sense; under attack by Maoists, Yippies, Weathermen, and Black Panthers, defenders of the culture naturally allied together across class lines to defend American society.

But now? Now, right-wing people in America regularly spout the same sort of extreme rhetoric that their parents and grandparents used in 1968, but about things that to me seem about as dangerous as kittens.  Maoism was a real and definite threat to American society, or at least it would have been if it had had any real support, and its advocates were not afraid to set off bombs and shoot policemen on its behalf. But gay rights and Black Lives Matter? How do they compare? The notion that today's American left has mounted some kind of attack on our society is nonsensical; compared to Trump-supporting construction workers the average American liberal is a lot more devoted to marriage, family, and the Constitution.

Reading lately about the 1960s, I have been struck by the force of Marx's comment that events occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. The 60s, Nixon, Vietnam, Kent State, and Watergate was an American tragedy; Trump, Pepe the Frog, Emailgate, and the Pussy Tape is the farce.

Seriously, to what extent is our current culture war just an echo of fifty years ago, when global communism was a powerful force, thousands of American were dying in Vietnam, and radicals of a dozen stripes were setting off hundreds of bombs a year? Did our culture in some sense get used to the idea of dangerous radicals, so that now that we don't have them we have to imagine them? Did right-wing Americans find a powerful new identity for themselves as the enemies of hippies, and refuse to let it go?

And to what extent is is just the rage of all social animals against that constraints imposed by our need for each other, directed against immigrants and liberals because that works as well as anything else?

How Your Mispent Youth Matters

It seems that I was at Yale with Brett Kavanaugh. We never met, so far as I can recall, presumably because I never went to drunken parties and he never played Dungeons & Dragons. From what I have read in the news, he seems to have been the worst sort of entitled prep school brat, a sort of person I met far too many of in those days and uniformly despised.

Does it matter? I think it does, but not in the sense that drunken rowdiness at 17 or 21 disqualifies anyone from higher office.

Consider, as comparison, Kweisi Mfume. Mfume, born in 1948, grew up poor in Baltimore and had repeated scrapes with the law. He has never admitted to any serious crimes, but there have long been rumors in Baltimore that he was a full-on gang-banger who committed a series of assaults and robberies. At the age of 23, according to his autobiography, he decided he wanted more from life. He got his GED, enrolled in community college, ended up graduating magna cum laude from an all-black state college. He also got involved in politics, serving as the president of the black student union in community college and so on. He was a Baltimore councilman, President of the NAACP, five-term Congressman.

I would not say that anything Mfume did before he turned his life around should have disqualified him from any of this later achievements.

On the other hand, voters would have been foolish not to take note. The kind of man Mfume is, and the kind of political leader he has been, have very much followed from his rough youth. He has never been "tough on crime;" he has never been accused of being "pro-police." He is from what we now call the Black Lives Matter wing of the Democratic Party, intensely suspicious of the Establishment in all its forms. Those who voted for Mfume should have known all this and absorbed it.

Which brings me back to Brett Kavanaugh. I care not a fig what he did in high school; I am, as I just said, willing to forgive almost any youthful crime in a person whose life has really turned around. I  believe in forgiveness and redemption. I believe that we need to reward people who have changed. I once wrote on this blog about Chuck Colson, a former Nixon hatchet man who found God in a deep sense and remade himself into the champion of prison ministries; many liberals never forgave him or offered him anything but scorn, but I think what he did with the second half of his life is worth our appreciation.

If I thought Brett Kavanaugh were going to be a great Supreme Court Justice I might support him. But I would never say that these stories of his youth do not matter, because to me they seem to reveal very much about his character, and I see no evidence that his character has changed. Out of law school he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, who was already notorious for sexual escapades, but recently has denied under oath ever knowing about Kozinkski's behavior, which is a bald-faced lie if I ever heard one. His first major job was working for Ken Starr's anti-Clinton inquisition, a perfect slot for a win-at-all-costs bad boy. He then went to work for the Bush campaign and was one of the "operatives" (their word) sent to Florida to litigate and otherwise fight out the recount. His reward for completing that assignment was a slot on Bush's White House staff, where he worked on judicial appointments and approvals. In 2003 Bush appointed him to the DC Appeals Court, but his nomination was held up for three years by Democratic Senators who said he was just a partisan hack. On the bench he has been one of the most conservative judges in America, especially in matters involving corporations; he has filed half a dozen dissents against decisions holding corporations responsible for their actions, from pollution to human rights abuses in foreign countries. He is also a notable fan of presidential power, ruling again and again against any limits on the President.

Kavanaugh remains, so far as I can tell, an entitled brat with nothing but scorn for the weak and unsuccessful. To me, his life seems a perfect whole from aggressive drunken sexuality to aggressive defense of Presidential power. As a judge he will pour scorn on all efforts to help the poor and disenfranchised, because he feels for them only contempt.

That, to me, is how his past matters.

Jason Stanley on Fascist Rhetoric

Sean Illing of Vox interviewed Yale philosopher Jason Stanley about his new book on Fascism:

Sean Illing
Your specialty is propaganda and rhetoric, and in the book you describe fascism as a collection of tropes and narratives. So what, exactly, is the story fascists are spinning?

Jason Stanley
In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.

This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative. . . .

Sean Illing
There’s a great line from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, I think in her book about totalitarianism, where she says that fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created. And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything.

Jason Stanley
I think that’s right. Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

Sean Illing
This is partly why I think of fascism as a kind of anti-politics. I remember reading a quote from Joseph Goebbels, who was the chief propagandist for the Nazis, and he said that what he was doing was more like art than politics. By which he meant their task was to create an alternative mythical reality for Germans that was more exciting and purposeful than the humdrum reality of liberal democratic politics, and that’s why mass media was so essential the rise of Nazism.

Jason Stanley
That’s so interesting. The thing is, people willingly adopt the mythical past. Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.

I think this is interesting but I would say that it misses something big about Fascism: the fascists' love of strong emotion and distrust of cool reason. Fascists especially seem to love dark emotions like hate, anger, and cruelty. Much of Fascism is shot through with sado-masochistic sexuality. Fascists have also tended to love "action" and dismiss reflection; the thing is to act, preferably with speed and violence. So to me it is not just that Fascists focus on enemies of "the people", it's the deliberately cruel, sneering way that they do it; it's not just that they are creating an alternative reality, it's that the alternative reality they create is one that celebrates kicking people in the face.