Month: November 2020

As Election Day approaches, I find myself mulling over some comments from the century-old essay by Max Weber on \”Politics as a Vocation\” (1919, available various places on the web, like here). Weber discussed the connection from good intentions to ultimate results in politics, and offers some warnings that politics is not a morality play where good intentions always lead to good results, or vice versa.  For example, he writes: 

[A]ll ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an \’ethic of ultimate ends\’ or to an \’ethic of responsibility.\’ This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends–that is, in religious terms, \’The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord\’–and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one\’s action.

When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder\’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Russell also offered an interesting working definition of skepticism in a world where may topics have a small-ish experts who have considered the issue at length, and then the rest of us. 

There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein\’s view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

What if our political differences are not first-and-foremost about different policies or priorities, but instead are about increased feelings of attachment to a political tribe? Jonathan Rauch put forward this thesis in \”Rethinking Polarization\” (National Affairs, Fall 2019):

Assuredly, Democrats and Republicans are much more purely left-wing and right-wing, respectively, than they were 50 years ago. Certainly, Republicans are more hostile to government than are Democrats. Ideologically, the parties stand on opposite shores. But they still are far from internally coherent in any philosophical sense. Democrats are divided between market-oriented technocrats and self-declared democratic socialists. Republicans are in the grip of a populist takeover that defies the relatively libertarian, internationalist orthodoxy of their heretofore dominant Reaganite wing. Are the Democrats center-left or socialist? Both. Are the Republicans populist or libertarian? Again, both. We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

And that is really the essence of what feels like a growing division in our country. In 2017, Pew\’s polling found that blacks\’ political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites\’ since 1994, or women\’s from men\’s, or college graduates\’ from non-college graduates\’. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans\’ political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything? To put the point in a less metaphysical way, what if tribalism as such, not ideological disagreement, is behind much or even most of the rise of polarization? What if emotional identification with a partisan team is driving ideology, more than the other way around? To understand and assess this peculiar proposition, we need to expand our toolkit beyond classical political science and into social and cognitive psychology. …

It\’s not so much that we like our own party as that we detest the other. In fact, Eric Groenendyk, of the University of Memphis, finds evidence that people hate the other party partially because they are disappointed in their own party. \”[T]hey appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party,\” he writes. \”In other words, they seem to be engaging in the \’lesser of two evils\’ identity defense.\” By protecting their sense of belonging, intense partisan animosity performs what Groenendyk has called emotional rescue. The fevered view of President Obama proffered by people like Dinesh D\’Souza may have been absurd, but it did serve the purpose of making every Republican leader look better by comparison. If Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, then you had better support whatever mediocre Democrat is on offer.

In any case, an implication of negative partisanship is that partisans are not so much rallying for a cause or party they believe in as banding together to fight a collective enemy — psychologically and politically a very different kind of proposition, as we see when we look at the literature on what tribalism does to the brain.

Social patterns like this don\’t really have a \”solution,\” but Rauch suggests that one approach is \”civic bridge-building,\” by which he means broader participation in all the groups that to some extent cut across partisan lines–and thus in indirect ways break down lines of tribal partisanship. It seems to me not purely a coincidence (although of course a number of factors are at work) that 2020 is a time both when many activities of civic bridge-building have been on hold by the pandemic and partisan political tensions are running high.

The great historian Henry Adams had a US President as a grandfather and also as a great-grandfather: John Quincy Adams and John Adams. His 1907 autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams is written from an outside perspective, as if his older self was a separate person watching his younger self grow up.  Some of Adams\’s description of the political climate in which he grew up as a boy in the 1840s had some resonance for me as the 2020 election season draws to an end: 

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother\’s birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate.

Of course, this comment raises the question of whether politics needs to be a systematic organization of hatreds, and if not, how people can help themselves to be both politically active, fervent, and committed while in no way fostering or giving in to hatred of their opponents.