"You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act"
They did not; it was decades later. I remember, as a child in Georgia in the 1980s, that the South was still solidly Democratic. (I was from a left-leaning household, and was proud of my region for supporting the correct party. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the Dixiecrats were different.)
Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. Bill Clinton was from Arkansas. Al Gore was from Tennessee.
So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
How about the posters all around my neighborhood saying "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings"? (Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.) They're very well designed and have a relatively high production quality for something intended to be stabled to a telephone post. Ironically, to me the aesthetic seems most similar to actual Nazi posters from pre-WWII Germany.
To the first point, there's a certain level of intimidation that comes from having poster like that up, and no one talking about them. Especially combined with seeing antifa running around in the street in masks (pre-covid, even) doing things, I don't know what, but the police were there blocking traffic, and yet it never made it into any of the local papers or blogs, I suspect because they're all left-leaning. These signs are literally calling for people's deaths. But no one dares to speak about them. I don't even want to be seen looking too closely at them.
To the second point, I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live here. Maybe try to imagine what a Mafia neighborhood is like? There are places you don't look closely at, people you get out of the way of and hope they never notice you, and a general sense that if you ever stand out of a crowd, you might get a "visit".
To the third point, that's just my personal aesthetic opinion, it doesn't really matter. And I unfortunately appear to have deleted the pictures I took, and as I said, I'm not too keen on taking more, but maybe I will. But I'll also need to be sure I don't leave any traceable metadata on the photos. If I do put up a link to them, will that cause any change in your opinion?
Overall, I'm very familiar with having people claim to be on " my side" that I don't really want there. That's all this has to be. Don't you accept the possibility that some people, who claim to be on "your side", may have gone too far? I'm not even asking you to disavow extremists on national television, the way Trump was asked in the debates. Just... that's a logical possibility, right?
Coming from someone who only just stumbled across this exchange, you're not appearing very charitable, though I acknowledge I may be misreading this entire exchange. I just wanted to let you know about my first impression, in case you care about how your arguments appear to people just reading the conversation.
From what I'm reading the statement you quoted may not be a good use of the word "literally", but the poster *is* making a statement that it's a good thing if certain people die. If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
(Mind, I have not seen these posters and thus also presumably don't live where Moon Moth does, so I don't have an opinion on whether this is the actual situation, but I think this is what one can glean from what Moon Moth wrote and I think it's fair to feel intimidated by such a situation.)
Yes, I may have mis-used the word "literally there." I'm not entirely sure what the right word would be. It's less veiled than saying, "That's a nice family you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to them." Maybe "implicitly" would have been a better word?
You feel differently if the poster said "Jew" instead of "Nazi"? How about "Commie" instead of Nazi?
Saying it's a good thing if certain people die is calling for their deaths, although not necessarily advocating murdering them. And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
I don't think the second thing follows from the first. No I'm not ok with the poster referring to Jews. I'm ok but probably squicked out with it referring to Commies, and I'm pretty much fine with the Nazi version. I don't think there's a useful general rule here. I think each claim should be evaluated on its own merit.
In general, I think that the tool of generalizing a particular to a general, eg "Every time an outgroup member dies an angel get it's wings" is overused. The particulars are different, and we should be willing to exercise our judgement.
Yes, "literally" was the wrong choice of word. "Implicitly" might be better. The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths. Are you happier with that phrasing? What about the graffiti that says "save a life, kill a cop"? Would you consider that literally calling for people's deaths?
As for my personal aesthetic opinion, I mentioned it because I thought it was ironic and darkly funny. It's literally (correct usage there) the least important part of my comment.
As for intimidation, I used to feel more like you suggest. Then some things happened to me. Now I feel differently. *shrug* It's not safe to talk about in public, so I'll just say that this is one of those situations where it's much better to learn from the misfortunes of others.
Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
That's a terrible book. Attempts by both parties to increase their power in Congress are not unique to the GOP. It is, however, true that Republicans are more ambitious on solidifying their hold on power via gerrymandering.
If you understand how gerrymandering works, it's obvious that Democrats have a natural "packing" effect by having very high % of populations in cities, while Republicans are more spread out. Unless you gerrymander extensively to have city cores "spoke out" to the neighboring countryside, the 70+% Democrat cities are going to elect fewer representatives per total population.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
Yeah if we note that 1950's stability that's the anomaly, no explanation can be complete if we don't mention in WW2. I guess that's where USA's asabiyyah is at its highest, while 80 years before it's at its lowest. If we follow the cycle, in around this decade we'll have another civil war, which actually looks quite likely.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.
not sure why you were so dismissive of this point, the reason to add PR and DC is not partisan, it's that those are citizens who deserve representation like everyone else
That may be your reason. And it is a good one. But: If PR was solidly republican, and DC was solidly democrat, do you think we would be hearing about statehood for both of them? Or would the blue-tribe news talk about one and not the other?
There are many things in the world that we should do because there are good arguments for them. The news selects a subset that are good for "their side" and talks about those things. The red tribe is right to be suspicious.
PR last governor was Republican, so I don't think the partisan politics are as clear as you do, but I really don't care if it helps the blue team or red team. Unless you have a good reason those citizens don't deserve representation in congress, it should be done and it should be done tomorrow.
These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful - "would the police have been so kind to these coup-rioters if they had been brown?" and "would Democrats believe in expanding the vote even to conservatives?" are equally unhelpful, except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
> These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful ...
> except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
I find them to be helpful in the following way: They clarify what part of a person's position is a universal standard they truly believe in, and which part is a convenient club to hit someone they dislike for other reasons.
Example: A person says "riots are never acceptable". They apply this rule to riots for the political party that they dislike, and not their own. This tells you something important: Their true belief is that riots are okay when the cause is "just", for however they define "just".
That's true and something I was considering adding in another comment. It feels gross to ignore the basic, obvious object level good that is representative democracy and treat this issue like it's just partisan. Yes, the Democrats have the moral luck that they benefit from the good-for-general-democracy-reasons position, but that doesn't make the position itself any less virtuous.
You have to consider the context in which it was raised. The point was that it should be done so that Dems could conquer, not that there are these poor people suffering in D.C. without substantive national political representation
I notice that retrocession — giving Maryland the land back that was carved out for D.C., minus a non-residential federal district with the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, etc. — is never weighed against statehood.
We already did retrocession back Virgina, it’s why the bottom-left border of D.C. is Potomac-shaped. The city used to be a quadrangle.
Retrocession would be a compromise that would probably meet immediate agreement from Republicans, since it would keep the current balance in the Senate while granting maybe one solid Dem seat in the House.
But Democratic advocacy for D.C. statehood is not about representation, so the Democrats won’t entertain retrocession.
I'm definitely open to ideas like that about DC, although I've heard good arguments against this. I actually had a longer comment written about DC being a more complicated case than PR, but I lost interest halfway through writing it. I don't think you're right about Republicans immediately accepting it though, it doesn't seem like straightforward compromises like that are actually possible in Congress right now.
nor do I think this decision should rest on a compromise between current political interest. politics change. The decision should be about the best thing for the citizens of DC, but I wouldn't rule out that being some form of retrocession
Is it not also an important goal for American democracy to have the representatives of the people be the winners of the popular vote?
Currently Republicans are over-represented in the Senate, so they're getting more power than they have earned in votes. The state lines seem like a pretty arbitrary thing to me, and it seems very bizarre to give extra power to some random rural regions just because of the peculiar history of the country.
It seems quite obviously unfair that your vote is simply worth less if you reside in a city.
Sure what's good for the citizens of DC is important, but this issue could also be a good tool to correct this republican overrepresentation which arguably is a bigger issue.
I'm a liberal, and I'm in favor of retrocession. As I understand it, the sticking point is that Maryland doesn't want it because they don't want to take on D.C.'s problems. (But Baltimore is worse than Washington).
Out of curiousity, are there other tools or suggestions to fix the power imbalance in the senate.
I guess what i'm wondering is, if retrocession wouldn't miss out on an opportunity to correct the Senate imbalance which is actually more important for everyone (including the residents of DC).
I'm not american, by the way but I think as a person living in the world, because of the US's power, it feels like I'm basically being governed by Republican senators from some rural state. Like for example: I feel like the whole world is doing way too little about climate change because certain republican senators like the oil industry.
None of the peoples or governments of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want this. Forcing them to merge against their will as a "compromise" rests on the assumption that this is a partisan exercise and that what the actual people in question want doesn't matter.
But there's lots of ways to give them representation without making them states, e.g. with two Senators.
PR could just be added to, e.g. Florida. DC could be given back to the neighboring states.
It's suspicious that 'they deserve representation' is somehow always followed by 'they should be made new states'. It's hard not to think that the arguments were form backwards, i.e. to justify a hidden 'bottom line' that was decided first.
A key test for "is this a good way to give people representation?" is "do the people on the receiving end of this want this to happen?"
None of the governments or populations of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want their governments to merge or to share representation.
Your second example, merging Puerto Rico into Florida, is actually likely an even better outcome for Democrats than making PR a new state - but it's still a bad idea because neither Florida nor Puerto Rico want that.
If "do the people who are seeking representation think this is a good solution" doesn't factor into your analysis, you're missing the point of representative democracy.
Why assume that the point of representative democracy is representing people? As far as I'm concerned, the point is ensuring that bums get thrown out with reasonable frequency and civil war is averted because everyone expects to get their turn before too long. Some fairly substantial amount of representation is instrumentally necessary, but I'm not in favour of optimising for representation as an end goal.
Come on – that's just not something that should be weighted very highly. Unless you're also open to succession – in which case, sure, that's nice, but is even (much) less likely to happen than statehood.
Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
This is how we've admitted every state up to this point. It's the basic idea on which the idea of states being united was originally built. It's literally in the name of the country.
> Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
Yes, that's literally how the process of admitting a state works. The representatives voted on by the people of those states vote on the question.
> And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
No one wants that. I don't understand how this point about how in a democracy what people want matters keeps eluding you.
> Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
Adding states that want to be states is good. It would probably be a good idea to set a minimum population requirement, but otherwise, assuming there aren't extraneous complications (e.g. Kurdistan wanting to join as a state would involve probably too many complications to be viable), entities that want to be states should be considered for statehood.
Merging Puerto Rico into Florida does seem ridiculous on its face, but I think something under-considered in the retrocession argument is how self-serving Maryland and the richer (and therefore more vocal) DC residents are. Maryland doesn't want to take on the poor Black people in DC, despite being a very rich state, and progressives in both DC and Maryland a looking at the Senate.
In any case, there will be something distasteful about a city-state for a large number of people. Puerto Rico has more people than Iowa, even after losing tons of people post-Maria, so that makes so level of sense to the average person. DC (besides being synecdoche for the federal government and therefore completely associated with it in people's minds) just recently passed Vermont in population, and, because it's the most Democratic-voting place in the country by a large margin, seems like a power grab.
I also think "what the people want" when it comes to local people deciding something that has national significance is unimportant. We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way. DC statehood isn't a local issue; it's a federal one
"something distasteful"...are you making predictions about polls or trying to argue on the merits? Because on the merits "DC shouldn't have statehood because it consists largely of Black Democrats" is an embarrassingly bad argument with nothing of substance to refute. I don't even know how to respond to an argument of the form "you can't let *those sorts of people* have a state".
> We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way.
This is the same war in which West Virginia just decided it wanted to be a state and the rest of the country agreed. Yes, the way to admit states is via the democratic process of voting on it in Congress. As a straightforward ethical matter, the preferences of the people in the proposed states should weigh on those deliberations. I honestly don't understand how multiple people seem really confused about this. "The process of adding states requires the endorsement of the current representational system" is obviously true and has nothing to do with the fact that the people in that process should consider the basic principles of democracy and representation in making their decision.
DC maybe. I'll grant you it's at least more complicated. Adding PR to Florida makes no sense. You can be suspicious of whatever you want particularly of Democratic establishment motivations. I'm telling you I'm personally motivated by puerto ricans getting proper representation, and I don't see any alternative to statehood being a viable solution. So you can have a secondary debate about motivations if you want, but I'm more motivated by the substance here.
I was responding to what seemed like a principled stand, i.e. the people of PR (and DC) _deserve_ representation. And it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
I believe you're sincere about PR deserving proper representation and statehood being the _best_ way to do that.
I appreciate the additional details about why you think statehood is best! I genuinely did not know why 'representation' was being 'rounded to' statehood.
> it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
"rounded to" seems willfully obtuse. They literally can't have voting representatives in congress without being a state. What else would representation mean?
I'm replying again because I'm not sure you realized what your PR+FL proposal implies. It would be a massive win for Democrats, turning 2 lean-R Senate seats lean-D for a D+4 net and potentially swinging the electoral college to favor Democrats again. It would be a massive, massive win for Democrats, far beyond adding PR as a state.
That no one is arguing for this implies the *exact opposite* of what you're suggesting. The tell is that you don't see any of the Republicans who want to coerce DC and VA or MD together advocating for PR joining FL as well, even though that would be a consistent position. They realize that would be a political disaster for them, so they only apply this logic to DC.
The Democrats have the luck of a position that is both just and politically advantageous. The Republicans can't even keep a consistent answer on the two questions because there is no consistent answer that maintains their advantage other than "no representation for American citizens we don't like".
Great point on the politics, but PR as part of florida doesn't make much sense on any level imo. It should just be a state. Republican legislators are working in many states to just make voting more difficult, as the party seems to have decided people voting in general is just not in their interest. That strikes me as quite bad in a democracy, and the party really is quite lost.
Yeah, like I said above, coercing PR into FL is a terrible idea on the merits (like coercing DC into another state). But that Democrats aren't proposing this undercuts the idea that this is all a cynical ploy by Democrats. There are more advantageous cynical ploys than the straightforward democracy-is-good position Democrats are advocating.
If you were to add 4 Dems today you'd have 54 of 104 though. Particularly in the context of DC being liable to give properly partisan Democrats, you've suddenly got room for a Manchin or a Sinema or someone to defect if the rest of the caucus wants to swing for the fences on a reconciliation package (or kill the filibuster lol)
Thinking through the derivative is of course something plenty of people will get stuck on, but "more Democrats is good for the Democrats" is the important takeaway.
Whether or not Puerto Rico would actually send 2 Democrats to the Senate is another story (a 1-1 scenario is honestly fairly likely), but we'll see what happens (assuming that the 50 existing senate Democrats can even pull it together to let us find out).
It makes some difference, but even a solid blue Puerto Rico and DC would only move the senate bias from R+2.9 to R+1.4. It's the same sort of narrow marginal difference you would get from, say, the effect Democrats taking the Texas state house in 2020 and blocking partisan gerrymander would on the house - noticeable for people who build careful election-forecast models but not really enough to sway the long-term balance of power, and something that would be a sidenote at best in most political history books.
In the context of the 2022 midterms that could surely be the difference between Democrats or Republicans controlling the Senate!
And if the lean had been shifted that much regarding the 2020 senate races then we could hypothetically have had 51 senate Democrats today instead of 50 (this is the dumbest of counterfactuals to be working through but bear with me). Having room for Manchin and Sinema to take turns defecting would be a big deal.
"Does Biden get to appoint any judges to the courts?" is a fairly important question.
So it does have some effect in a narrow horse-race politics sense. What I mean is more - when you look at the history of polarization, it has this huge trend from relatively low polarization to almost everyone in the country hating the other party (and often their own). The big trend in polarization is several orders of magnitude larger than the difference between an R+2.9 and an R+1.4 senate.
Also even in the horse-race sense - you're right that it could make a difference, but the probability that that makes the difference isn't that high (it's a bit less than the difference between 2018's ~D+8 environment 2020's ~D+6 environment). "Dems would only need a very good year but not a total outlier to win the senate" is an improvement, but not a game-changer.
Everyone discussing whether statehood is a good idea or who it'll benefit is missing the point. How would it reduce polarization? There's no plausible mechanism. The real reason Ezra Klein includes it in his book is because he wants to increase the power of his tribe, and/or because he thinks the people deserve representation and statehood is the best way to achieve it. Not because it'll reduce polarization.
Its an extension of median voter theorem. To simplify, both parties want to win, so will adopt the set of policies and campaigning to get 50+% of the senate seats. Moving the balance of the senate left, and closer to the median voters, doesn't mean the democrats win eternally, but that the republican party reconfigures to appeal to more voters, moving closer to the centre
how quaint and how surprising it is to hear somebody discussing polarization as an issue between Democrats and Republicans.The polarization is between those who know we are ruled by a corrupt oligarchy intent on bankrupting a majority of the country, and those who like to pretend we live in a democracy.
That's because of the fact that it's an issue between Democrats and Republicans (or the political left and right, at least), and the "corrupt oligarchy" is at least half mythical.
They all have the same donors. They all vote for consistently for imperial war. They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. They all vote to shovel money to rich financial outfits and corporations at every opportunity. They all forbid criticism of Israeli policy and regularly swear obeisance to a foreign state. They all (still) hate Trump in an irrational manner. They all not to talk about deficit anymore. We haven't had such unanimity in the ruling class since the 50s. This is simply a matter of voting records and published policy, not myth.
Underscoring their point about the irrational level of hate. Trump largely served the interests of the elite, making the uniform revulsion of him seem strange. Was his low-brow persona enough to rile stir their ire? I think there's more to it that we don't understand yet.
He's gauche in the extreme and played the powerful for fools. The entitled were not amused. Sadly, he basically sat around tweeting shit that went way off-script and playing golf for a couple years, but his existence laid bare for all to see the uniparty for the corporate globalist plutocracy that it is. Note how quickly they moved with EOs to "restore order" and declare "America is Back." Can you really believe Biden is capable of this? He's clearly just a front man they prop up in front of a camera from time to time. Ezra Klein keeps the the script.
It's one of many things. He made it very clear that he was Not One Of Us. Not just by his personality, but also by aggressively attacking them at every chance. (And to be fair, probably half of those attacks were deserved). And of course, he's a terrible human being, an incompetent insecure martinet of a leader, and frankly just annoying to listen to.
The funny thing is, only true believers and partisan democrats payed any attention to him. He was easy to ignore, and I was always shocked when a friend starting going off about something Trump had said, suddenly furrowing their brows an spewing flames.
Why yes. Who put Jared in charge of that file, again? Was that person blindsided by the fact that his son-in-law was Jewish? Because it sure looked to me like Trump was extremely proud of those deals, and of being a strong supporter of the Israelis.
The donors are much more polarized than they used to be. See https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors - the first one to donate more than $10k to both parties is #32 on the list, and only 10 of the 31 above him donated even a single dollar to each party. In the top hundred, the single most balanced donor is a couple who gave $231,046 to Republicans and $3,380,179 to Democrats, over 14x more. (And almost all of that GOP money was to a PAC that tries to push pro-LGBT views among Republicans, not a more typical Republican group)
The military budget peaked in 2011, and fell for four straight years after that, falling by a total of one-sixth in nominal dollars. Obama left office with a lower budget, in nominal dollars, than Bush did - once you adjust for inflation and population growth, it fell by 27% during his term. (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2021-TAB.pdf, pages 60-61 of the PDF, looking at the top line of each)
They do shovel a lot of money at banks - I can't argue with you on that one.
"Forbid criticism of Israel" in what sense? It's hardly illegal.
I agree that some hatred of Trump is irrational, but some is perfectly rational. He's an overgrown 13 year old with a penchant for sexual harassment and clueless bombast. He is hilariously thin-skinned, taking mortal offense at things that any other politician would ignore. He's incompetent at managing any organization unless he's an absolute dictator. And he did kind of try to steal an election on basically zero evidence, just a couple months ago. But despite that, there's a huge gap between the parties on Trump - the GOP has mostly bent the knee(with a few exceptions), while the Democrats hate him with a fiery passion.
There's a little daylight between them on the deficit. Democrats say that deficits are awesome, and spend accordingly. Republicans say that deficits are terrible, and ignore that when it's spending time. (Only a little daylight, in other words)
So which voting records and published policies are you referring to?
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all still going. Biden is likely to add Iraq sooner rather than later. MSM won't print criticism of Israel or publish pro palestinian views. Hatred is never rational. The rest of this rant isn't worth a comment.
Afghanistan was before Iraq, and Iraq I discussed. Libya was pretty flagrantly illegal, and Obama did it over Congress' objections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Libya%2C_2011). Syria seems to have been approved on the understanding that it was just support for rebels, not an actual deployment, and that trust was broken. But in fairness, both Trump and Obama did that, so you can call that one bipartisan.
More generally, you miss important detail by filing it all into "they support imperial wars". If the Republicans want to triple the military budget and the Democrats want to double the healthcare budget, they're both supporting roughly the same amount of new spending, and you can say that both support big government. But that's still a pretty huge difference in practice, and lumping them together would miss the point.
(Of note: Those were literally the top Google results for "cnn israel" and "wapo israel", and those were the first two outlets I looked up - I didn't need to go digging for those links.)
Hatred can be quite rational. You're actually supposed to hate sufficiently bad things.
And the points you refused to address because they were a "rant" were two data sources that clearly prove you wrong, me 100% agreeing with you on one point, and me agreeing with you (with a small quibble) on another. So is it me agreeing with you that's a rant, or is that I linked to solid data sources?
The thing about this seemingly-enlightened take is that it makes predictions that don't bear out in reality. Rich people would prefer more immigration, especially high skill immigration. Immigration remains pretty locked down, especially high skill immigration. Rich people would also prefer for there not to be extremely restrictive zoning rules in cities so they could build more things, but we don't have that either.
The world we live in looks like it suffers from a lot of dumb populist impulses, not a shadowy elite pulling the strings behind the scenes.
So you speak for all rich people, do you? Immigration, particularly "skilled" immigration, has gone up every year. I know because I oppose it and Trump unsurprisignly did not deliver on his promise to stop it. Are you actually complaining that you can't destroy parts of cities you don't like and replace it with something else? It makes me wonder what kind of people are on this list.
Immigration has not gone up each year. It has actually dramatically declined several times. This chart doesn't have the 2020 data yet, but when it does it'll show a dramatic dropoff:
H1B (the major high-skill immigration pipeline) has been capped for years, which were restricted further by the Trump administration so that a few thousand more talented people were forbidden from working in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Modifications_in_2020
Regarding development: I am complaining that the same basic free market mechanics that made smartphones ubiquitous aren't allowed to operate on real estate, resulting in catastrophically expensive supply shortfalls and skyrocketing rents and property values. When there is not enough of a thing, I think it's a good idea for people to be allowed to consensually buy, sell, and develop goods to create more of that thing in response to market forces - in this case, housing.
And you'd already know about this stuff if you'd attended the seminar on how to speak on behalf of all rich people with me.
H1-b visas ceilings continue to go up every year, which is what I believe is relevant here, not permanent legal residences, which may very well have gone down, IDK.
The comment about what kind of people are here appears to be an implication that zoning prevents people from destroying other people's property. I don't think that's an effect of zoning, which mostly affects what you can do with the parts of cities you already own.
If extremely restrictive zoning laws were repealed, more housing stock could be built in those cities. And yes, some rich people would presumably do that and make money. But that increased supply would reduce the rental and sale value of existing housing stock in that city, already owned by... Who owns that again? I forget.
Right, I think this is getting to the root of (this) problem: not the billionaires, but the hundred thousandaires. The 1% can't overrule the locally-optimizing incumbents who can vote.
Developers and investors want to build, technocrats want to build, but the upper middle class doesn't, and the populists want to hurt the developers and investors. So the upper middle class and the angry populists team up against the rich and the technocratic to make sure that everything stays expensive and terrible forever.
Maybe we're thinking of different base cities to some extent, but it's making it hard for me to find the hundred thousandaires argument compelling. I know zoning is a huge problem in SF, too, with more traditional residential housing. I'm from NYC.
When I sit in a 60-story residential skyscraper in NYC and look out at the smaller buildings below, and wonder who'd want those adjacent lots not to also become highrises, the first people I'm thinking of are the people in the already-developed building I'm sitting in. Way more new units in the same spot (impeding these units' view) would tend to hurt the current skyscraper owner more than the 4-story owner. The 4-story owner can flip their lot for a lot of money if it's gonna become a high-rise. Renters obviously want there to be more housing stock so landlords can't bend us over the barrel quite as hard.
The people living in the buildings I'm thinking of are definitely millionaires, and obviously their developers/owners are many times more wealthy than that. You don't think there's literal and figurative rent-seeking behavior happening from the Trump/Kushner set? It's hard to think billionaires are my natural ally in this situation. If I'm a developer, why not keep the zoning laws in place generally and just secure specifically favorable treatment for myself vis corrupt means? Then I have the best of all possible worlds. This has happened in NYC for decades.
Because it's hard to get all the rich people in the world to cooperate on a rule that only helps a few of them while denying opportunities to the rest. Jane Q. AmoralInvestor just wants to make money however she can, and if that's by financing the construction of a new building and renting out units, who cares if it cuts into John P. Incumbent's profits?
Competition is the secret sauce that turns greed into everyday utility. It's why I'm composing this reply on a device that would have been an impossible miracle a few decades ago that now costs me under $1/day including amortized device cost, electricity, and network data fees.
Zoning restrictions end the competition before it starts - so greed instead channels its energies into extracting the most value it can from the fixed situation. But the answer to this is just to let greed fight greed and walk away holding all the profits greed had to give away just to stay in the game against itself.
You don't have to sell me on competition being good, and that's not the question I was asking. At least we agree, it seems, that John P. Incumbent himself isn't going out of his way to kill zoning restrictions. Certainly we agree Jane doesn't care if his profits stay up.
But let's say I'm Jane Q. AmoralInvestor... it's also my incentive to buy lots whose value is depressed by current zoning laws, and then secure rezoning for myself. Once I have that stuff, I don't want to abolish zoning law entirely (unless I just bought the whole city), just the zoning law that impacts me. Because as soon as I get that, I'm Jane Q. Incumbent, and new development not undertaken by me is also to my detriment. (I guess I married into the family, under these naming conventions).
> Klein links this polarization to "vetocracy", the idea that it's impossible to do anything nowadays because somebody will prevent you. Sometimes this is a literal presidential veto. Other times, it can be something as stupid and venal as the party out of power using filibusters and every other dirty trick to make sure nothing improves, because if something did improve the party in power would get the credit
This seems a little scrambled to me. More polarization actually could make things move! "Nothing" gets done now because in a closely-divided Senate, there are a few holdouts on both sides - Collins, Manchin, and the like. If they gave into polarization, the majority would be able to ram through its agenda.
Partisanship and Polarization are not quite the same thing. People can be intensely loyal to their own party whilst in practice the two parties do not differ substantially from each other.
This is because of a) the fillibuster, and b) different parties often controlling presidency/house/senate. It's incredibly rare for either side to have a filibuster-proof majority, so they almost always need votes from the other party to get anything non-budgetary through the Senate alone. And then if you don't control the House and the Senate you need the permission of the Chamber controlled by the other party. And unless you have a big majority in the Senate you need the President not to use their veto as well.
These structural features of US politics are really really important in explaining why nothing gets done (insofar as it doesn't.) In the UK parties are strong and ideologically sorted, but we usually have one of them with a majority in the single chamber that can basically make laws all by itself (Commons can always overrule Lords after a delay). So for us polarization hasn't led to paralysis. (I know we've had two coalitions recently but neither have involved the need for co-operation between the two main parties that hate each other.)
I'm struggling to understand the 'loss of geography' section. In particular:
> As cable TV, Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment, it turned out that almost everyone in Kansas was more similar to everyone else in Kansas than any of them were to people in New York, and so Kansas went solid Republican and New York went solid Democrat. But a national Democratic Party that has to include Kansas Democrats under its tent is a Democratic Party that's going to naturally be a bit conservative, a bit sensitive to the interests of religious people, a bit sensitive to the interests of farmers, etc. Once you move from within-state sorting to national-level sorting, things get a lot more sorted very quickly.
Wouldn't this *decrease* polarisation at the national level? I think I get the first bit: when people are focusing on local or state-level politics, the Kansas political parties find their way to the Kansas center, so that ~half of Kansas voters see themselves as Democrats; but when people start focusing on national-level politics, most of the Kansas Democrats realise that they lean right relative to the rest of the country, and so they become Republicans. But I can't figure out the last two quoted sentences.
If the national Democratic party was half Kansans and half New Yorkers, and Kansans are all rightist and New Yorkers are all leftist, then the national party is half rightist and half leftist and probably compromises on being centrist. If the Kansans leave and more New Yorkers come in, then the national party is all leftist, and moves to the left. So moving from geographically homogenous to geographically sorted increases polarization.
It's weird to describe that with the phrase "loss of geography" - but I think this is an issue that comes up in a lot of these related discussions, because what we see is that regions no longer matter, but urbanism does. One aspect of geography (that is arranged in a chunky way) has stopped being relevant, but another aspect of geography (that is arranged much more fractally) has become extremely relevant.
The point is that while you may impose a new geography on it, the only thing *required* for Scott's hypothesis to work is that the old geography no longer holds sway. If instead of being along an urban/rural split, democrats were now 60% of New York at random and 20% of Kansans at random, his proposed mechanism would still work.
Huh, if we instead think of it as the Democratic party exchanging the left half of Kansas for the right half of New York, then this actually doesn't guarantee that the party will become more uniform. That happening is dependent upon the right half of New York for being more left than the left half of Kansas.
But I think this factor mostly goes away when we imagine more than two states. If I picture a bunch of bell curves, with medians uniformly distributed around the origin, then it's pretty intuitive that exchanging the left halt of bell curves to the right of the origin for the right half of the bell curves to the left of the origin would result in more uniformity within the parties.
Even better if, instead of exchanging halves of bell curves, you just put a uniform cutoff at the origin. There is still a Democratic tail in Wyoming and a Republican tail in Vermont, but they're only about a third of the state.
I think what he's saying is that in the pre-communication era, the e.g. Democrats would have to incorporate the Kansas Democrats in their platform. And the Kansas Democrats would be more to the right than the national average perhaps, dragging the Democratic platform a bit more to the right. Whereas now, ~everyone in Kansas is Republican, so you don't have that effect.
It's the difference between taking the average position of the most liberal half of 50 random populations, some of which as a whole are more conservative than others, and just taking the most liberal half of the entire population. In the first scenario, the pre-communication era one, you still get some signal (within each state, the Democratic party is more liberal than the Republican), but it tempered by the difference in the base local orientation.
Another way to phrase this point is that politics became less a way to get things done locally than a game or entertainment for self-expression.
In a way, this lowers the stakes, and makes people less immediately accountable for indulging in pure partisanship.
If indulging in partisanship means the local library or road won't get built, I might rein myself in. If the effect is more diffuse, I have less incentive to do so.
While this is an argument some people might make, it is not the hypothesis Scott put forward, so you should avoid saying things like "Another way to phrase this point" that imply the two hypotheses are similar or isomorphic.
Its not necessarily a entertainment vs. "getting things done" split. On a purely self interest level, whether the national government implements universal healthcare or not, or crashes the economy, or starts wars, etc. has a massive impact on my life, bigger than local issues. And people's judgements aren't purely self interest but include moral/ideological preferences, if in another part of the country something bad is happening, then I would want to vote to stop it, even if it doesn't influence my daily life.
I read this book earlier this year and I found it very engaging (read it in 2 days), but was overall unsatisfied with his proposed solutions; particularly it did read to me that he was saying that the cure for polarization is for the Democratic Party to achieve complete and total victory.
'Total politics' - I'm sure that someone has coined this before but it seems a good term for the optimize-for-short-term gain Scott talked about.
Also interesting are the parallels between the 'cure for polarization by going *through* polarization to a total Democratic victory' thread you pick up on and the post-Landian discussions around accelerationism. Klein could be read as espousing a very moderate form of left-accelerationism (or perhaps a moderate u-accellarationism, if that is even coherent).
I think what you have to remember here is that we have a two-party system, and over time that system will always self-correct so that both parties have roughly equal access to power (averaged over decades).
If you change a rule so that Democrats have a big advantage (like, popular vote), Democrats may win the next election cycle by a lot, but that but means it's time for Republicans to re-adjust their branding and strategies to be competitive under the new rules. The system re-adjusts to equilibrium.
So, the question is, is the re-adjusted system better than the old one?
For instance, from Klein's perspective, does the new Republican party that wins under the new rules do so by being less focused on white identity politics, or less hostile towards sexual minorities, or some other compromise with centrists/mild leftists, in order to grab more of the centrist voters who were on the fence? If so, that's a win for the country from Klein's perspective, even if the Republicans end up winning elections again next year.
I think Klein is mistaken about what would improve Republican chances of success. Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
Yes, but he still did abysmally compared to Biden.
This is sort of like the 'eating burnt food increases your odds of cancer by 50%' thing - that's from .000001% to .0000015%. I'm not sure how meaningful it is to any larger discussions of population-level trends.
Trump actually won majority Hispanic parts of Florida & Texas vs Biden. And he'd already done better than prior Republicans with minorities when he ran against Clinton, so this was a continued trend. He lost this time because suburban whites shifted against him.
'hispanic parts of florida and texas' is getting into local weather records territory (eg, 'highest recorded windspeed during a storm of 2-5 inches rain/hour during March in Minewok, Illinois).
Given the number of different minorities and the number of different 'parts' (ie small geographic areas) across the country, you could easily get many thousands of such groups to measure. You should expect some of those to be outliers just by random chance, assuming anything like a normal distribution.
I'm not saying there was zero real effect - I'm just saying it was small, and cherry-picking the very specific places and measures on which it looks largest doesn't actually make it more impressive.
> Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
I'm having a very hard time seeing metrics where this is true, other than something facile like "raw number of votes received not adjusted for turnout or total population". For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?
To the core point, Trump outperforming GOP candidates that lost isn't quite tautological but comes damn close. It also isn't to surprising if there is a regression to the mean due to Obama's extremely strong minority support in '08 and '12.
That url isn't to twitter, it's to a news article. The news article does contain one tweet, but goes through a lot of data in an exit poll which was not in that tweet. Could you provide a citation regarding Adrian Gray retracting anything?
Apologies, that was an epistemological "where" instead of geographic. You can absolutely pick individual areas that have trended one way or another (and this is useful data for ground-level operations), but it's a large enough degree of freedom that it kills your statistical power. Broad claims about demographics absolutely require aggregated data.
As someone who went from complaining about polarization/broadly skeptical of liberal orthodoxy to a 100% unmovable Democratic partisan in the Trump era, that's basically my take.
It's not possible to settle on a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium with people who cannot accept the bare results of an election: they are playing 'defect' right up to the destruction of the game itself. As of polls *after* 1/6, 70% of Republicans thought the results were illegitimate. (The number was nowhere close to as high - 28% - for Democrats even when their ultimate boogeyman Donald Trump was elected. Source is Morning Consult polls as cited at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/)
Actually, this might be an interesting question for the next survey. Conditional on partisanship, how many people think the 2020 election was fairly counted?
The (IMO) unconstitutional election law in PA says to me that it wasn't run fairly, but I have reasonable confidence that the ballots were properly counted and probably weren't fabricated. (Modulo the usual trivial screwups)
I recall reading some comments that a high % of Democrats actually thought there was significant election fraud in 2020 as well, like 25%+, which I find bizarre
There is not a good chance they actually believe that. It goes down overtime. Its also worth noting that majority of democrats believed that russia hacked machines to win the 2016 election.
I vote mostly for Democrats but I don't know if this is the best idea. States like California where this has happened aren't exactly all that well governed -- and being a de facto single party state gives voters less influence & represents less healthy competition. The Republican electorate isn't about to go away, and Republican senators/representatives mostly seem more thoughtful and reasonable than the electorate they represent, so wrecking the GOP might just see those people replaced by true believers.
Probably I should have some strong opinion on this, but I'm still focusing on the part where Ezra had a staff of eight for his blog. Not in a negative way - just trying to think about what I could do with a staff of eight. It would probably be a disaster - I don't have his managerial talent.
You joke, but that's basically how a lot of small businesses based around a particular talent (musician, writer, artist, etc) work. The talent works on their area of expertise, and has someone else to do the "business stuff". Whether that person is notionally their manager or their employee is somewhat irrelevant as they are the main source of revenue.
Here's my issue with the Zach Goldberg chart: If you made one of those 60 years ago, most of the issues would have been stuff like interracial marriage, Jim Crow laws, damming the Grand Canyon (which Goldwater proposed). Go back another 50 years and you have child labor laws, women's suffrage, workplace safety laws. Go back further when public libraries, national parks, belief the Chinese will never ever assimilate, and the question of should humans be allowed to own other humans - were the hot button issues of the day. Stuff we basically identify now as progress.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now. Same with healthcare - of course the US shouldn't be the only wealthy nation on earth to deny people healthcare based on pre-existing conditions - that's just common sense. Of course [X group] will assimilate, and of course immigrants aren't a net drain on society.
History leans progressive. Many of the hot button issues of today become common sense of tomorrow. You can always make a chart that makes it look like progressives are going off the rails.
The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
The chart is agnostic as to whether the direction the Democrats are moving in is progress or insanity, it's just conveying the point that the Democrats are moving in a direction and the Republicans are staying still (or moving slowly in the same direction), rather than the sort of polarization where both parties move in opposite directions, or the Republicans get more conservative and the Democrats stay still, or anything like that.
Democrats aren't about to allow the Republicans to achieve any policy goals that their base actually wants, so the best they can really do is stay still.
Republicans had the "trifecta" from 2016-2018, and it seems like they did achieve their goals.
"Republicans did indeed secure their big high-end tax cut. They also got a major boost in defense spending, though mostly via appropriations deals with Democrats that gave them corresponding generosity in domestic spending the GOP would have preferred to reduce. And they did indeed use the budget reconciliation process for both their tax and Obamacare-repeal legislation to sidestep the Senate filibuster."
I suppose it was also a long term republican goal to avoid acknowledging climate change is real so leaving the Paris Accord was a major achievement?
And I suppose that having fresh new conflict on the border of turkey and Syria was another accomplishment?
Its a bit hard to know exactly what Republican's goals are some times. But i guess we can assume that a Republican's actions are achieving Republican goals.
And they captured many of the courts for the next million years which I guess is considered progress towards their policy goal of overturning Roe V Wade and maybe getting of workplace protection for LGBT people.
I guess they didn't build as much Wall as they wanted.
My question is to you: If there was some big, long-term policy goal that Republican's are trying to do, did they propose it in 2016-2018 and it failed?
In my opinion the Republicans simply don't have that many grand shared policy goals and seem more interested in obsessing over pop-culture social issues.
My point is if you don't take into account basic incremental progress that all society undergoes, of course it will always look like the progressives are going off the rails to the left.
If we're going to say it means something that Conservatives won't budge while progressives change their opinions and move left, then let's take it back further to the hot button issues of yesteryear. I think most would consider it fairly radical for someone to still be against interracial marriage today. Yet if it's somehow illustrative to look at who moved and who didn't - I guess the person who is still against interracial marriage gets some kind of credit for being the one who didn't change? If not, then why are we implicitly giving Republicans some kind of leg up here for being the ones who didn't budge on gay marriage or pre-existing conditions?
Refusing to budge on slavery in 1860 is pretty radical when you take into account what the rest of the world was doing at the time. Who changed their opinion on the issue and who didn't really isn't illustrative of anything. Or if it is - I would contend the group who doesn't change their opinion generally comes out the worst in history on most issues - which I am pretty sure is not the intended point those charts showing Dems moving left.
The point isn't that there hasn't been social progress over the years, the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong. If you include the issues from yesteryear, what you'll see is that the Democrats have gotten significantly more liberal on them, and the Republicans have also gotten more liberal. Obviously, slavery is outside the Overton window right now, along with your other examples.
What the chart shows is that Democrats have gotten much more liberal on a host of issues, while the Republicans have gotten more liberal on some, and more conservative on others (with a long tail towards more liberal, just eyeballing it). Adding older issues would just make the Republicans look more liberal-trending, which is the opposite of the original claim, that the Republicans have "gone completely off the rails".
I understand that. But my point is if you could somehow subtract out basic progress, it could easily look the other way. You might see that Democrats are basically drifting with the current of progress, while Republicans are actively fighting against it. That's the reason I don't find these "who moved where" charts very meaningful.
I'm not sure what you mean by subtract out basic progress. How would you construct a chart that makes it look like Republicans are going off the rails while Democrats are remaining constant. Do you mean adding points like "view of gay marriage vs the societal mean" and showing how those are trending more conservative (because the mean changed while the Republicans stayed put)?
Republicans and Democrats used to generally agree about increasing the minimum wage over time. Nixon and Johnson both did it. Now, Democrats still think that we should increase the minimum wage over time, while Republicans don't. A similar framing can be used for basically all of these issues.
Imagine the underlying chart was moving to the left (as progress does). Now Democrats are just drifting with the chart and Republicans are actively moving against the chart. All of this is based on looking at past hot button issues which became the common sense of the next generation and extrapolating out that stuff like gay marriage will be the common sense of the next generation.
Obviously there's no real way to quantify it. But then again these charts are pretty subjective to begin with. If you want to make a point you can always run the study enough different ways and cherry-pick the results you want. I used to work for a statistical consulting firm. That's all we did.
The dataset can be shifted to make the republicans look like they are going off the rails instead of democrats.
If we plotted the Democrats' and Republicans' viewpoints against the average trends in peer nations like Canada, Germany, Uk, etc., then we would end in a chart where the Republican's are swinging further and more extremely to the right, and the democrats, are all also shifting more slightly to the right.
So including and focussing on the above chart where Republicans stay the same, is implicitly suggesting that America n years ago was some kind of ideal that its good to stick with. Choosing to compare against other peer nations shifts the values to a more progressive set.
So I guess you can just choose which chart you want. You want the Democrats to look like they are going off the rails, then compare them to the Democrats 20, 50 or 100 years ago. If you want the Republicans to look like they are going off the rails, compare to similarly wealthy nations.
I feel like people sometimes willfully forget how comically right-wing the american left-wing is by international standards.
>the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong.
But as I understand it, that's very much *not* the claim.
The claim is something closer to 'Democrats are relatively stable, and Republicans have gotten really crazy over the years.'
If social consensus/civilizational advancement is trending in one direction, and one party stays in step with it while the other gets further and further away from it, then this would seem to loosely support *that* argument.
Your argument is based entirely on rejecting Republicans as being part of American society:
'Democrats are rapidly moving to the left, so society is moving rapidly to the left, which means that Republicans are radicals for not moving along with society.'
Yet if you accept that Republicans are as much part of society as Democrats, then this framing is absurd.
Yes or no, average approval rating towards legalizing gay marriage across all Americans has increased dramatically in the last 30 years?
'Republican voters' is not half of the population; in a year with record-breaking turnout, Trump got 75million votes, or about 23% of the total population of the US.
It's very possible for Republican voters to stay still, and for society as a whole to move on without them. Even when you average them into 'society'.
Yes, if you set the frame to move at 20 mph, then the progressives moving at 22 mph look stable and the conservatives moving at 5 mph are veering into a ditch.
If you set the frame to 0 mph, then the 22 mph progs are in the ditch and the 5 mph cons look stable.
And the best part of all is that where you believe the frame should be set will be determined by, you guessed it, whether you're a con or a prog and the prior associated with each.
I think its a mistake to try and map polarization to some particular set of issues. Better to map it to what the views of the population are. As the median voter has shifted more "progressive" on the issues you mention, the democrats have also become more progressive, staying slightly more progressive than the median voter. Whereas if the set of beliefs the republicans have the unchanging, but fewer and fewer people in the general population hold them, then they are getting further from the average voter
By "the rest of the world" do you just mean the British empire? Because they were forcing what we would now call the third world to give up slavery. It didn't have to be abolished in continental Europe because it had already been replaced by serfdom there long ago.
It depends on the framing! If your question is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no". If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no".
But surely that framing, which uses a nominal dollar amount, is just silly, right? $7 in 1980 isn't $7 in 2021. The first "Inflation calculator" I happened to google says it would be $22 in 2021, and even if that specific number is off, it would certainly be much higher than $7.
You make a mistake in this analysis focusing on particular policy positions. The reason Republicans are seen as going off the rails is their relationship to the truth and democratic systems, not because of their positions on capital gains taxes or infrastructure spending. Storming the Capitol, rejecting election results, believing a deadly virus is a hoax, arming as if for war, embracing violence, casting their opponents as pedophiles — these are the things “going off the rails” means. The Republican Party has been less and less concerned with public policy (Republicans didn’t bother to draft a platform in 2020), and more and more concerned with maintaining power, with or without democracy. Malcolm X wasn’t considered radical because he sought expanded civil rights; so did MLK. It was because he advocated doing so “by any means necessary.” The Republicans are analogous.
These actions are attributed to republicans by democrats. You describe fringe group activity and falsely attribute it to all republicans. This is nonsense.
On this issue, a majority believe there were serious violations of constitutional law, software "glitches," and ballot shady ballot harvesting that may have and probably did effect the outcome. There are statistical arguments warranting an investigation, of which there was none to date. This is a legitimate concern, though your use of that slogan, though catchy, isn't helpful. The other things you mention are in fact edge cases not much crazier than the last four years of screaming Russia did it talk and investigations that came to nothing from Democrats.
There was quite a bit of investigation - several dozen lawsuits, most obviously. Zero of which won, and quite a lot of which were thrown out for a lack of evidence before even making it to trial - basically, that's judge-speak for "Even if everything you say is true, and the other side doesn't show up, you /still/ couldn't prove your case".
I'm fine with investigating, and defended Trump's right to file those lawsuits. But let's be honest, the investigations turned up nothing more than dry wells and stupidity.
I'm curious, did any Democratic house or senate members ever condone the violent part of the protests/riots?
I don't know the answer to that^, just genuinely curious.
To me it seems like maybe Trumps actions immediately prior to, and during the jan 6th thing were on another level.
What I mean is, from what i know most Democrat representatives have tweeted support for Black Lives Matter. But did they, knowing send messages of support for rioters during a riot, when members of congress were being threaten with nooses, etc? There's also the difference of communicating from the presidents office, being the one who is supposed to call the national guard and keep the peace, etc.
Not to mention stoking tensions and inflaming your base, by drilling lies about stolen elections into their heads for months.
I also dispute that "leftist riots" are to blame for all the terrible things you mentionned. Its a well known and well documented fact that police used aggressive and violent escalations against protesters and turned many peaceful situations into violent ones. Who's to blame for that?
There are many videos of police kettling protesters, tear gassing them for no reason, knocking them down for no reason. Just remember trumps bible photo op that he did.
And the left is seen as going off the rails because of things like riots, destruction of property, CHAZ, Covid restrictions selectively enforced against religion, conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, Title IX, Biden getting a pass with #metoo, etc.
If some people believe that travel restrictions are racist, thats an independent claim that could be evaluated on its own. You could look into whether there's a clear scientific basis for the travel restrictions, or whether experts are recommending it, and you could probably come to a conclusion.
its not related to some other people thinking a deadly virus is a hoax. that's a separate thing.
What's key here as well is the radicalization of the right following the widespread overreaction to 9/11. I suspect Republicans' stances on issues like accountability for war crimes, torture, surveillance and the place of Muslims in US society have shifted pretty far "to the right."
Aside from the thematic conflict of the metaphors involved, I don't think that 'staying in one place' and 'going off the rails' are mutually exclusive.
Consider evaporative cooling of group beliefs. As the beliefs of a group are either proven to be flawed or merely go out of fashion, we expect a lot of people to abandon those beliefs. The ones who still hold them in the future may be much more abnormal (in ways that could be called 'off the rails'), and they may hold them in ways that are very different (more fanatical, more oppositional, less data-driven, more conspiratorial, etc).
X years ago, it would be pretty normal for most enlightened scholars to believe in phlogiston. But if a scholar today believed in phlogiston, it would be very likely that they were 'off the rails' in some important way, even though they 'merely stayed in place' all that time.
> The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
Staying where you are in a time of such rapid change *is* radical.
The Amish stayed where they are for the last century and a half or so. I don't think anyone alive would say they aren't the very definition of a fringe group. So why doesn't the same go for the religious right?
At one time, everyone thought smoking was fine. Then we found out it wasn't. Someone who refused to update their beliefs about smoking and continued to claim it doesn't cause damage would rightly be considered a dangerous lunatic today. So why doesn't the same go for climate-change deniers?
Polarization may not be the right word for it, but to stay where one is is not a passive act. For a person who is informed, it requires an active choice to take the knowledge one could gain and reject it. It isn't sitting still in a calm sea, it's swimming against a clear current so as not to move with it.
They made the comparison between smoking and climate change. The comparison is extraordinarily appropriate and extremely common, because second hand smoke and carbon emissions are negative externalities illuminated by scientific research.
Carbon emissions are also positive externalities. They decrease deaths from cold winters, increase crop yield through CO2 fertilization, make more land warm enough for humans to live in. The popular catastrophic climate change rhetoric counts only the negative externalities and makes no attempt to actually calculate whether the net externality is positive or negative, as an actually knowledge-based argument would do.
I am skeptical-at-best of these claims, but I don't think we even need reach them. The value judgement has to follow the acknowledgement that (a) the planet is warming and (b) human emissions are why. Virtually all experts with any knowledge in the area agree on these facts. But the public does not.
84% of liberal Democrats say human activity contributes "a great deal" to climate change; only 14% of conservative Republicans agree (it scales smoothly from one to the other, source: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/). Conversely, 59% of conservative Republicans think natural forces contribute a great deal; only 14% of liberal Democrats agree.
Again, one of these positions simply is in line with overwhelming scientific consensus, and the other is not.
So is second-hand smoke, right? Also a positive externality? Because some people like the smell. And it keeps away people who would whine about the smell, which many appreciate.
Sorry I'm having trouble figuring out why "but this could also be good in some ways" means we can't call things negative externalities anymore. My belief is actually that emissions are a *net* negative externality.
Is your complaint in this reply, then, that I have to say "net" whenever I say negative externality now? You haven't really specified in this reply whether you just want to point out that many have failed to do a cost-benefit analysis, or whether you actually think warming nets out positive.
Wouldn't a knowledge-based argument accept that we simply don't know or can't know the entire effects of Climate Change at this point?
Is it really possible to sum up all the pros and cons of co2 emitting activities?
I think the consensus on the left is that its bad to take enormous unnecessary risks that could potentially cause enormous amounts of human suffering.
I mean, potentially that suffering will never occur because someone will invent some amazing tech solution next year that blocks sun rays, or captures carbon from the air, but that doesn't change the fact that the wise thing to do now is to take the careful route with less risk.
But by staying still they are getting further from what the median voter believes. So are more polarized in the sense that they are getting further from that midpoint. Whereas the democrats may be further left than the median voter, but they are staying consistently the same amount further left, and updating as the middle moves.
Seeing the things you list and others as being part of a singular tradition is your interpretation of them. Certain people on the center right will insist that the modern definition of racial progress is antithetical to the definition of racial progress as concerns the civil rights movement. old school Feminists being outflanked by Tran rights issues is another example where depending on your outlook, progress 1.0 and progress 2.0 run parallel, orthogonal, or opposite. This hasn't happened quite yet but the very notion of universal healthcare in the US might be undermined by the idea that race-based-means-tested government healthcare is morally superior to universal healthcare.
Moral outlooks, including and especially those of the last hundred years, are not mathematical conjectures that are suddenly proven by some academic and then accepted for the rest of human history.
It's certainly true that all intentional change which catches on gets called 'progress' retroactively, regardless of it's actual direction on any number of axes.
That said, society does *change* consistently, in one way or another; anyone who doesn't change with it is out of step with society for some reason, and that trait of being out of step is likely correlated with a lot of other traits that might be of interest to this discussion.
It isn't. There is a sort of natural selection of ideologies and policies, where the victors get to be called progress and natural order of things, and the defeated - backwardness and villainy.
I think one of the reason for polarization that isn't often mentioned is the total ideological victory of the West in the Cold War, led by USA. The Civilized World was happily united in their fear and hatred of the Obviously Evil Extremely Dangerous enemy for many decades, and then suddenly it disappeared, or at least was greatly diminished for a time.
There was a brief euphory about this, The End of History and all that, but it turned out that the West still had many problems and no obvious enemy to blame and hate, and so it began hurting itself in its confusion.
> Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
I'm pretty sure this just isn't true, and that's why they both needed strict police states to keep their own populace in check. But I'm not a historian, so I won't argue it.
But nothing I'm saying here is about right vs wrong. It's merely an observation that people who are many standard deviations away from their culture's accepted norms and values tend to be weird people, regardless of what those values and norms happen to be.
I'm not really smart enough to grasp what all this means. I just like to keep it simple and go with examples I can wrap my head around. Off the top of my head here's a list of progressive causes in the last 200 years in the US that were controversial hot button issues in one generation, and common sense in the next:
40 hour workweek
child labor laws
women's suffrage
ending slavery
ending Jim Crow
ending poll taxes and literacy tests
desegregation
toll-free interstate highway system
national parks
public libraries
miranda rights
Medicare/medicaid/disability insurance
unemployment insurance
OSHA
USDA
Americans with Disabilities Act
Labor Day
Clean Air and Water acts
California emissions
workplace harassment laws
interracial marriage
gay marriage
minimum wage
smoking bans
seatbelt laws
nutrition labels on food
calorie counts in restaurants
killing onerous bank overdraft fees
lemon laws
pre-existing conditions shouldn't make health insurance impossible to get
.
.
**Now here are the ones I think went wrong:**
Prohibition
55-mph speed limit (although we probably should have stuck with that for our grandkid's sake)
rent control (maybe causes more problems than it helps)
That's my list. What am I missing?
.
I'm not talking about something someone yelled at a protest, or a scientific fad in the 1800s when science was basically in its infancy and doctors still used leeches. I'm talking about actionable progressive policy - like the examples in both my lists above - that went wrong or right. I get the idea of survivorship bias. But surely we should be able to come up with a few more actual implemented progressive policies that went wrong, right?
It looks to me like several of those in your list are still being opposed, or are being given lip service while being commonly evaded, and not just by those on the fringe.
Official (legally required) segregation seems to have been replaced by an individually chosen form of the same old thing. Jim Crow also seems to be protean.
Minimum wage is routinely opposed - by some respectable set of US right wingers. And some economic orthodoxy.
Workplace harassment laws seem to me to be frequently seen as on the one hand, excuses for empathy-less HR reps to make trouble for innocent people - and on the other hand, to be a toothless tiger for any employee seen as sufficiently valuable, particularly managers, executives, etc. At least in a subset of companies, some of which are notorious. (Uber is my go-to example of such a reputation.)
The "Americans with Disabilities Act" is another case of a bureaucracy decried for imposing meaningless requirements to accommodate hypothetical people - while at the same time Apple's architectural award winning new headquarters building had to have retrofits for simple things like access to washrooms for people in wheelchairs.
And I haven't noticed any reduction in absurd fees from rapacious banks.
And oh yeah, public libraries are great - but there's very often no room for them in the civic budget. I tend to be pleasantly surprised - and spend a lot less at e.g. Amazon - when I live somewhere that has such a thing.
And poll taxes and literacy tests seem to just get replaced with other ways to keep the "wrong" people from easily voting. I.e. lip service, from most, but inadequate implementation. again.
Clean Air and Water acts - it's politically mainstream in the US to decry the EPA for imposing excessive costs, delays and uncertainty, in favor of species that aren't cute or photogenic and thus don't matter. Few people want the river they live near to catch on fire, or smog to the point of measurable impacts on life expectancy <em>for them</em>. But they seem a lot less clear about the environment that other people live in.
I think you're much too quick to dismiss survivorship bias, honestly. There have been thousands of ideas brought up by what we might now call progressives that have been rejected for various reasons. This often happens in their infancy, killed by other progressive types who know it will not work. Often it happens when the ideas are introduced to a wider audience and their flaws are identified.
In a functioning society, very few ideas will live to get implemented without a thorough vetting. When that happens (prohibition), it's often regretted and reversed.
Your list appears to be an attempt to recommend further progressive policy, but may in fact recommend the thorough vetting of thousands of ideas more than it recommends cart blanche approval of progressive planning.
I'm late to the party, but I think you're missing Social Security as something that went wrong. Regardless of whether you are in favor of such social programs, the implementation was based on faulty premises: the larger, younger population will transfer money to the smaller, older population; that population will generally continue to increase; that 30 years working is enough to fund indefinite retirement.
We now know that it's a better plan, generally, to have forced savings. If each individual's Social Security taxes were instead invested for the benefit of those paying them, then the plan could never run out of money.
As a conservative, I think people should be responsible for their own retirement planning, and am against the government getting involved in it. But I accept that many people don't know even the basic principles of financial planning, and that liberals want to provide help to everyone. As a compromise, then, I understand the need for government intervention. But the implementation of Social Security is fundamentally flawed.
From where I sit, that's merely a US conservative talking point, that they hope will be believed if they repeat it often enough.
The advantage of social security and similar schemes, is that they distribute risk. In particular, the risk that you will live longer than expected, and outlive your savings. When planning for retirement, I had to save as if I might reach 95th percentile or even higher life span. It's equally likely that I'll only reach 5th percentile. With any kind of pooled risk scheme (like social security, or old fashioned private pensions) that risk averages out, and the amount needed per person is only the 50th percentile amount. (Perhaps a bit more, to allow for potentially increasing lifespans.)
The rest of the common talking point is social security running out of money, for what seem to me to be primarily political reasons. If politics doesn't allow social security to be managed providently, or contributions to be increased, or for that matter the country to import young adults to pay into the system, that doesn't mean that an entirely different type of scheme would be better. It means that US politics is dysfunctional.
In the pew research link you sent, there's a chart breaking down support for gay marriage by political party between 2007-2017.
Republicans go from 20%to 47% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
Democrats go from 49% to 76% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
It looks like they both parties followed the same trend and went up 27% to me. So i'm a bit curious on what you mean by:
"democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm".
I guess you mean that the whole population is changing its mind faster on this issue, than it did for interracial marriage?
Then maybe a new question is: how fast should progress go?
I would argue as fast as we can while maintaining strong democratic institutions. Its hard for me to think of a way to make this specific though. Did we go too slow changing our minds on interracial marriage or too fast on gay marriage?
How fast do we want the other party to be able to move?
"In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now" I think the same-sex marriage vs interracial marriage equivalence doesn't work.
You have religious and cultural traditions about marriage going back thousands of years, which are still adhered to by a majority of people in the majority of countries in the world; the idea that those traditions are wrong is (to a great extent) a historical novelty, an idea which is less than a century old, 20 years ago most people in first world countries opposed it, and even now, the majority of countries still have majority opposition to it.
By contrast, interracial marriage bans are much more of a historical anomaly. You can count on one hand the number of countries that have ever had formalised bans on interracial marriage – the vast majority of countries never have. It is not an idea with thousands of years of heritage behind it, in fact it only really dates to the 17th century.
Overturning something which has existed for a few centuries maximum, and only ever in a handful of countries, is a lot easier than overturning something that goes back thousands of years, and is found in the majority of countries around the world.
In 20 years time, there will still be a substantial minority opposed to same-sex marriage. It quite possibly will have shrunk somewhat – although the high birth rate of religious ultra-conservatives counteracts that – but it certainly will be a lot larger than the minority opposed to interracial marriage will be.
Just to be clear your position is that interracial marriage bans are easier to overturn because they only existed for a few hundred years, while you believe formal gay marriage bans have exited for thousands?
Because the interracial marriage work was done first. Part of the gay marriage argument was "this is the Civil Rights of our time!" and part of that was deliberately making the comparison with interracial marriage. So people who had grown up with "ban on interracial marriage wrong and bad and evil" were much more likely to be persuaded on "ban on gay marriage wrong and bad and evil" because the deliberate comparison had been made "you don't want to be a *racist*, do you? of course not! but being anti-gay marriage is the exact same thing as being a racist who was anti-interracial marriage!"
That argument only really works in the US though, because it is one of the few countries in which a ban on interracial marriage existed and became a big political issue. The vast majority of countries never banned interracial marriage; even in the few others that did, it almost never became a major political debate. (A good example of that is France, which had on-and-off-again bans on interracial marriage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they often went unenforced, and eventually finally disappeared without most people even noticing – indeed, most French people forgot they ever existed, if they ever knew they existed to begin with.) It probably also has some salience in highly Americanised Western countries (especially English-speaking ones), but that says more about the cultural dominance of the United States than anything else. I don't think you'd get very far with that kind of US-centric argument in most of the Middle East, Africa or Asia.
I know your topic is specific to marriage, but how does your thesis account for what appears to be the greater overall stubbornness of racial discrimination in the United States? It's been 165 years since the end of the Civil War, yet racial discrimination and bigotry hang on stubbornly. Marriage equality and other civil rights for gay Americans seems to be gaining acceptance at a much quicker pace. Seemingly, if the taboo against homosexuality, because it is so ancient, has a stronger hold on the culture than bigotry on the basis of race, there would be far higher resistance across a host of issues. But that seems to be the opposite of what we see.
So one big difference is to what extent we are dealing with a US-specific phenomenon versus a global phenomenon. Interracial marriage bans were largely specific to the US, few other countries have ever had them, and their defenders in the US found few supporters in other countries. By contrast, a majority of the global population – even in 2021 – still supports limiting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Conservative American Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have been receiving support from Christians in Africa (and other parts of the world) where opposition is still the clear majority position, and there is no certainty it won't still be in 20 years time – witness the strong support African Anglican churches gave to the conservative ACNA breakaway from the US Episcopal Church, and their strong support for a global Anglican alliance in defence of traditional sexual morality, GAFCON. By contrast, American Christians who defended interracial marriage on religious grounds found very little support from overseas Christians. I think globalisation and increased diversity of immigration add to the picture – conservative American Christians can today call on support from conservative Christians in the Global South, in a way in which they couldn't have in earlier decades even if those Christians had been inclined to support them (which on the issue of interracial marriage they were not). And I think broadly the same point applies to some other religions as well, such as Islam.
If you made one of those charts in the prior progressive era, it would have included major progressive issues like eugenics and prohibition. It's easy to construct a narrative saying that things are coherently moving in a certain direction if you ignore everything inconvenient to its narrative. It's a teleological view without a clear telos, and a historiography, quite frankly, based on flattering the preconceptions of people like you.
History leans Christian. And at least a Christian view of history has a clear telos. Yet somehow I doubt you believe that Jesus is coming back.
Sure, that is how we view it now: quack science seized on by racists. But plenty of intellectuals of the day championed it. Maybe people a hundred years from now will say similar things about any number of progressive issues out there right now. My point isn't that X issue is good and Y issue is bad.
My point is the opposite: some perspective and epistemic humility make it quite hard to view something as progress before you really know how it will turn out.
The fundamental problems with eugenics aren't scientific, even though the science used to support some specific implementations of eugenics has been rubbish.
There's no fundamental scientific problem with the idea that people would overall be better off if more people tended to be born with genes for better health, fitness and intelligence, though. The problem is in translating that into an actual policy that isn't somewhere between "horrifying" and "really really really horrifying".
Eugenics is a classic "progressive" policy. "Progressive" policies tend to be about boldly making big changes to society because they sound like a nice idea at the time while giving insufficient thought to the unintended consequences which in practice tend to always outweigh the intended ones. Eugenics is one of those idas that sounds like a great plan when you've thought about it for five minutes but turns out to be horrible when you've actually done it for two decades.
The reason that I'm (mostly) a conservative is not that "progressives" are always wrong, but because they often are, and because I think the world right now needs more people capable of saying "Hey now, stop right there, think about the unintended consequences" and fewer who say "Hey guys I have a radical proposal to fix everything!"
Being quack science seized on by racists doesn't mean it's not a progressive issue. It was promoted by progressives as part of a progressive ideology to remake society.
The science wasn't the problem — some human characteristics that matter are heritable, and humans have been changing animal strains by selective breeding for a very long time. And the people who "seized on it" included Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, ... . Its principal opponent was the Catholic Church.
"History leans progressive" is an illusion created by survivorship bias. Only the issues on which progressives eventually win get branded as "progress".
When the "progressives" win, things change, and this is branded as progress. When the progressives lose, nothing changes, the issue is forgotten, and the change for which they fought is retrospectively rebranded as "not progress".
I was really struck by this when I started reading GK Chesterton. Now, GK Chesterton was a fusty old conservative even in his day, so in a world where "progress" was a genuine direction in political space you'd expect his writings to be busy defending ideas that nowadays seem ridiculously old-fashioned. And yet he's not, he's mostly out there defending sensible principles, because the "progressives" of his day were in favour of forms of "progress" such as the abolition of private homes and families for the benefit of a government-mandated eugenics program.
This is my observation too. I've tried to think: "If I take an outside view and place my self randomly sometime in the last 200 years, were the liberals or conservatives more likely to be correct / moving in the right direction?" And I found that both sides are likely to be wrong about a ton of things, obsessed about a ton of things that really don't matter, but when they have clearly articulated differences the liberals are probably more right about social issues and more wrong on economic ones.
There's plenty of exceptions. But if you're trying to figure out what your priors should be: liberals are probably right on social issues and more likely than not to be wrong economic ones is probably a good place to start (then obviously update on the evidence in the specific case).
"the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant"
Actually the majority of British people today would welcome a massive nationalisation programme – at least for rail, water and energy. See the survey below. "State ownership is still the preferred option for a majority of people across most of the industries we asked about."
Everyone is in favor of lots of stuff when responding to surveys and costs are not factored in. This is true of every pet project of any camp - not just nationalization. Ask people if they want better sports stadiums on surveys and they are in favor. Ask them in the next election if they want to implement a tax hike to pay for better sports stadiums, and they vote it down (at least here in the US). Thus, the joke about Abortions for Some, Free tiny American Flags for Everyone!
'Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced'
This is true, but a bit misleading. Corbyn fought two elections not one, and although he got crushed the second time, he did quite well in the first one, only losing narrowly and improving on Labour's performance 2 years earlier. Indeed, Labour gained their largest % of the overall vote since 2001 in the 2017 election. Further, what changed between 2017 and 2019 was not Corbyn's leftist economic policies (it was something of a factor that the 2019 manifesto promised more spending, but by no means the most important) but the fact that anti-Brexit people had become radicalized and didn't see Corbyn as anti-Brexit enough while (more important) pro-Brexit voters now saw him as trying to overturn the referendum.
You're take that Corbyn lost because ordinary voters saw that his economic policies were crazy-because-socialist is suspicious, because it implies voters vote on policy, and there is very little evidence that that is true. I have to say that when Corbyn was elected Labour leader, I thought his leftism would doom him, because people would trust the mainstream media's claims that he was extreme (which of course, in one sense he was, he did represent a big shift to the left, love it or loathe it). But after 2017, I stopped thinking that this was anything like a strong enough effect to guarantee that a politician as far-left as Corbyn couldn't become PM.
To be fair, it is a little hard to say just what 2017 indicates, because the Tories ran a famously shitty campaign, resulting in Labour soaring in the polls relative to where they were at the start, when they were 20 points behind and it really did seem like 'Corbyn too socialist to achieve anything other than massive defeat' was the right take.
That doesn't mean that the current beliefs of progressives will become the common sense of the future. For example, racial 'blindness' was the progressive standpoint of progressives of yesteryear (see MLK's most famous quote), but current progressives advocate judging people by their race. So either people who had similar beliefs to MLK were radicals who didn't have 'common sense', or the current progressives are radicals who don't have 'common sense'.
You entire argument hinges on your claim that you know that the current beliefs by progressives will become the common sense of the future, which you cannot know. We can certainly point to others who falsely thought the same thing, like communists.
'Progressives advocate judging people by their race'. This is something of a strawman. It probably fits well with how some social justice types on twitter actually behave on twitter. But virtually no one actually defends 'form a judgment of how virtuous any individual is on the basis of their race.
Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. I don't think anyone would call them anything other than progressives.
That framing in that article-treating this as something white women do as a collective rather than as something individuals have done-is bad and racist and bigoted (doesn't *necessarily* mean the phenomenon it's talking about isn't real: compare a racist on the right talking about high crime rates in black inner city areas) but it's not advocating for the position 'judge individuals on the basis of their race' but rather saying that there is a problematic trend in white culture with using the idea that black men are a threat to white women to control or drum up violence against black men. I actually think very few bigots on either the left or right *ever* advocate directly for "judge individuals on the basis of their race', post-Jim Crow, apart from actual Nazis* and Nation of Islam black supremacist-types. King's famous remark in the I Have a Dream speech made sense because he was talking in the context of laws that forbade *all* blacks from doing certain things, but that's seldom advocated for these days against either whites or blacks. (At least at a legal level.)
*Even not all of them maybe. The son of the guy who runs Stormfront once said in an interview with the NYT about him abandoning white supremacy that his parents were generally fine with people of colour on an individual level, and that there
'Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. '
Again, not really (regardless of one's views on the wisdom of affirmative action, a topic on which I don't have strong views.) They usual defences of Affirmative Action are that it will a) make society equal overall by giving blacks more power (on the assumption that they currently have less than their fair share), b) will somehow compensate blacks as a group for past injustice, c) will lead to greater "diversity" of experiences amongst the student population and hence a richer educational experience (maybe no one actually believes this one, but officially this is the *only* legal justification for affirmative action) or d) help compensate for the fact that the grades of black students don't reflect their actual levels of talent because of racism. Now maybe all of a-d) are total bullshit, I'm not taking a stand on that, but none of them involve deciding that whites are worse students or worse people because they are white.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married.
Maybe. But what about bet on other progressive ideas? What is your bet on efficacy of "defund the police" movement and overall policies on crime? What about progressive ideas on how to solve homelesness and drug addiction problem we see on West Coast? What about progressive ideas on housing crisis? What about progressive ideas on fighting systemic racism by implementing large scale diversity trainings? Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?
I think most of these will fail spectacularly and then will be just whitewashed. "No true Progressive" believed in these ideas back then. They only believed in ideas that proved to be successful.
"History leans progressive" isn't even true for one country (America) in one short time period (1960-2020). Economically, public policy since Reagan is significantly to the right of where it was in the 1960-70s. The anti-tax movement is one of the most successful political movements in American history. Unions are far weaker than they used to be; the minimum wage has plummeted when adjusted for inflation; state control of the economy is largely anathema, replaced by a neoliberal consensus that both parties subscribe to.
Following up on my previous comment, it's definitely not true that history leans progressive overall. History is fundamentally unpredictable. In 100 BC, Rome was a semi-democratic republic where you could more or less express your political opinions and believe in whatever religion you want. Its philosophers tended to be rationalists, skeptical of religion and smiling on its absurd pieties. Then the centuries-old republic fell, replaced by the Augustan autocracy. Then an obscure religion rose out of a backwater desert in the Middle East and took over Europe. By 500 AD, this religion had an iron grip on politics and philosophy; the rational skepticism of 100 BC turned into the all-consuming theological autocracy of the Middle Ages, an orthodoxy enforced by the mob, the kings, and the clergy. Christianity was spreading so fast that Christians must have thought it would take over the world. Then a random orphan in another brutal desert invented a new faith and united the tribes of Arabia; shortly after his death, his followers destroyed one superpower (Persia) and nearly destroyed the Christian Roman Empire within a single generation.
What will happen in 500 years? There's no reason a theocratic autocracy enforced by mass digital surveillance can't happen. Insert your favorite boogeyman as the religion (Christianity, Islam, social justice...)
I hope someday you sincerely try to tackle the "why cant we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" question.
It seems to be the most pressing current question. Unfortunately, It does not appear to me that the left takes it seriously. The left answer appears to be "more of what we have been doing, and do it with new people."
On the right, there are some who write directly about the question and try to sincerely answer it, though very few people of stature bother to address the arguments.
I would love to see you take a serious shot at answering that question from the ground floor.
You should read the left more. "Everything stopped working around 1970, because neoliberalism" is basically dogma on the left; "why can't we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" was <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/issue/failure-is-an-option">the theme of the most recent issue of Jacobin</a>.
Of course you might think that the left diagnoses are wrong, or that their remedies would make it worse, but that's separate from the left not taking the question seriously.
I probably do not pay enough attention to the non-neoliberal, non-woke left. Though my impression is that's just communism with more epicycles, which may be wrong. I would be interested in going down the rabbit hole. I wish your link wasn't paywalled.
On the link: if you scroll down some, you can click on most of the articles
On the left: there's a wide range between the US and communism that leftists tend to advocate for. Nationalized health care is obviously a big one, and one which most of Europe is to the left of the US on. There are a number of individual-focused changes like parental leave, vacation time, and work hours. Leftists also often advocate for more societal-focused changes like nationalizing natural monopolies, increasing the funding for public transit on a national level, increasing the power of unions, or mandating that company boards have workers on them.
Those are all policies that could entirely be part of a capitalist society, where businesses are still generally owned by individuals instead of by the state. Of course, many on the American right would describe those as communism (apparently Joe Biden is a "communist"!), but doing so isn't really an accurate description of anyone who would call themselves communist. And some on the left certainly are communists, calling for a revolution by the proletariat and an abolition of private property, but that's a small minority.
I assumed the Seth Ackerman article that's paywalled was the one addressing my question. Which of the others addresses the issue squarely? There are quite a few.
Just so we share a mindspace, I've read Oligopsony's comments on SSC for 10 years and am aware of non-US politics.
I am extremely extremely doubtful that the problem is variations on policies such as parental leave, funding levels for various nice social programs, or making company boards more diverse. I am curious how you think your examples would result in some general improvement in government capacity? Would government with the various policies you mentioned be able to tackle COVID effectively?
The problem I identified in the original post extends to basically all of the western democracies. Europe spectacularly failed on responding to COVID and also generally appears moribund and unable to act efficiently or effectively. Perhaps its not as bad as the US, but there does appear to be a general phenomena in the west on this front.
Ah, I was mainly answering what the "non-neoliberal, non-woke left" has that differs from communism.
The Ackerman article talks about how most of the systems at the top of the American political system are set up to stop change. The Supreme Court can override the legislative branch, the legislative branch needs the president to approve, the president needs the legislative branch to create laws, and House and Senate need each other to agree, the Senate needs a supermajority to get past the filibuster, and so on. Thus the system as a whole can't actually produce any significant change that hasn't been wanted by a large majority of the US population for a long period of time.
That's obviously not entirely true, but it is true for a lot of the issues. 67% of Americans want a $15/hr minimum wage[0], but it's looking doubtful that it will happen, despite the president and most of the House being in favor. Similarly, 69% of voters want Medicare for All[1], but there's almost no chance of it.
Of course, that doesn't explain Europe, other than perhaps saying that they too have too many checks and balances, and that they need a more unilateral populace-based control. But, on a lot of issues, European governments do have a lot more government capacity. The US pays a lot more than Europe (other than the UK) for building public transit, for instance.[2] Leftists would probably explain it as partly caused by privatization.[3]
Sorry for the paywall, but glad I inspired some interest!
On the contemporary socialist-or-social democratic left (I won't say "non-woke," because that's a very elastic term, even moreso than socialist) I'd say there are two schools of thought on the stagnation question: the fatalist Marxist response and the anti-neoliberal response. The first is generally a bit further left than the other, but not perfectly so (because there are other issues at stake.)
For the fatalist Marxists like Michael Roberts, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Cockshott, things are slowing down because of capital accumulation. Specifically, rates of profit are falling, and *have been falling*, for a very long time, in accordance with the dynamics of capitalism. This long-term secular trend was slightly obscured during the middle of the twentieth century, which had plenty of new places to build and destroyed old things to rebuild, and which was throwing a lot of growth into consumer goods rather than capital accumulation - there's your epicycle, if you like - but then reasserted itself. These agree with the anti-neoliberal social democrats that the slowdown is associated with the shift to neoliberalism, but see neoliberalism as a way of reasserting profitability by privileging capital - a response to slowing growth rather than its cause. (Although the politics are quite different, you might notice a similarity to some of Tyler Cowen's explanations in a steady decline of low-hanging fruit.)
For the anti-neoliberal social democrats like Branko Marcetic, Thomas Piketty, or many of the MMT types, neoliberalism led to a slowdown by shifting the income distribution upward and encouraging that upward wealth going towards financial assets rather than real production. A change within capitalism - one that empowered labor unions and governments alongside shareholders, and that increased the share of effective demand coming from consumers as well as investors - could change the incentives structure of production towards more long-termism. These groups also tend to see public goods as underinvested in. A nice blog series that outlines some ways of thinking about how neoliberal solutions can be anti-growth - written in the kind of insight porn that SSC readers are likely to appreciate - can be found at https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/category/coasian-hell/
I'd say Jacobin is a good place to go to start keeping tabs on the left, not because they're perfect by any means - they can often be quite shallow, as any publication that tends towards mainstream success can be - but because they represent a nice sampler of thought in this sphere without presuming that you've memorized everything about some particular weird inter-left debate. Getting from there to less shallow stuff is often as simple as following an author to their private blog.
If you had to recommend a book length in-depth treatment of the "fatalist Marxists" position (or just another long running blog i could pick through) I'd be very interested to read it.
I've read picketty, i wouldve put him in my "neolib" camp, lol. whoops! I'll read harrowell.
Michael Robert's blog, or for a book-length treatment, Andrew Kliman's "Failure of Capitalist Production" may be helpful (though Kliman is a cranky fellow in both senses and can be somewhat exhausting to deal with at book-length.) Roberts also has edited a book of papers from this perspective entitled "World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability."
I don't know what Substack's linking policy is, but you should be able to find these wherever fine books can be found.
I'm probably missing something here, but I'd always heard that profit margins are pretty high now - how does this interact with the decreasing-profit-margins case?
The decreasing profit margin on building something tangible... Physical capital. Instead, the system is now set up to be more profitable for those who invest in financial instruments.
Profit margins are the ratio of sales to profits, whereas Marx was talking about the ratio of capital investment to profits. So, if you invest $10,000,000 and sell $5000 of products, but $4000 of that is pure profit, your profit margins are great, but your rate of profit (profit relative to capital investment) is appalling.
More generally, I *think* a big conceptual disconnect is that Marx is working on the labor theory of value. The claim is that capitalists can only make a profit by capturing the surplus value created by human workers, so as the ratio of human workers to automation falls, the ratio of profit available for capture to overall capital investment also falls.
The claim also explicitly includes the caveat that capitalists can temporarily fend off this fall in profits by exploiting the workers harder - longer hours for less pay, worse conditions, etc. I think adherents to this view would vaguely gesture at graphs of wages not rising for a long time, wealth inequality spiking, etc. as evidence that capitalist are doing exactly this right now, allowing profits to stay high, but that this is not a stable system and can only lead to a long economic bust when exploitation reaches intolerable levels.
The relevant distinction here is between capital share of income (how much new wealth goes to capital, currently high, as far as things go) and rate of profit (how much income you expect per time period per amount invested, currently low, as far as things go.) Ceteris paribus raising one will raise the other, but if rates of growth are low - precisely the situation we're trying to puzzle out! - then you can have low rates of profit even with a high capital share of income.
Importantly, he compares countries that embraced neoliberalism to a greater vs lesser degree rather than just having everything after some date represent neoliberalism while everything prior to it doesn't.
I think your point is a little lost because I have no idea who you're referring to on the left or right. Are we talking about mainstream Republicans and Democrats, in which case I dont see any attempt at big diagnosis on either side, or a bit further to the poles?
I didn't want to get into a debate on the relative merits of these authors and their politics, I was just noticing a trend that may or may not be real. I was not speaking from a mainstream politician perspective, but the various intellectuals that address these questions.
For example that may prove the rule, Matt Yglesia does write about this issue, and he gets quite a bit of flack for it. His most recent book One Billion Americans book can be considered a "take" on this question.
Something that bothered me about the book is that it doesn't link the people's affective polarisation with the political parties. There's definitely an increase in political polarisation across the world - incl Marine le Pen in France, Brexit, German far right parties rising fast, India, Hungary and more. I'm not sure how to square that seemingly benign affective polarisation chart with the political outcomes. And while Dixiecrats move would've had a role in creating a better party mix, I'm not sure why that would've led to more polarisation relative to all the other party mixes that have happened in the past.
One option, which I wish the book had discussed better, is the rise of mass media. Media creates a transparent information economy for the whole country. It ensures the speed of information transmission is rapid or instantaneous. So any political action you take has to have an immediate and positive effect. If that's the case, then naturally compromise gets harder, because you compromise to get something you want later. But the immediacy of feedback makes us all hyperbolic discounters. Makes us do things like McConnell not giving everyone $2k even though that would've won him all 3 branches of the govt.
Ultimately it makes us all greedy algorithms. And that's not a US specific topic, it's true around the world.
I take all your points. It's a very fair characterisation.
However by that metric can we classify anything as polarising? It'll always seem like "this is a fringe view" until it wins and then the Overton window shifts, and the PM and the Tories now take Brexit on as 'their' issue, so it means we're never actually polarised, it's just that a new view has emerged.
Not saying that's incorrect btw. But by this thought process, polarisation on any one issue is the normal way for any idea to become popular. And if multiple ideas start getting held together by the same people, then overall polarisation, which is a sum of people's preferences that seem autocorrelated, also rises.
So for example it would be like if Brexit view becomes correlated with other policies like immigration, taxation, social services etc, partially through the sales pitch and partially because it's the same people. And if any "popular" issue gets adopted by a party, and you have feedback loops that make their position entrenched (because you can't back down etc) then it'll seem like polarisation would naturally increase as time goes on.
Thank you - you've made me rethink the polarisation theory. Which is fun because I wrote about it a while back so good time to revisit :-)
My amended thought is that people have a grabbag of positions. Say
x1 = f(a, b, c, ...z), same for x2 all the way to xn as people, and a to z as 'positions'. and f() just multiplies each position with a coefficient from -1 to +1 and creates an array.
Initially let them be randomly distributed.
First comes a level of media that helps everyone know what the general consensus is on positions a, b and c. So some folks start updating their own positions towards either extreme.
Then comes new issue z, which originally wasn't an issue, but now is. z now moves from being a 0 on everyone's scale to now be bimodally distributed (this is Brexit).
If z, or any other position like a, b, p, becomes bimodally distributed, and it's public enough that enough people now know it's bimodally distributed, people will start sorting "for" and "against" it, and within each of those camps the positions start becoming similar. The 'a's update towards becoming similar to other 'a's and so on.
That is the argument for overall polarisation. Admittedly it's an observational argument and not a deductive one.
The next step very well might be that new issue comes up and preexisting polarisations get dissolved, or they sort into existing camps. That part's harder to predict. Just like it's harder to predict if Republicans will go full Romney or full Margaret Greene.
> The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I don't think leave/remain will ever replace left/right. But I do think a cluster of issues and positions that is crudely encapsulated by leave/remain -- but crucially does not actually include rejoin/don't rejoin the EU -- may well replace the current left/right.
If the Tories move closer to a pre-Thatcher conservatism with a stronger focus on the nation and an acceptance of a role for the state, and lock in the change by making a success of "levelling up" retaining some of their northern gains they could redefine the meaning of right wing to something you might describe as "leave". There's some signs to be oquptimistic if you like this stuff. The success of the vaccine taskforce taking the sting out of the words "national industrial strategy", the failure of the global marketplace to deliver PPE and success of moving production back onshore. My reading is that the party is divided, Boris is pro this shift and Sunak is less so. But I'd say there's a reasonable chance it happens.
If this happens the question is how does Labour respond. Does Starmer try to copy the plan leading to something like the very unpolarised Blair/Cameron years - https://www.youtube.com/watch/PPgS7p40ERg. Or does Labour position itself as it's anthesis and embrace globalism and, dare I say, anti-Britishness. There's definitely a faction in Labour that want to (witness the reactions to Starmer saying he wants to see more union jacks around) but I can't see the party letting that unelectable faction take power... again.
So I don't know too much French history, but if Le Pen really is more extreme and more polarizing in France than previous politicians, wouldn't you expect to see an increase in French people with a negative opinion of her party? (and, among her supporters, more hostility towards Macron)?
So to clarify, what I meant is that you should see a reduction in people who think both major candidates are fine, and an increase in people that really hate one (or both) of them. If you assume the alternative to Le Pen is a more mainstream centre-right figure who appeals less to the fringe, then you would expect to see less net hostility to the mainstream alternative than you do to Le Pen - and if we're assuming Le Pen's predecessors as the main opposition figure were more like that, then Le Pen should get more hate than they did.
I can't see the body of the articles because paywall - going by the headlines it looks like Le Pen is seeing more support? But that's not necessarily a sign of more partisanship (or of less partisanship - you can have a Reagan-like fringe politics figure or a Biden-like mainstream figure both pick up a lot of support against the incumbent, for opposite reasons).
Ah I see. That makes sense. Sorry about the paywalls.
But this is one of those cases where defining "polarisation" is interesting. You could see it as the chart above re Rs and Ds creating a nice bimodal distribution, or you could purely look at % of people with antagonistic views towards the other party, or you could look at the level of pushback against the "mainstream" parties in the middle of said distribution. My point was that most of the world is seeing the latter.
But yes, if MLP were more moderate, the reaction would be to cause less net hostility to her. But she's not, which is what creates the furore. So MLP does get more hate than her predecessors. But she (much like Trump) also gets more love for her extreme views. Whether this is a strategy (get visibility through extreme views, moderate to get acceptability) remains to be seen.
Also, to your point, to me the interesting aspects would be to see how it plays out too - there's a likelihood that her route from strong minority to majority relies on relaxation of some of the views, which could be a victory (much like Scott writes about the Democrats).
To me whether or not a party becomes polarising is therefore more easily explained by the efforts of the party to have clear, simple policy positions, and ensure that the media-feedback-model shows them as always on the attack + never giving in. It's less about the specific person, and more the fact that such political polarisation is not purely a US phenomenon.
You should really, really, really read Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He makes a pretty compelling argument that the things you are pointing to are due to the current communication infrastructure where "NO!" is easy to get behind but proactive solutions are easy to get behind. Then those ultimately fall apart once the NO! take effect. In the US, Occupy and the Tea Party were two faces of the same coin... that ended up changing nothing. He has many international examples. For a small taste, check out his Pairagraph: https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686cf7fce19/1
I think both the comparison of whether Democrats or Republicans are radicalizing more, and of the relative success of their "rebel flanks," might be improved by separating economic and cultural issues.
QAnon and "it's racist for white people to eat sushi" have something in common: elites think it's dumb, but it doesn't really affect their bottom line, so they're willing to play to it when the polling says they can pander to those activists without weirding out normies.
Social democracy, much less a more vigorous model of socialism, *would* threaten the people who run the Democratic party. So Democratic leadership is willing to move left on race and gender, at least on the representational aspects of those issues, while making sure to keep the economic and foreign policy left out of control of the party.
But Democrats have moved left on economic issues - see e.g. $15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A.
That said, I think there is something here, except the "people who run the democratic party" isn't politicians or oligarchs, it's journalists (or occasionally younger office staffers), who grew up UMC, went to fancy ivy-league schools, and spend too much time fighting culture wars on Twitter. And the things they control aren't so much actual politics as the narrative around politics - you see this a lot with Democratic politicians trying to talk about healthcare and social security, and the media bringing everything back to race and idpol.
It may be significant that the two issues you list "$15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A." are both, at the moment, purely theoretical. Neither has happened. Biden has now explicitly called for a delay on a $15 dollar minimum wage and long ago ruled out backing M4A, explicitly promising to veto it if it passes.
Not saying it won't happen, but if it does it will be after a great deal of delay.
You may be surprised to hear that FL, land of conservative rubes and yahoos, passed an amendment last election instituting a statewide minimum wage of 15/hr by 2026, I believe it is, with more than 60% approval. The republicansin the state legislature concerned primarily with corporate profits would never have approved this. We'll see what happens. Medical Marijuana was approved here a few years ago in the same process, but the state found a way to delay or prevent it's implementation.
I'm not sure a $15 dollar minimum wage affects too many democratic voters? I'm pretty sure I haven't taken advantage of any labor that was less than that in the last year. Lots of poor people take advantage of low income labor by shopping at Walmart or such but not really welathy professionals. And my sense is that employers of people at less than $15 tend to vote Republican but employers of wealthy professionals tend to vote Democrat.
Ignoring the last year being COVID, would you have eaten at any restaurants that aren't fine dining? Bought food from a grocery store? Those are both minimum wage jobs.
I've been ordering out so not counting waiters. Probably there are dishwashers I should have included? I've been doing a lot of ordering things online through Amazone but I have actually used a CVS so that's actually probably another less than $15 job. Still, not too many of them.
What planet are you from? A very large percentage of democratic voters are dirt poor. And Walmart gets the gov't to pay the expenses of its neglected work force though food stamps and medicaid and so forth. An argument for the $15 wage is that this would greatly reduce the need for gov't programs due to this scam Walmart currently runs agains the American people.
That assumes the raising the cost of low-skill labor has no significant effect on how much of it is hired, which is unlikely. If half the minimum wage workers get a raise and half become unemployed, surely the need for government programs goes up, not down.
Walmart, or MacDonald's, or any other employer faces tradeoffs. Capital can substitute for labor — consider the increasing use of self-service checkout lanes. Skilled labor can substitute for unskilled labor. Walmart uses unskilled labor instead of alternative inputs if and only if doing it that way costs less.
The same is true between firms and products — if MacDonalds gets more expensive because it has a lot of workers whose wages have been pushed up, that may mean people buy more TV dinners and fewer Big Macs.
What you observe at any instant is the solution to an elaborate optimization problem. It's natural to assume that if one of the factors changes, everything else stays the same, but that isn't what happens.
To add to Dr. Friedman: regardless of whether Walmart can replace a worker with a machine, they can and will fire a worker if they can no longer employ that worker profitably. If you hire someone for $11 an hour and get labor out of them that is worth $14 dollars to you then that's great: if you suddenly have to pay them $14+ dollars an hour then you're just losing money on the transaction. And who goes through all the trouble of hiring someone to lose money?
I think what you mean is that Walmart cannot operate as large a business (in terms of stores, amount of goods sold, etc) if they fire half their workers. Which is true: that just means they'll have to scale back if they can't employ them profitably.
Americans support M4A consistently at about 60% or above. It is no longer a partisan issue, if it ever was. It's the Insurance industry lobbyists against the American people. The congresspeople of both parties simply do as their told by the lobbyists to thwart the will of the American people. From Obama onward DNC pics promised it in some form then reneged once in office.
This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost. Trying to make a version of it that penciled out (which required raising taxes and limiting coverage) sunk Warren in the democratic primary.
The polls are consistent on this -- it isn't just democrats, it's everyone. The poor aren't concerned about having to pay more in taxes, and plenty of studies show how much cheaper single payer is than the mess we have now.
> This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost.
Which is ironic, because the US already spends more per capita on health care than any other country. Arguably, having a single payer conveys more bargaining power to negotiate lower bulk pricing, so Americans would probably end up spending much less overall under M4A.
So there's a case to be made that it could help (I do support some form of M4A overall), but I doubt it would bring American costs anywhere close to in line with other countries' - there are a lot of other reasons US healthcare is expensive. Some of those are general cost-disease reasons (which implies we shouldn't expect M4A to significantly lower prices), but others might be due to the issue where the US government has massive spending for worse results compared to other rich countries (see e.g. transit, infrastructure, education), which implies that socializing healthcare could potentially make it more expensive overall (because the US government is bad at cost control). The Sanders plan specifically seems to go that way - it differed from other government-provided healthcare plans in that it basically planned to cover everything for everyone (for comparison, the NHS only covers things that fall below their Pound/QALY threshold).
I'm Canadian, so I'm well aware that socialized medicine typically doesn't and shouldn't cover literally everything, but from my understanding, Medicare already doesn't cover everything, so M4A wouldn't either. I think Americans would be happy with M4A that doesn't extend coverage any further, with the option to supplement insurance with a private insurer.
I think one of the reasons the US government is bad at cost control is because they try to implement half-assed pseudo-market "solutions" in an effort to appease numerous special interests rather and give the illusion of choice, rather than simply and directly implementing what makes sense (too much money in politics).
So they could do a simple but bad M4A where all of the existing insurance companies continue operating as-is, and they just bill the government for standard coverage. That would be horrendous and I agree, it probably wouldn't cut costs, because the unnecessary bureaucracy is still there and the pricing is not standardized.
Doing it right means bargaining with the hospitals to establish standardized pricing for what's covered (all emergency care should be covered), and creating an independent agency to pay the bills issued by hospitals.
I can't imagine this wouldn't cut costs, because it eliminates all of the bureaucratic and administrative red tape, hospitals can no longer just make up a bill for whatever they think you'll be able to pay to make up for shortfalls due to non-payers and no need for collection agencies, and negotiated bulk rates would be cheaper.
But I share your skepticism that the any administration for the past 20 years, including the current one, would actually be effective at achieving such an outcome.
Democratic donors are left of Democratic voters on economic issues too.
The idea that political elites could or would put down otherwise popular ideas because they would lose out on money falls apart as soon as you notice that politics doesn't pay very well. Almost everyone in politics could make more money doing something else. Senators don't rent out dilapidated townhouses in DC to share because they're in it for the money - it's because actually care about some issues, institutions, or have an egomaniacal need for the validation that comes with winning elections and having titles next to their names.
But it's almost never about the money. If money rules politics, immigration policy would look much better than it actually does.
Also, is this Democratic donors in total (which would include small donors- including the enthusiastic Berniecrat donors) or is it Democratic donors *weighted by size of contribution*? When people talk about donors in this context, they surely mean people who make donations, at minimum, in the tens of thousands- really at least the hundreds of thousands.
The problem is- unless I'm misreading- it doesn't seem to be weighted by contribution size. When people talk about the donor class in this context they're really talking about the small portion of the donor class whose contributions are so individually significant as to give them a palpable degree of power as an individual or corporation over politicians.
This feels like cheating, but it's a strong data point: Sanders vastly outraised Biden in the primary running to his economic left. Sanders is an overwhelming economically-oriented candidate, and pretty close to Biden on social issues.
Biden nearly went broke in the primary, and none of the economic moderates came close to Sanders in fundraising - in number or total raised.
I think when people talk about donors in this context, they're primarily talking about big players who make very large donations with specific policy strings attached- or at least on a money for access basis. Small donors are a wrinkle in this narrative, but they're relatively new, and so their effects have been modest so far, plus they'll never have the leverage of the big donors, because their money is spread out between far more heads, making it harder to bargain.
But the even more decisive argument is that Bernie lost. For that reason, his small donors are effectively cut out of influence.
So I think it's sensible to talk about a "donor class" re: the dems that doesn't include Bernie's small donors.
Doesn't this seem like a just-so story? If Bernie won, it would have proven how important money is. But since he lost, it just proves that only some kinds of money matter. Are there any possible observations that would cause you to update in the direction of money not being very important?
I don't think it's at all clear that donor money is important- I'm very open to the possibility that it's other factors that discipline politicians. Personally I'm probably 50/50 on it. I just think that if we're going to grapple with the idea that it is important, that hypothesis is usually focused on a very specific sort of donor- the kind of donor that has conversations with politicians in smoke filled rooms.
When people talk about "donors", they often blur the lines between whether they are talking about the small number of megadonors that fund the SuperPACs, or the large number of small-dollar donors that fund the parties. I'm not sure that one of those groups gives more money in total.
Also, there's a specific set of issues that Democratic megadonors are right of partisan activists on, but on most issues they are still left of the median Democratic voter (but not left of the median Democratic small donor).
The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly.
The "Neutral vs. Conservative" post was more about the dynamic, and how the lack of neutrality of the mainstream institution plays into things. Klein's argument (I imagine) is more about the fact that this pattern exists. (Klein maybe also puts more of the responsibility on the rightward offshoots rather than the left-neutral institutions which inspire them, but that seems like a secondary question).
"The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly."
Not sure how true that is anymore in present year. Fox started the open tribalization of media outlets, sure, but when "neutral" outlets run lines like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" amid a backdrop of burning buildings and "antifa movement seeks peace through violence", we're pretty squarely in the realm of reality-distorting partisanship, not just neutrality with some preference for one political camp.
It's not a huge issue with the article, but the impression I got on the first read through was that at the start of part 3 you were only linking Ezra Klein's article as an offhand reference, as you often do. So I did not expect the next paragraph to be outlining what Klein said in that article instead of his book stance, which you had been almost solely quoting him on up to that point. It took me until most of the way through the paragraph to realize my misreading, thinking at first that you were going to detail Klein's argument for something to the effect of "Polarization causes problems but the alternative is so much worse."
I like Ezra Klein, but this sounds a bit like "The problem is that the outgroup is too polarized."
I guess there's no such thing as a completely objective and neutral analysis of this stuff though, so I'll probably still read and enjoy the book, and just price in the fact that he's a Democrat to my own biased interpretation of it.
That is pretty close to what he's saying, modulo s/too polarized/responsible for the current polarization, and fwiw I think he's more right than wrong. I think it's dangerous to use pattern-matching to dismiss "the problem is that my outgroup is acting badly" without consist the object-level issue - many conflicts are not six of one and half a dozen of the other.
"One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be. "
If anything, I think causality might flow the other way, if there's any relationship at all. IIRC, Fox is by far the newest of the bunch; all the others have been around for many decades, and Fox filled in a gap starting in the 90s by being the only one that wasn't extremely liberal. (Perhaps part of the polarization story should include why all the major news networks were liberal by that point in time! Were they always that way? Did they follow Congress, but precede the public? Has media trust decreased over time? My impression is yes, but I don't know, but it might be relevant.) I think the most likely explanation is really "there aren't enough conservatives who want to go into journalism to support more major networks."
(If you're interested in questions of media bias, I recommend the book Left Turn by Time Groseclose).
But also, I would want to see data indicating Republicans actually are less ideologically diverse before accepting that there is anything to explain. I don't trust Klein's impression, since Republicans are his outgroup, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity exists. Speaking of, you discussed party identity, but perceptions about the other party might be more important than the reality: http://gsood.com/research/papers/partisanComposition.pdf
That paper suggests perhaps the easiest intervention for decreasing polarization, namely literally just tell the truth about both parties: "When provided information about the out-party’s actual composition, partisans come to see its supporters as less extreme and feel less socially distant from them."
Moreover, if journalistic bias contributed to popular polarization, could academic bias have done the same? Academia is probably even more liberal than journalism (e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264003803_Political_Diversity_Will_Improve_Social_Psychological_Science) and it looks largely like liberals and leftists pushing conservatives out rather than conservatives choosing to leave. Much is made of the "decline of trust in expertise" but if major institutions are increasingly biased, isn't distrust a logical reaction?
On the question of ideological diversity within the parties ... . Throughout my lifetime, libertarians have tended to identify as Republican, although less so recently. Insofar as the Republican party had an ideology, it was fusionist, a hybrid of libertarian support for laissez-faire and conservative support for traditional values. I'm not sure the post-Civil Rights Act Democratic party contained as sharp a split.
Perhaps the polarization was mostly kicked off by the Democrats finally stepping on a couple of middle Americas sacred cows and middle America deciding to dig in. Specifically in regards to Christian moral values being the guiding factor in our cultural/political norms and American patriotism/nationalism/exceptionalism no longer being a widely accepted truth. That split seems to more or less have solidified around 2005 with the Iraq war and lgbt issues being a couple of the main splitting points.
I'm honestly surprised that you missed two related, enormous, obvious-in-retrospect things:
1. Polarization among people tracks with the development of a right wing ecosystem, starting with talk radio in the 90s, then Fox, up through today. This ecosystem, in particular Fox, were explicitly built to cultivate a monolithic partisan voting block. It worked and continues to work. The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
2. The GOP didn't get more *ideologically* extreme, but more *institutionally* extreme - or rather, anti-institutionally. The GOP of 20 years ago would have balked at sending out checks, but Trump backed it. Third is because the GOP is ideologically rudderless, and not really more conservative than it used to be. The old GOP also wouldn't have encouraged an angry mob to attack the capitol by perpetuating bald-faced lies about election fraud. This is the dimension on which the GOP has gotten much more extreme - dangerously so, as Klein correctly points out.
The institutional degradation under Trump was genuinely new and concerning, along a dimension completely divorced from liberalism/conservatism. If that's the only lens you look at things through, you're missing most of the story.
How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Also, what are your thoughts on my claim that polarization was mostly driven by Democrats going further left while Republicans stayed the same? And if it's true, what would that look like in the absence of FOX News? The Democrats go just as far left as they did, but the Republicans come with them and so maintain a lack of polarization? Or would the absence of FOX somehow have prevented the Democrats from going left?
(pasting to reply to the still-existing version of this comment)
You're still thinking about this in ideological terms. I don't know what happens to the party platforms in that alternate universe, but I'm fairly confident that the disagreements focus more on policy and less on the fundamental nature of reality, and consequently don't result in a level of reality-disconnect that leads to a large crowd taking control of the Capitol in an attempted coup because they think the election was stolen.
Guess: Median voter theorem suggests that the absence of a GOP monoculture means there are more conservative voices in mainstream media that are incentivized to appeal to a broad audience instead of a radicalizing subculture that's tuned out mainstream sources, while mainstream sources are still incentivized to appeal to conservatives as much as they can. So that would tend to suggest that at least some conservative ideas would fare better than they have and ideas on the left would get more (sane) pushback than they have in the world where the GOP exists in a parallel media reality.
Do you mean to suggest that this amplification is taking an under-appreciated fact and bringing it to light, or taking an appropriately-appreciated fact and making it seem bigger than it is?
Not the OP, but I'm pretty skeptical of it being the Democrats moving left that generated polarization. There are two things that might be measures of how polarized a group is:
* the physical party platforms, which mostly doesn't matter
* how much your people hate the other people, which matters a lot
What Fox and talk-radio made widespread was the fomenting of targeted hatred at Democrats, rather than any particular voting bloc. In an era of bipartisan news, people still hated people, but hatred was more based around stereotypes, or local issues, or race or ethnicity. Now you just hear about all the awful actions of either "libtards" or "trumpies" and that's that.
You haven't dealt with the Right's attack on empiricism. Or the market forces there. It's the line from hpmor about telling one lie and the truth ever after being your enemy.
Take something like global warming. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive. Two parties should have tracked eachother on this. There was some policy dispute... but the Republican party mostly went to the "global warming is plot by grant hungry scientists and evil globalists in support of agenda 21). That's not.... "The right stayed in the same place". Nor does it contend with how right wing media served the Republican donor class.
Walter Cronkite didn't have Phillip Morris on to promote cigarette use... Therefore he's a raging liberal.
The directionality goes the other way.
"Tune in to hannity where we interview a scientist who says that he was told to publish climate research because he was told that it would make Christians cry."
This is cherry picking. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive that different gender outcomes are due to a strong gendered difference in interests.
Yet even saying that among leftists is going to get you branded as a hateful person.
>How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Well, for starters, there is the fact that one of them happened before the other: Fox News started in 1996, and you've argued the polarization of regular people started in the early 2000s.
> How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
I don't have a test but perhaps a mechanism.
You already told the story of how local news (& politics) was subsumed into local news (and politics). When Kansas had their own newspapers & TV stations, they were able to tailor their stories to local populations and could be as conservative as they needed to be. As those local media outlet disappeared (because of the internet & cable TV), there was a need for a national, conservative media outlet and Fox filled it.
Someone else up-thread addressed the point that the culture all over the western world has been moving left on (e.g.) SSM, healthcare and a host of other cultural issues for decades. Perhaps we should be measuring the movement of progressives and conservatives relative to that current rather than to where they each were 50 years ago. The cultural river has flowed since then.
>The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. If you disagree w/ the American right on 90% and agree on 10%, they will invite you to come learn more.
That common observation predicts that Biden wouldn't have had a chance in the primary and Sinema and Manchin shouldn't exist. It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. The common observation definitely implies that the most popular and widely respected leader of the blue tribe wouldn't go on record telling people to cut out the woke scolding, but Obama did just that.
This "common observation" is wrong because it extrapolates from the most obnoxious people on twitter, which is not real life. Everyone's takes will improve when they recognize that the social dynamics of Twitter, while real and important, only describe a small part of the world.
You're mostly answering a different question here. It's perfectly coherent to say that the American left will ostracize you for dissent, *and* that dissent wins when we use a secret ballot. As for Obama, he's among a very small number of people who've been able to get away with saying stuff like this, and they've also been going for his blood recently.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter" seem to be having a substantial influence on Biden's admin: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression-fc4 Twitter is the social media that comes closest to being our "public square", where politicians, academics, company founders etc. spend unhealthy amounts of their free time posting under their real name. It is very much not the case that "what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter", and a quick look at recent US history confirms that.
There's also the question of how stable this situation will be. Have you seen any of Christopher F. Rufo's reporting on critical theory trainings in elementary schools and places of employment? It could be that the "dissent wins at the ballot box" thing is mostly a function of an older generation that was raised on different values. This stuff was previously dismissed as "just crazy college students", but those college students are graduating and exerting major influence on their workplaces etc. What do you think the endgame looks like? Overall your objection seems a bit like saying "global warming isn't a problem because the Earth hasn't warmed up very much yet".
Odd to say the right isn't keen on punishing people who agree on 90% of issues, since literally in the last week they've been voting on whether to expel one of their congressional leadership who agrees on everything except the question of if Trump should be impeached. And were threatening to kill the literal vice president, of their party, because he didn't agree the election was stolen.
It sounds like you're saying that in your personal experience you enjoy hanging out with Republicans more than Democrats.
What does it mean to be "ostracized" from the American left?
Like they're not inviting you to dinner parties or something? Or they post mean twitter comments at you?
The current governing Democrats includes a pretty wide range of viewpoints, from maybe AOC on the left to the more centrist representatives from swing states. and they're working together i guess without ostracizing each other.
If you mean in terms of the workplace or something, then yes i think both the left and right often make work decisions informed by politics, religion, and other personal beliefs. Like firing someone who refuses to use a colleagues' preferred pronouns on the left, or a church group refusing to hire Lesbian or even just female preachers on the right.
You didn't mention it in this review, but does Klein discuss the transition from delegates picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms to open-primary systems where every step is determined by the popular vote? To my eye, one of the primary drivers of polarization has been politicians becoming more afraid of primary elections than general elections.
I actually have no idea how this happens in other countries. How do the UK/Commonwealth parliamentary systems decide who stands in West Eastershire or whatever?
In New Zealand, the majority of politicians get there through the party list, which means that they personally did not receive the votes as a candidate but their party did, and they are chosen by the party to fill the seat. I don't think there is a particular way parties have to construct that list, in practice most parties do it differently, but parties have very low membership in New Zealand so it's a lot more akin to the closed door agreements than a public contest.
The UK Labour party famously had a change in leadership selection procedures in 2014, from unions and parliament having 2/3 of the vote to having none of the vote, which promptly led to Jeremy Corbyn being selected leader:
But it's not clear that the new system caused anything, because Corbyn won by so many votes that he would have won under the old system, or at least come close, depending on assumptions about new voters. You might suppose that voters didn't know that and were afraid of "throwing away their votes," but the previous system was a ranked choice system with little cost of expressive voting for the token left-wing candidate. Something weird happened and I think many people are too quick to draw a lesson from it.
(Incidentally, you could say that unions lost their special votes, but you could also say that they were promoted from half votes to full.)
In the UK, the various parties have very different systems for choosing their leaders.
In the Labour Party, the electorate includes all members of the party or of affiliated unions. Around half a million votes were cast in last year's leadership election. The Lib Dems have a similar system.
By contrast, Conservative MPs hold most of the power. Conservative party leaders are chosen by multiple elimination rounds by MPs only until there are only two candidates remaining. All party members vote in the final round but, even then, the conservative party is much small and only 140,000 voted in the last leadership election.
Crucially, the four biggest parties in England require that their leader be a member of Parliament so you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Leader of your party the way that Trump and Sanders did.
The way that parties choose local candidates has changed a lot in recent years. It used to be that Conservative candidates for parliament were chosen by local conservative parties but the rules were changed to require that candidates be selected from a central approved list.
Labour had this rule until recently but now gives local parties more autonomy.
Again, you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Labour candidate for East Westchester.
In the UK although the candidates are chosen by the parties, The Party as an organization is much more powerful. The US is fairly unusual among developed countries in how candidates raise a huge amount of personal funding and run on personal brands.
Parties as institutions have more incentive to be moderate than individual candidates, because they need to win with the general electorate. So the party being more powerful means you tend to get more moderate policies, and the successful politicans are mostly the ones who buy into them.
Other European countries are broadly similar in that respect
The U.S. was fairly polarized pre-1920s, which was definitely still the smoke-filled rooms era. Presidential candidates George McGovern and Jimmy Carter weren't in a polarized era, but Mitt Romney was.
McGovern and Carter were the two candidates that took advantage of the new party primary system, and are often seen as major left outliers from the party at the time, because of their knowledge of how to run under the new system.
Klein does discuss it (unfortunately my copy of his book is at the office so I can’t cite chapter and verse). But it is clear that he thinks the old smoke-filled rooms with party stalwarts picking candidates is better than the primary system. Partly this is because the only voters who turn out for primaries are hyperpartisans, a fact which leads them to vote for more extreme candidates.
with some GOP commentators who claimed that [around t=23 min] a) From 1988 onwards, the winner of almost every Republican primary has been someone who assembled a coalition from the center and left of the party, b) Trump was most supported in the 2016 primaries by voters who described themselves as "somewhat conservative" or "moderate." I don't know what to make of this - on the one hand it sounds like primaries are having a moderating influence, but on the other if "moderating" means Trump gets elected than that's not very reassuring...
I can't put much credence in a paper published in 2010, because 2010 was the start of the big Tea Party wave in which an unprecedented *three* incumbent Republican Senators and dozens of representatives were knocked out in the primaries, and culminating in 2014 when they took down the party's number two House leader and heir apparent to Boehner. This in turn cemented a shift among the GOP from Clinton-Gingrich deal-cutting to white-knuckle obstructionism because any compromise was seen as selling out. Perhaps it's open primaries combined with some other factor that caused them to be an actual threat as opposed to incumbents mostly cruising until then.
A bunch of people are replying to my comment as though it is about Trump and responding with observations about Presidential primaries, but it's not. Trump's "radicalism" was largely a matter of affect and disregard for process. He ended up signing pretty much every bill Congress put in front of him and only really vetoed restrictions on Gulf arms sales. The real difference has been seen in Congress.
hi everyone. i'm a "it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium" guy. so i just wanted to chime in to say: i think it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium.
it's a good question. i sort of implied the "it" here to be "polarization", but i guess i'm also including "dysfunction due to polarization". if we really have the same level of "affective polarization" now as sweden or norway have had for a long time, why does it seem like their governments work way better? i think "because proportional systems result in centrist reform rather than pendulum swings" is pretty plausible.
but i could also make up a bunch of ad hoc forces that previously kept polarization in check that are now gone, like, the US used to have lots of powerful international enemies and now it doesn't. after all, one of the few things democrats and republicans can agree on now is that china is bad.
The Dixiecrat thing still seems like a reasonable hypothesis: the system we have always trends towards polarization, and there was a big weird thing happening that fought that trend for a few decades.
This exactly. The issue seems to me, and it's surreal that no one else mentioned this, the US only allows two parties to exist. Negative partisanship only works when they're are exactly two options. On the graph showing international polarization trends, consider that most other countries have more political parties -- I know that Germany and NZ with MMP certainly do, and the UK does as well.
(This doesn't explain any of the historical change in the US, so please take it as more prescriptive than descriptive).
because if you go with prop rep, you get too many parties, worse polarization, and extremists that have their own parties, out of control from the center. Two parties at least should tend to keep the extremists under control
That's only if you use proportional representation. Use range voting or approval voting, which eliminate spoilers, and you get multiple parties without it. Also, the most moderate candidate tends to win in those systems.
idk, should i really believe this? in the US, the republicans have obviously done a terrible job of keeping extremists under control. when i think of "countries that spun out of control because of proportional representation", where should i be thinking of if not all the stable european countries using it right now?
Several European countries now have 10-25% of their elected representatives from nationalist parties (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006). This is enough to produce significant influence when they enter into a 51% coalition government. Also, Brexit. From the other side, most of Europe was much quicker to adopt socialism during the Cold War.
I'm not sure how Brexit is relevant? It was passed by popular referendum in a country without proportional representation.
Part of the benefit of a multi-party system is that you aren't forced into a coalition on one side or the other of the spectrum. AfD may have 13% of the vote in Germany, but the center-right CDU forms a coalition with the center-left SPD instead. Similarly, the conservative government of Austria is currently in coalition with the Greens, keeping the nationalist FPO out of power.
I tried to check on a bunch of other countries listed in that link, and got sucked down a rabbit hole of trying to understand idiosyncrasies on other country's political spectrums. Suffice it to say, sometimes the center-right forms a coalition with the far-right, sometimes they don't.
This seems superior to me to what happened in the US, where a populist very few intuitional Republicans supported got the nomination and won, becoming the leader of a majority party. It's hard to imagine this happening if a Trump-populist party had to compete with / form a coalition with a christian democrat party.
The UK uses proportional representation. The vote may have been a referendum, but the voting system obviously affects the country's politics.
The problem with PR is that it is often the case that the two centrist parties together don't break 50%, causing all possible coalitions to include an extremist party on one side or the other. You can easily get dangerous results like 22% far right, 29% center right, 20% center left, 29% far left. Then the center right has to choose between far right and far left, and has the obvious disincentive to choose the far left which allows the far right to exercise outsized influence.
Whereas Trump was a brash, arrogant liar who was pretty objectionable as a human being but from a policy perspective did a lot of largely boring mainstream Republican things like enforce existing immigration laws and try to promote domestic industry. There was plenty of room for reasoned disagreement but despite the hyperbole it was hardly concentration camps and Jim Crow.
Moreover, the point isn't that the US status quo is ideal but rather that we should use range voting or approval voting instead of PR. I don't think Trump wins an election with range voting.
Duverger's law is false. It's a theoretical argument, but the conclusion is only true in the USA. Lots of countries have FPTP and all the rest have third parties (non-geographic). I don't know how they manage it.
I'm not American, but the poetical story I always told myself is that Americans are fighting themselves after they lost the things they fought for together. To me, it seems that over the past 50 years Americans cared about lots of cool things like spreading democracy and capitalism, and now they only care about dealing with local problems. And who causes all of the local problems? The other party.
And this isn't a chicken and egg thing. Everyone seems to say Americans care about local issues now because of Polarization. I think it is very clearly the opposite, Americans are polarized because they don't clearly perceive any external threats to themselves (which bdw, America looks like it has a ton of external threats it should be concerning itself with).
I think both parties are worried about what Russia and China are doing, but we're filtering that concern through partisanship: The other party are shills for a hostile foreign power!
There's been an interesting mitosis effect where the US and USSR were allies against Nazi Germany but then turned on each other during the Cold War. Dems and GOP were allies against the USSR but turned on each other after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This is my working hypothesis as well. The end of the Cold War removed the main constraint that was suppressing polarization. The specific manner in and rate at which it reemerged were not easy to predict, but I'd claim that its reemergence was predictable.
I am cautiously optimistic that, if China does not change in ways that make it a worthy successor to the US on the international stage, it will unite enough Americans against it.
I think you're missing a crucial point with the "Republicans moving further right vs Democrats moving further left" issue, which is the social versus economic split. I don't have the fancy data to support this, but if you look at social issues (such as gay marriage or race equality), I don't think many people would say that Democrats haven't moved further left. However, if you look at issues like reducing poverty, increasing labor laws, etc, you'll see a very different view. In the into the 1970s, both parties often supported increasing social security (Truman created Social Security), labor rights (Nixon introduced OSHA), nationalized healthcare (Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid), the minimum wage, and more. George H.W. Bush signed a tax hike while every Republican president since has been in favor of tax cuts. Right now, Democrats support continuing those changes while Republicans generally prefer to go back on those changes.
To clarify a bit, I think it's about the framing of an "issue." If the issue is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats generally agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no." If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no."
Republicans have stayed at the same place, while Democrats have stayed at the same velocity.
>I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People. Here he makes all of the impassioned and convincing arguments he avoided in his book
Regarding how Ezra has different styles in the book and elsewhere, he said in a podcast 'I only put things in the book that I think I could prove...this is my first book and I wanted it to be very grounded. So there are things that I think are true but cannot really prove it, so they did not go in the book'. It is at 19:40 in episode 'Your Questions Answered'. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-questions-answered/id1081584611?i=1000479525981
Robert Putnam taught us that social capital (i.e. the network of relationships among people, both formal and informal) has been dropping in the United States for 75 years across all incomes, education levels, and demographics. This has led to decreases in social trust, cooperation norms, and a sense of shared identity. It is not hard to believe that this alienation of the American people from each other is leading to higher degrees of polarization. The specifics that Klein talks about certainly are part of the question, but it all sits in a much broader context.
I want to chime in on the idea of polarisation being some kind of lynchpin of problems, that if we fix everything would become a lot easier. I live in New Zealand, which is less polarised than the USA (you can see that in the graphs above). But despite this, our government (whether red or blue) has been strikingly unable to do anything to solve a number of the big problems the country faces. NZ has the worst housing costs in the developed world, one of the lowest productivities in the developed world and has so far done almost nothing to reduce our carbon emissions despite having a substantial proportion of our capital and people deployed in areas threatened by flooding and sea level rise. We're going in backwards in education levels, too. This seems inconsistent with the idea that if polarisation were reduced, the USA would find a way to solve its problems (but then again, maybe aside from the polarisation the USA otherwise has very good institutions? I'm not sure).
I'm surprised to hear that. NZ has a reputation in the US as a very well-governed country, though I can't remember how much of that comes from the coronavirus response.
People are often surprised about areas where New Zealand isn't doing well. For whatever reason, our reputation continues to punch above our weight. I'll absolutely grant that our coronavirus response was very good. Most politically inclined people I know here sort of agree that we've been very good at handling sudden emergencies, but relatively poor at dealing with long, chronic problems.
In some ways we have the opposite problem to the USA in that we have a large group of swing voters that genuinely do switch from one major party to the other election to election, and that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are. This has made it difficult to make the kind of changes that would reduce rent and housing costs, reduce carbon emissions etc.
New Zealand's COVID response succeeded through good luck far more than good management. Case in point, the latest outbreak in Australia is due to the fact that they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice. Had we had a higher population and been less isolated we would have been in the same boat as everywhere else.
Australia has had a very good pandemic by the standards of almost everywhere but NZ, and the latest quarantine-hotel outbreak currently consists of 5 people plus the family of 3 who seem to have been the source. So 'no better than Australia', even if true (which it doesn't seem to be; NZ showed more willingness to lock down hard and early, which clearly paid off) wouldn't be all that bad.
> they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice.
That quote is about inadequate testing of staff, not of quarantinees. I believe the latter are tested twice in most parts of Australia; the current debate is over whether to follow the lead of one state which recently added a test on day 16, i.e. two days after release.
> that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are.
I see a lot of people becoming more conservative due to the dysfunction of government. For example, a lot of Dutch people are in favor of green energy, but don't want wood burning plants that are very dirty and that don't achieve a reduction of greenhouse emissions in the medium term, even though the treaties and such say that we need to achieve a reduction fairly soon.
The government also claims that moving to electricity is 'green,' regardless of how that electricity is produced, which is obviously wrong.
The article actually claims the opposite. It claims that when most electricity comes from coal, like in Poland, EVs are more polluting. It argues that EVs are cleaner when a high enough percentage of the electricity comes from renewables.
However, the article makes a very common error.
It assumes that the emissions caused by EVs can be calculated by looking at the average carbon emission of creating electricity. However, you actually have to look at the emissions caused by the production of the additional electricity which is used by moving to EVs.
There is widespread agreement by experts/scientists that we cannot reasonably scale wind and solar beyond a certain point. In the absence of a electricity storage breakthrough (or such), we can probably only increase the percentage of no/low-emission electricity by building more nuclear plants, but the West, the trend seems to be to get rid of existing nuclear plants, rather than build new ones (if we can even still do that, with the current level of regulations).
So there is a pretty good chance that the extra electricity used by EVs, comes from coal plants. For example, right now in Germany, coal plant capacity is kept in reserve to match supply to demand. Every extra EV that goes on the road in Germany, will cause more electricity to be generated with coal plants.
Not something I've seen in NZ, mostly people here are becoming more radical due to worsening personal situations, but of course that could just be my bubble. I didn't notice it when I lived in NL either, but I wasn't very plugged into the politics there at all!
Most overseas coverage of New Zealand is a form of romanticism. Obviously it depends on the metrics you choose, but there aren't really grounds for holding up New Zealand as a poster child for good governance. On the contrary, our unicameral parliament allows politicians to follow extremely poor process when it suits them. In the last term of parliament, one minor party in government was effectively granted a $3b pork barrel fund.
New Zealand has some structural advantages in this area over the US. In particular, local government has much less power:
(a) Local government does not have a general power of competence, i.e., it can only regulate on any given subject if the central government has explicitly granted it the power to do so.
(b) In particular, local government does not have the power of eminent domain.
(c) The police are run by the central government, not local government.
(d) Schools are run by the central government, not local government.
My gut feeling is that it also helps to not have a separate layer of state government, but I'm not sure that would work for a big nation.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that New Zealand is badly governed.
Enjoyed the post, minor nitpick, you refer to both Bill and Hilary Clinton as Clinton in the same paragraph, and it's a little confusing.
Thoughts.
I think liberal, conservative, and polarized are terms that are all used in unclear ways here. For example the graph linked to in the twitter post reads to me as Democrats have become more Democraty than Republicans have become Republicany. The issues in the graph, for the most part, don't have an accepted coherent philosophy unifying them, other than Republicans take one side of the issue, and Democrats take the other. Reading the graph this way fits with the Democratic narrative that most Americans agree with the Democratic position on most issues:
So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular. In this respect the Republican party is more extreme because it differs more from the median American position.
The other graphs also make me wonder. Does it make sense to measure historic liberal and conservative values of various parties, if the hot issues of the time were different, or the opposite positions on said issues were considered progressive? As an example I challenge you to consistently map US foreign policy to liberal or conservative over US history.
Along a similar set of lines I wonder what is being measured by the polarization over history graphs. Is it measuring difference in opinion or willingness to cooperate? Difference in opinion probably reduces the likely hood of cooperation, but it is not sufficient. Both parties may want to pass infrastructure reform, but are unwilling to make minor concessions lest their opponents get a policy win. Regardless of how polarization is measured, I think it's fair to say that we are not at a polarization high point considering we have not had any duels or canings on congress recently.
I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization since this is a common talking point in Vox among other places.
People point out gerrymandering as a cause of polarization because it negates the need for a representative to appeal to the median voter. In this respect you could consider the senate gerrymandered as well because Republicans hold a fundamental advantage in the senate map as well.
"In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists."
I don't really understand what this means. What does extreme mean? I think you have to define along the lines of the overton window, in which case I would say that Democrats and republicans are roughly symmetrical in how extreme they are, but Republicans have a larger portion of extremists. In other words an extremists is just someone who hasn't gone mainstream yet.
"Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump."
If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats. Even if you are talking about democrats, I don't see how the electoral college is the correct metric in the context of this conversation.
"If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats."
Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is. Medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases are very popular, while handing out drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants and affirmative action are not.
I should note that I don't know that I buy the democratic narrative. I haven't looked into it enough to decide, but I disagree with you that "Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is". Polling exists and is very useful for this kind of thing. Yes people can ask biased questions and it's hard for a layman to interpret what the results mean, but it's far better than elections for determining how popular a policy is. Elections carry so much more baggage such as the candidates who are running, and most voters probably don't even know all of the positions their candidates have.
> Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes. Democrat positions - or at least Biden compared to Trump - are more popular among voters.
Oh please. Trump hatred, a deranged of off-the-rails extremism if there ever was one, got Biden installed. He had no policy position other than Orange Man Bad and He's Killing Us!
Look at the presidential elections since 1990 then - Democrats won the popular vote in all of them except for 2004, and that was at the peak of Iraq and with an incumbent president.
Joe Biden won the electoral college 306 to 232. Trump won the electoral college by 304 to 227. Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes, a 4.5% differential. Trump lost the popular vote by around 3 million, a 2.2% differential. It seems to me that using the popular vote as a proxy for popularity isn't unwarranted.
The gerrymandering-polarization narrative never really made sense. The Republicans got to draw a lot of districts following the 2010 census, and supposedly their own gerrymandering made them extreme. But Republican gerrymandering means cramming Democrats into a few super-blue districts and spreading Republicans across numerous slightly-red districts. But you'd think slightly-red districts would elect moderate Republicans.
Congressmen aren't tailoring the districts so as to have a competitive election they just barely win, they want to have an competitive election they just barely win.
Certainly they build their red districts with a margin of safety to make sure they win even when elasticity goes against them. But still, concentrating the other party's voters and spreading out your own is fundamentally how gerrymandering works.
I don't know the details of real world districts, but consider a state where 60% of the population is a member of your party. If you drew every district to have 60% of the voters be members of your party, you will have gerrymandered the state to grant your party all the representatives with only 60% of the vote, without it ever being close.
"Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
Yes, except if we rewind to 1970, Clinton's positions (at least the economic ones) look moderate and Trump's... well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions, but the Republican Party would look insane and ultra-far-right. Both parties shifted to the right a lot in the 1975-2000 period, and the Democrats starting to swing back left is part of the more recent growth in polarization.
My belief remains that having political differences between parties is a good thing, though I'd distinguish between 'ideological diversity' and 'polarization', because the latter case implies having precisely two poles (/tribes), which *is* a problem but also may be decreasing a bit now (and in any case is the fault of the two-party system).
The economics goes back centuries, it's the view of trade that Adam Smith attacked and Ricardo demolished. Unfortunately, the false version (absolute advantage/favorable balance of payments) is easier to understand than the true version (comparative advantage), and makes a better fit to the political interests of many of those controlling trade policy.
> If you had some limited number of resources, and you wanted to improve (US) politics as much as possible so that the government made better decisions and better served its populace, what would you do?
Lawrence Lessig makes a compelling argument in Republic, Lost (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11814478-republic-lost) that the best way to improve US politics would be reversing Citizens United and getting money out of politics. Because both parties are in such intense competition, they spend all of their time fundraising instead of governing. If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
Voting system reform is far wiser. Implement score voting so the most popular candidate wins, rather than the candidate most popular among the plurality of the plurality. But I oppose democracy and instead support a wise government by superforecasters.
Was US politics doing just fine prior to Citizens United but suddenly got a lot worse after that? Because this polarization trend discussed above preceded that.
I was more making the point that if we could only solve one problem in politics, "money in politics" is more impactful than polarization, and might have a side-effect of decreasing polarization.
I'm saying that if Citizens United had a big impact, shouldn't we be able to see it by comparing what things were like before vs after? Some kind of trend-line test?
> If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
I agree on getting the money out of politics, but I doubt very much they'd stop trying to get voters to hate the other party. When real currency is out the window, votes are the only currency left so it will become a battle over different populist positions with all the same incentives.
Operating on the assumption that "populist" means "popular but useless or harmful", and "good policy" is "popular and helpful", I think that populist positions require advertising (aka money) that you are doing them and that they are working in order to get people to vote for you. Good policy should be self evident with a "are your circumstances better than they were four years ago?" test.
Policies that are unpopular and unhelpful (using public money to build yourself a private waterpark) or unpopular and helpful (force-feeding people vegetables) feel mostly unconnected to how much money political campaigns have to work with since the political incentives are to keep them quiet anyways.
The article about polarization data from 9 countries article doesn't seem to totally back up the idea that the internet/social media isn't to blame. Looking at their raw numbers, instead of their 2nd derivatives, Britain and Australia are roughly equal to the modern day US (which matched my understanding of their political climate), but are shown as having about an unchanging level of polarization over the past 20-30 years.
It could be that one conclusion is that the internet has nothing to do with polarization, but another potential one is that the internet raises polarization up to a certain cap, and other countries were already at that cap and have been even before the internet. Looking at the graphs, only 3 countries show a trend downwards from their current level of polarization, and they are all still (excluding Germany) currently at a level of polarization that roughly equals the US (45).
While this is a more complex explanation and thus goes against Occam's razer, it also seems really unlikely that the internet has nothing to do with polarization. After all, the Loss of geography section seems like it perfectly fits with the internet being to blame.
"That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness."
Republicans are less ideologically uniform in Congress. Probably less ideologically uniform among the general population, too. In both the Democratic and Republican parties, the primary opposition is from the right.
All evidence suggests the American party system (based on the electoral college) naturally tends toward polarization. America depolarized beginning in the 1920s largely because old debates were becoming less relevant, and the 1930s created the left-right ideological axis as the new primary difference between the parties, resulting in depolarization over the next forty years as the old pattern of polarization dissipated. In the 1970s and later, party constituencies became increasingly coherent to match the left-right ideological axis on which issues were debated. Even as late as 1976 you could see a presidential election that wasn't TOO different from that of 1876. No longer.
I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion. A big part of the changing dynamics of the 80s into the early 90s was the complete embrace of the Republican part by evangelicals, along with their re-entry into the political sphere after generations of trying to separate from society. Much of the socially cultural issues that caused deep divisions from 1980-2010 were in that area - abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, flag burning. The weird thing is that seemed to have a delayed effect up through the mid 2000's, when you people started abandoning organized religion, and the Democrats really started to be the party of the youth. This then naturally merged into the racial divisions that were exacerbated by right-wing opposition to Obama as a legitimate president.
I would have liked to see much more discussion in the book about the dimensions and correlations of religious/political polarization in the US. That could explain why we are so different from other WEIRD countries.
Evangelicals weren't especially anti-abortion early on. Catholics (who leaned Democrat at the time) were. They basically captured the intellectual heights of the conservative movement (how many Protestants are on SCOTUS?) and converted evangelicals to their cause.
You're right that evangelicals weren't that anti-abortion early, and until the 1980s they were still holding over a lot of anti-Catholic feeling. But the disappearance of Protestants from the SCOTUS didn't really get going until the late 1990s/2000s.
But the bigger issue stands, in that starting in the 1980s the parties developed a strong religious polarization. And the religious issues tended to drive some of the bitterest division. People weren't screaming about marginal federal income tax rates the way they were about abortion and gay rights. I think there is a part of this story about how certain issues that inspired the deepest division were religious, and that the religious polarization by party intensified that trend.
>> "I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion."
Yes, I also think this is a MAJOR part of the story.
I'd frame it a little differently, though: America used to be united by religion, which set a limit to how far its political divisions could go.
The cultural glue that gave Americans a sense of investment in a set of meta-level norms for resolving political disagreement was the civic religion Will Herberg in the 1950s called Catholic/Protestant/Jew. That religious mainstream has undergone a long, slow collapse, of which we're only now beginning to reap the fruit.
From some folks I've talked to, it seems like the leadership of many organized Christian denominations in the US seems to be much more Left than their followers. So it's possible that the leadership was pro-abortion, but it took a while for the signal from the congregants to get out.
It's also possible that the law-and-order impulse of people recoils against Roe v. Wade, which ultimately is a *terrible* legal opinion, even if I mostly agree with the results.
Many "Mainline" Protestant denominations have leadership that is much more to the left than their followers, but they're hollowing out, while Evangelicals (who have very conservative leadership) stay roughly the same. I don't have the best data on hand right now, but according to Pew in 2007 Mainline Protestants made up 18% of the US population while today they are only 14%, while over the same time period Evangelicals went from 26% to 25%. And in 1970 Mainline Protestants made up 30% of the population! It's been a long steady decline for Mainliner's while Evangelicals are holding out (or at least declining, much, much slower). So while the Mainline Protestant leadership is getting further to the Left, there are fewer of them overall year by year.
This is a good essay that gets to a good place and raises lots of good points, but I'm going to quibble with you on one point and then just point something out, but let's just understand I'm only quibbling on the point, not the overall piece.
OK? Cool.
Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
That's more an observation.
To quibble: I don't agree with you that the GOP is reacting to the craziness of the Dems. I agree the Dems are crazy! But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party.
That was quite crazy too. Not as crazy as now but it was crazy. And it sewed a lot of seeds for today's identity politics, particularly along the sexual faultlines.
In sum, each has brewed their own crazy and they both go way back. Each has also positioned themselves in contrast to the other, as well, though. Both things have happened. History is a mess. Anyway: Moderatism doesn't sell tickets.
And as an aside I've always had a hard time with moderatism on some issues. For example: I want to see a pretty hard ass approach to climate change. The time for moderation has passed. And even if it hasn't passed, if it turns out we go to far, we'll still come out with a nicer, cleaner, more healthy world on the other side of going hardass on it, so it's fine regardless. The utility value of going green is quite high to all even if the threat is overstated.
But I don't think it is.
This feels a little like a digression but I don't think it is. A mushy middle isn't really the answer. Restoring a consensus of nationhood and we all have more of a responsibility to that consensus than we do to political points seems more important.
To your point about an EA of politics: I've long thought crushing gerrymandering would be the best effective altruist solution here. If districts were more politically muddled and primaries were more of a contest we would see a different politics.
Gerrymandering is more important than the money. Usually people get mad when I say that but I suspect this crew won't.
>> "But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party."
Do you remember the "black helicopters"? And SNL's "Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol"? :-)
>>>Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
----
Out of curiousity, have you been to different regions of Germany and spoken to different types of people?
Half the country that is like 40+ years old, grew up in the Soviet Union, and the other half didn't. Some cities like Berlin have far-left ararchist movements that are blockading streets and burning cars when a squat is evicted, other cities are majority catholic and have huge beer festivals. The west and east had different immigrant populations that were arriving from ww2 on, like all the vietnamese in the east, and the turkish guest workers in the west.
I'm not sure why you would assume that farmers would get on perfect with city folks. Its my understanding that a lot of the far right party AFD, has a more rural base.
but yes, Germany is smaller than the US.
To be honest, I've been to about 15 states in the US (i'm Canadian with family there) and sure you're a diverse country, but but not strikingly more so somehow than other countries.
caveat: I'm just responding to your comment, I haven't read Ezra Klein's book or that article in a few months.
The thing that always strikes me about US political polarization is how clean of a rural/urban split it is, where urban areas all over are strongly Democratic and rural areas all over are strongly Republican. When did it start being this way? Do other countries see this same split?
I'm no historian, but wasn't there long migrations of black people, moving north, and out of rural areas into city centers. And then white people moving out of city centers because they didn't want to live near black people?
If that is true (and correct me if its wrong), then I guess its pretty easy to imagine that the white people that moved to suburbs and rural areas because they didn't want to mix with Blacks ended up in the Republican Party. And that conversely the city people were more progressive, also included immigrants from elsewhere and ended up in the Democrats.
But I'm curious about your take, how did the 2000 election drive a rural/urban split?
In Australia we have three parties -- to first approximation the Labor Party is for the city-dwelling poorer-than-median, the Liberal Party is for the city-dwelling richer-than-median, and the National Party is for rural areas. The Liberals and Nationals are in a permanent centre-right coalition.
As a city-dwelling rich(er-than-median) person I find it strange that I have no natural place in US politics. When I first moved to San Francisco I thought it obvious that rich city dwellers should support the right-wing party -- after all, they want to lower our taxes while the other party seems to spend their time talking about how evil we are. I never understood why my fellow rich city-dwelling friends didn't see things the same way.
"I'm not sure I fully understood Klein's explanation of exactly how this happened. After all, since identities are not 100% correlated (ie not all farmers are Protestant and not all city-dwellers are poor), you can't actually do this for the whole population at once. I think Klein would say that these correlations went from kind of random, to the ones that capture the biggest slice of the population."
Two things here:
1) People underestimate how very NOT diverse America was until recently. We were an 85%-90% white country from 1860-1960, and over 90% Christian, so those were not identities that you even could polarize around. There was some slicing and dicing of the various Christian sects (e.g. Catholics overwhelmingly supporting Democrats), but I think that's how this has shifted--the "big" identities have become much more polarized because they've become smaller.
2) Klein sort of misses something in this analysis, which is that polarization can be explained as much by the *erosion* of identity as by the *realignment* of identity. The question of the book is of course "Why are we polarized?" but as you do a good job explaining, the real question is more, "Why did we go from a system where you had conservatives and liberals supporting each party, to one in which conservatives overwhelmingly support Republicans and liberals overwhelmingly support Democrats?" But you could also pose the question as "What kept a bunch of conservative white people in the Democratic Party for so long?" The answer in the South was that the Democratic Party was completely tied up in white Southern identity. In the North it seems to be labor unions, or more broadly that they saw the Democrats as the "working man's party," that kept them in the party. I think the breakdown of the labor movement--and the class consciousness that came with it, not just the material benefits--kept a lot of conservatives in the Democratic Party.
As far as what polarized the parties, I see it as (in chronological order):
1) Civil Rights Act: As you said, this led to the decline of the Democratic Party in the South, essentially pushing conservative white Southerners closer to the GOP)
2) Reagan: He actively campaigned against moderate Republicans before becoming president and strongly pushed the idea that the Republicans should become a conservative party, basically making the conservative wing of the party ascendant
3) Iraq War
4) Obama: I don't think he tried to polarize the country, but he was basically the liberal dream candidate--black, son of an immigrant, intellectual, more dovish than Kerry, Gore, and Clinton--and the conservative nightmare. The 2010 election was basically the end of the conservative Democrat in Congress, and I don't think you can disentangle that from conservatives who had historically voted for Democrats being turned off by Obama.
I actually feel more confident about the Iraq part than the rest. The lead-up to Iraq was not very polarized, but the 2004 election seemed to polarize strongly so that if you were FOR the war, you were absolutely for Bush, and if you were against the war, you were for Kerry. Even though basically all of the pro-war Dems kept their prominent positions in the party, they all had to self-flagellate over their original support for it (and arguably, Iraq is why Obama beat Clinton in '08). That's very different from previous wars, which other than the Civil War seemed to not have a strong partisan division, even when they were unpopular. And that hard line also aligned with some regional polarization and seemed to beget a lot of the "Red State=Jesusland full of hicks trying to shove Bibles down your throat, Blue State=Latte sipping socialists."
It's a great question. I think that--to use my examples--basically by 2000 the realignment caused by the Civil Rights Act and Reagan had taken shape, and then Iraq just solidified it. If you didn't like Bush in 2000, you HATED him in 2004.
I don't know, it's true the country was 85-90% white by today's standards, but back then the different European ethnicities were quite distinct and there wasn't really a monolithic 'white' culture the way we see it today. Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white, and even the germanic/nordic communities throughout the midwest largely spoke their native languages and held onto their native customs. Yes they all treated each other as superior to black/brown populations, but to say they were an assimilated mass with little diversity between them would be wrong
You're right, and we did actually see partisan sorting along those ethnic lines that trumped ideology--you had strong support for Democrats among "ethnic" whites until Nixon and strong support for Republicans among WASPs in the Northeast. I just meant "white" and "Christian" weren't identities you could polarize around, so saying "white people are starting to drift to the Republican Party" would have just meant "America is shifting right" and not "America is polarizing."
"Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white"
Looked down on, perhaps, but "not really being white" certainly not. America had a legally enforced racial caste system, and European immigrants always classified as white under it.
Yea they never legally defined Italian/Irish as non-white, but I think my comment still stands that the prevailing opinion among Anglo/Germanic communities was that non-Anglo/Germanic Europeans weren't really 'white' like they were.
I wish there was an ungated version of the paper linked there available, because it does actually go into social (rather than merely legal) distinctions. They again find that European immigrants were lumped in with other whites, not African Americans or Native Americans.
There was a tiered hierarchy. Angle-Saxons at the top, then European immigrants (who themselves were divided based on their origin). Then they drew the line and declared those to be "white." Then there were African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and others.
The European immigrants still counted as "white," but they definitely weren't treated the same.
There's an important sense in which your 3, 4 and 5 are horribly missing the point.
For 4 and 5, Obama *spoke* like a dove but governed no less hawkishly than Bush while Trump *spoke* (kind of) like a hawk but governed more dovishly than any American president since Carter. Which gets to the meat of why 3 matters: Obama cultivated the persona of a political outsider at exactly the time when the Iraq war and the 2008 recession demonstrated incontrovertibly that the political insiders running our foreign and domestic policy were at best disastrously incompetent and at worst malevolent. When his neoliberalism turned out to be indistinguishable from Bush's neoconservatism in practice, just with rainbow flags in place of crosses, a lot of people in both parties started looking for the door.
Which is, to my mind, the essence of today's partisanship. If you reject the Washington Consensus which formed the mainstream of both parties pre-Trump (and which has been desperately trying to claw back control of the Republicans post-Trump) then your choices for elected officials are very limited. Without a genuine outsider to vote for, the best bet is just to gum up the gears of the Washington machine by threatening to primary any politician who tries to reach across the aisle to pass another part of their shared agenda. If a new war or a a new bailout or a new expansion of the surveillance state is worth it to their donors they'll take the risk, but forcing them to play defensively on the smaller issues means Democratic and Republican elected officials have that many fewer opportunities to defraud the American people.
I don't think you're wrong or I'm wrong here, I think we're describing different but simultaneous phenomena that pushed the country in the same direction. You are right that Obama was not (as he may have seemed at the time) a strong departure from the Washington consensus, so people who wanted that probably were turned off by him. What you write helps explain why we're seeing rising numbers of independents but not rising numbers of swing voters; there are a growing number of people who do see the two parties as indistinguishable and/or just bad actors, but who nevertheless have strong policy preferences one way or the other.
I think the synthesis for our ideas is this: Obama was not that different from previous iterations of Democrats, and people on the left saw him as basically a normal Democrat. This actually turned off some people, who had been hoping he would push against the grain more, and lead them to demand a more extreme version of liberalism a la Bernie Sanders. Many conservatives, on the other hand, perceived Obama as a radical, dangerous departure from the norm, possibly more because of who he was rather than the policies he pushed, though I'm sure they had their reasons. This led them to demand from the right for less cooperation and more ideological rigor. You could basically argue the same thing about Trump--Republican voters saw him as a businessman who deviated from Republican orthodoxy in speeches, but ultimately his big accomplishments were tax cuts, deregulation, and appointing conservative judges. If you asked Democrats, though, he was a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics, pushing them to cooperate less, and the cycle repeats.
Er, no, it had nothing to do with "who [Obama] was". It wasn't even what policies he pushed. It was what political tactics the Democrats used under him.
What both wiped out the "conservative" Democrats in 2010 and convinced the right that the Democrats had radically and dangerously departed from the historic norm was that in 2010 the "conservative" Democrats in Congress took the radical and unprecedented step of committing mass electoral suicide in order to push through a massively unpopular program on behalf of their party leadership. When even the people of the State of Massachusetts were opposed enough to Obamacare to elect a Republican in a special election to try to stop it, the Democrats went ahead and rammed it through.
You want "a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics", THAT was the moment.
At that point, the idea of there being such a thing as a "conservative" Democrat, or even one who would reflect and respond to his constituents' desires, died in the minds of America's right. They're now convinced that there's nobody to persuade or compromise with in the Democratic Party. And so any Republicans in office who act like there's any Democrats in office who can be persuaded or compromised with are either idiots or traitors.
And so that illustrates what they're really demanding of Republican politicians. The demand is not for ideological rigor; Trump went ahead and talked positively about the British NHS in a Republican Presidential debate, after all. What they demand is that the Republican politician agree that all that's possible with the Democrats is war-to-the-knife, and pledge to fight it.
RE international comparisons: which other developed countries have two-party systems? From a cursory Wikipedia, it seems like the answer is Malta and that's basically it.
Other contenders:
South Korea often only has two big parties, but which two seems to change every election.
Australia has two big groups, but one is the Coalition of two parties, and the senate is elected via PR and has 20% minority representation.
I am more familiar with the UK and don't think it counts, we had a coalition government pretty recently and the Scottish National Party are pretty big.
Many countries have a mostly dominant "natural governing party" and then a smaller opposition party. In Canada that was the Liberal Party, while in Japan it was the Liberal Democrats, and in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Arguably the American system is more analogous to various south American and African countries with strong presidential powers. Who tend to have the presidents party and the other one.
As a Canadian I feel like while we are multi party, we share some of the problem's with the US because we use the first past the post. Because there's basically just 1 party on the right and 2 big ones on the left, we basically have a constant spoiler effect on the left where the vote is split too much for either major left wing party to win. And so we end up sometimes with the Conservative (rightwing) party winning, even though 65% of the country voted for a left wing party.
I think of being a 2 party country and being a first-past the post country as almost one and the same problem. It greatly incentives voting against the one you hate rather than the one you want. And that's a huge barrier to entry for new parties and so should trend over time towards 2 consolidated parties.
Inequality began its explosive rise starting in the late 70s due to globalization, the loss of labor bargaining power, the rise of the managerial class, etc. As the producer of the world’s reserve currency, the US has a unique role in globalization which magnifies the effects (both good and bad). The massively divergent outcomes among members of society, plus what I would argue resembles stagnation at lower rungs, created fertile ground for a loss of social trust and a rise in angst. In the absence of deep, productive debates on the true underlying issues, we simply default to tribal partisanship and culture wars.
Economic inequality has been rising since around the late 60s. I agree globalization is a major factor (but it increased bargaining power for workers in many other countries), but automation has also been a major factor. I'm not sure what constitutes a productive debate on the underlying issues, but it seems to me that economic inequality is possibly the single most constantly talked about issue there is.
Sure, we talk about inequality but mostly in naïve, tribal ways that fail to address root causes, nevermind actual solutions. What i mostly hear is "tax the rich," "systemic racism," "throw more money at failing schools," etc etc. Regardless of what you think of such issues, they are not going to put a dent in inequality - which has been rising ever faster the more we "talk about it."
We need real discussions on trade policy, monetary policy, dramatic tax reform, supply-side revolutions in healthcare/education housing etc. Mostly what i observe is the use of emotional issues to avoid having the real discussions that are necessary - and which would probably prove financially costly for the elites.
Inequality and "economic inequality" aren’t problems. They are mathematical relationships. Inequality isn’t even remotely the same thing as "unfairness", which we can probably agree on as an actual problem.
I guess my point is that to the extent that unfairness is an issue, if we wish to address it we should start by labeling the issue correctly. Inequality of outcome is not necessarily an indication of unfairness, nor is greater economic inequality intrinsically worse than less inequality.
While I agree in theory, it may not mean much in practice. If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable? If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable? There are no clear answers and the way society finds the "answers" seems to be a very messy process, which i believe we are going through now.
I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair. We do a very poor job of this...the winners of the current configuration aren't "policed" much at all. I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative.
"If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable?"
Globalization doesn’t require a country to pursue it. Individual and corporate actions are sufficient to achieve global exchange absent country interference. And I really don’t understand what "leaving people behind" means. I decided to retire ten years ago. Was I left behind? Others chose not to move to booming markets (perhaps for good reasons), or chose not to make the transition to booming, higher paid professions. Were they left behind? Or is this just a euphemism for the fact that change creates winners and losers, pretty much by definition?
And I will add that wage inequality in a market is actually acting as the incentive to correct for the lack of transition (to the new job or area). The market is sending an incentive and a signal for people in declining areas and professions to adjust their behavior if possible.
"If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable?"
Not if we agree to play by those rules. If I agree to play by certain rules and we all follow them I would consider the game fair (and presumably desirable), even if the final score is extremely lopsided. I am not arguing against redistribution, I am suggesting that the system can be both fair and desirable even when it leads to inequality of outcome.
"I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair."
I agree we should police bad actors and ensure that the system is as fair as possible. But I do not believe it is logical to look at an unequal outcome and make an assumption that the system is unfair nor even that more equality would be better. Inequality of outcome and fairness are not necessarily correlated. Indeed I could argue that a market based system would be dysfunctional if every course of action led to the same results.
"I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative."
The equality pillar has nothing to do with equality of economic outcome. It refers to equality of process — it is about treating everyone fairly using the same rules.
I agree but I feel like that's a problem with pretty much every issue. With inequality, I think there are some 'inconvenient truths' that obstruct discourse, such as the fact that rising productivity inequality is probably at least one driving force behind it. Of course one can still argue for redistribution from rich to poor even if the gap largely reflects productivity difference, but I think many find it less palatable to demand recompense based on abstract moral valuation of equality than on the basis that one is being shortchanged by fatcats and is merely demanding the rest of one's rightful compensation.
Of course for some big inequality-related issues, like housing and education costs, Klein's point about the nationalization of politics is probably pretty relevant. They're local/state issues and thus can't command as much popular interest as national political issues.
Surprised I haven't heard anyone saying this - what about wealth and income inequality? Given the correspondence, seems as if an explanation would have more power if it related to them both. https://images.app.goo.gl/biMLpT78K9rK1QJr7
High levels of blatant inequality in the 1880s-1910s, pushes polarization until enough solutions get passed, things go down, people are happy, welfare state starts stagnating and retreating, inequality goes up, pushes polarization.
Why would wealth inequality push Polarization? People are unhappy, don't know why, blame the outgroup.
Alternatively, only way to suppress class consciousness is to give people some other identity to care about.
U.S society was fairly large and diverse in the 1920s, although African Americans were restricted from taking part in politics in the south (where most of them lived).
And that's also probably a contributing or correlated factor. No need to limit causality to one thing when there are probably a host of things that contribute
Alternative: most of the income inequality has been eaten up by other forms of compensation. Not just healthcare benefits, etc. Also regulatory benefits. With the introduction of OSHA, ADA, EEOC, etc., everybody is getting a large boost in non-monetary benefits through the regulatory apparatus rather than through the labor negotiation process.
If there's any discontinuity around that time, it'd be 9/11 and Iraq. I think 9/11 was the original cause, but it took a couple years to show up, because in the short term it was a unifying factor. It wasn't until Iraq happened, and started to go differently to how Bush suggested it would, that it exploded into polarization.
This is a guess, obviously, but it seems to fit well enough.
Does the chart of polarization show the UK becoming less polarised? Because that does not match my impressions. I would say less until the mid 90s and then flat for a bit (maybe not quite - Blair was dominant so the Tories going down weird routes for a bit did not affect much) and then the left reaction against Blair started with Iraq/Bush which started moving bits of Labour apart just as the Tories went centre enough to have a chance to grab back power - the 2008 crash made this worse and then the Tories won and while socially liberal they were harsh cutters of government services, which made polarisation more urgent. The Lib dem implosion as part of the coalition destroyed the middle for a bit, then Brexit/Corbyn/Boris sharpened the cultural aspect until there was very strong polarisation.
So I would expect a U shape with the minimum late 90s early 00s
The UK chart shows ultra-high polarisation during the Thatcher years, calming down a bit during Major, reaching a minimum with Blair, and then increasing until we reach Thatcher levels again with Brexit. That matches my intuitions.
Which suggests that maybe polarisation levels are just strongly influenced by specific issues and personalities. What's really interesting is that the Iraq war was a polarising event in the US but a depolarising event in the UK, because in one country it was supported by a right-wing leader and in the other by a left-wing leader.
Perhaps the best thing for depolarising the US would be for Joe Biden to start a war.
I don't think anyone has mentioned Bush/Gore and 9/11? Those are two events that were huge in the popular consciousness that fit the timeline. Of course you can't draw a line in the sand, can you - just why was the 2000 Presidential race so evenly split - in my memory both Bush and Gore were pretty unremarkable candidates. All I know is that you still can find people bitter over the outcome, which naturally ought to contribute to a "win-at-all-costs" mentality. And then you had 9/11 and everything that followed. Attack on American soil! It was quite a shock to the system after a decade of relative peace and harmony. People were digging in on jingoistic patriotism versus the other side advocating a more measured response and saying, No the US is the true aggressor here. And throughout the Iraq War the justifications became more murky and Bush expanded his power in unpopular ways and you had things like the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Bush was so hated that a faux-documentary was made about his assassination and what would be the aftermath. I don't have a point to all this, perhaps it's too much of a just-so story. But I definitely see some of the origins of the current culture war in those times.
I think an interesting subject for further inquiry is why the Democrats have been more successful at fighting off insurgencies that Republicans.
My moderately informed opinion is that institutional Democrats have a lot more institutional support than institutional Republicans.
If someone primaries Mitch McConnell, they will get a lot of favorable coverage (in the primary campaign) even if that person's views were much more abhorrent. If AOC were to attempt to primary Chuck Schumer, it would be seen as a threat to the republic.
When Trump was launching his campaign, everyone thought it was hi-larious how he was taking down the Jeb Bushes and Marco Rubios of the world. I recall a lot of tweets about how Trump maybe really nuts, but what's really nuts is the numbers in Rubio's tax plan!
Meanwhile, the leasing institutionally conservative publication published an "against Trump" cover. But it didn't matter.
Bernie Sanders was always a threat. He was pressured to quite. People were really concerned about "Bernie-bros.", etc. Try talking about Jill Stein in certain quarters.
I think the Democrats are heading down that slope, though. They're doing what the Republicans did, resisting the direct challenges to the people in charge, but bending policy and appointments toward the insurgency to appease them. But eventually the old Democrats will be called some equivalent of DINO for holding on to something (anything) while the current is pulling them leftward.
I think may you have something here, but I want to quibble. AOC got into congress by primarying one of the prominent dem house leaders. I don't think she got much pushback for it, and if she did it didn't matter. The movement that put her in is dedicated to finding and pushing out dems that are too far to the right.
Also, in my state legislative district, the local Democratic party did not endorse their long-time centrist representative in the primary, when he was being challenged by two inexperienced activists on the left and the far left. It was also interesting to see a local news source completely avoid mention of the left challenger, in favor of the far left one. Like literally, their editorial recommendations didn't mention her name or acknowledge that she was in the race. (Fortunately they have a robust online comment section.)
I'm more than a little surprised that population density didn't come up once.
The simplest way to describe the difference between republican and democratic coalitions is population density. Democrats are predominantly an urban coalition, and republicans are more rural / suburban.
When you factor in that most economic growth has taken place in cities, and cities are always where almost all culture is produced, you see a pretty obvious pattern:
- cities are where almost all economic power is concentrated
- cities are where almost all cultural power is concentrated
- cities are dominated by democratic politics
He's got a point that AOC/Bernie have less influence inside party politics - but there are plenty of SJW extremists writing in the New York Times. Sure, QAnon is totally off the rails and there isn't anything like that on the left, but the closest left wing equivalents are tenured sociology professors.
Whenever I leave California to go visit my parents in Ohio, I feel like I understand the sense of despair and anger and frustration that people here feel, towards the place that took a lot of their kids, and responds by calling them racist, bigoted people for not going along with this increasingly radical agenda, which seems coupled to economic policies that are AWESOME if you leave your hometown and move to a big city and learn to do really insanely complicated things for a giant corporation, but otherwise are kinda meh.
It's been difficult for me to escape the conclusion that you can't possibly have a stable political coalition that covers "city dwellers" as more and more of the country movies into cities - unless those city dwellers are united against a common enemy. All around San Francisco in 2014, there was a big tech backlash, with people spraypainting '#DieTechieScum' on the sidewalk. It all went away around the time Michael Brown was killed. I watched how quickly all the big tech companies joined into BLM, and remembered thinking at the time "now we have an enemy that we can all feel good about hating."
If this hypothesis is true - that increasing urbanization drives political polarization - the solution would be... some kind of ... thing.. .which caused lots of people to start leaving big cities all at once. Maybe spreading tech wealth all over the country, and increasing the frequency of interaction between highly trained technological professionals and blue collar workers. Who knows what would cause such a thing?
Why not just have everyone move to cities? Seems easier to me - cities have economies of scale, whereas rural areas have... cows which do not require the rural population we currently have
That is in fact roughly what's happening, at what may be close the maximum rate consistent with aggregated individual choice as opposed to coercive state policy.
The present urban/rural political dynamic is what you see as a result.
I think you're wrong. America has instead gotten more suburban in the more recent decades. Restrictions on building in big cities pushes real estate prices up, and people out. There are many blue suburbs now, but it's not because a smaller portion of the country lives in rural areas (that has stayed steady at a low percentage of the population for a while).
I'm beginning to suspect that a great number of people here live in a bubble. So many people are fleeing San Francisco that rents have actually dropped by hundreds of dollars. Same in NY.
Reactions to covid are merely an accelerant. Conditions is San Francisco regarding homelessness, public sanitation, rising crime, and educational shortcomings are factors that won't go away anytime soon. And it looks like companies are finally waking up to the benefits of allowing folks to work at home. There's no going back.
Work from home is just going to accelerate urbanization. So many people that have jobs in suburban office parks would love to live in a city - and particularly people with jobs in a small city that would rather live in a big city.
All the data shows an increase up until last March, at which point the rents dropped drastically.[0] Just like they did in the rest of the country.[1] Perhaps it has multiple causes, but the data doesn't show it.
One theory of the cause of increased partisanship since the 70's that has been growing on me is transparency/sunshine laws. Apparently, pre 1970's congressional/comittee meetings and votes were all done closed door to the point where we don't even know how specific legislators voted on specific legislation. But beginning in the 1970's a wave of legislation calling for increased "accountability" opened up these proceedings to the general public. But, the theory goes, special interest groups, corporations, media interests etc are a LOT better at holding their representatives accountable than the average joe voter. Where previously they were still motivated to enact regulatory capture, but ultimately didn't know if it was working and couldn't easily organize against someone who defected, now they could. And the legislators now knew that they could.
And where previously they could give a good partisan speech but then go behind closed doors and compromise or acknowledge when someone from the other side made a good point, now there was no longer any backstage. The theatre element of politics is on and you can never be seen to not be treating the other side like they're the bad guys and we're the good guys.
Also with the transparency laws, the media gains power because they are the largest influencers of the only group that can possibly counter the special interest groups, the average voters. So the value of influencing the average voter goes up which, of course, increases competition for that influence. And the more the battle for that influence heats up the more you need to band together to win(media consolidation), the more you gain from demonizing the other side, and the more incentivized you are to do it.
The link I posted above has some really compelling research and arguments that link transparency laws to polarization, regulatory capture, government waste, pork, bill size inflation/obfuscation, wealth inequality, increased campaign spending, decreases in crossing the aisle voting, increases in "bang for your buck" for lobbying spending, wage stagnation/inequality and a whole host of other problems. It's a surprisingly robust theory.
It also offers an easy solution. Closed doors and secret ballots.
Excellent, I was going to mention this as well. TV didn't show up in the Senate until 1974 for example.
This also ties in with (and is accelerated later on) by the "revolt of the public" a la Matting Gurri in the post 2000-era, as the mediating media institutions have fallen away. Basically, I think at least part of the polarization is tied into the loss of faith in elites and institutional decline over the past 50-60 years, combined with a loss of narrative control.
Add in the decline in religiosity generally, one party grabbing most of the remaining religious voters over time after Roe v Wade (1973), some identity politics, and a few other things I'm sure I missed, and here we are.
"You know the South defected to the GOP right after the 1964 Civil Rights Act"
They did not; it was decades later. I remember, as a child in Georgia in the 1980s, that the South was still solidly Democratic. (I was from a left-leaning household, and was proud of my region for supporting the correct party. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the Dixiecrats were different.)
Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. Bill Clinton was from Arkansas. Al Gore was from Tennessee.
I read the whole thing. I responded to the part that was wrong. The South's defection to the GOP was not "right after" the Civil Rights Act.
So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
How about the posters all around my neighborhood saying "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings"? (Where "nazi" pretty clearly refers to anyone the local antifa doesn't like.) They're very well designed and have a relatively high production quality for something intended to be stabled to a telephone post. Ironically, to me the aesthetic seems most similar to actual Nazi posters from pre-WWII Germany.
To the first point, there's a certain level of intimidation that comes from having poster like that up, and no one talking about them. Especially combined with seeing antifa running around in the street in masks (pre-covid, even) doing things, I don't know what, but the police were there blocking traffic, and yet it never made it into any of the local papers or blogs, I suspect because they're all left-leaning. These signs are literally calling for people's deaths. But no one dares to speak about them. I don't even want to be seen looking too closely at them.
To the second point, I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live here. Maybe try to imagine what a Mafia neighborhood is like? There are places you don't look closely at, people you get out of the way of and hope they never notice you, and a general sense that if you ever stand out of a crowd, you might get a "visit".
To the third point, that's just my personal aesthetic opinion, it doesn't really matter. And I unfortunately appear to have deleted the pictures I took, and as I said, I'm not too keen on taking more, but maybe I will. But I'll also need to be sure I don't leave any traceable metadata on the photos. If I do put up a link to them, will that cause any change in your opinion?
Overall, I'm very familiar with having people claim to be on " my side" that I don't really want there. That's all this has to be. Don't you accept the possibility that some people, who claim to be on "your side", may have gone too far? I'm not even asking you to disavow extremists on national television, the way Trump was asked in the debates. Just... that's a logical possibility, right?
Coming from someone who only just stumbled across this exchange, you're not appearing very charitable, though I acknowledge I may be misreading this entire exchange. I just wanted to let you know about my first impression, in case you care about how your arguments appear to people just reading the conversation.
From what I'm reading the statement you quoted may not be a good use of the word "literally", but the poster *is* making a statement that it's a good thing if certain people die. If no one speaks up about such slogans it's easy to feel like the environment you're in agrees with the slogan. If you're observing that the people whose deaths are being portrayed as favourable are in a group with fuzzy borders, in this case the word "nazi", which one has observed as being thrown around quite casually for people who are not actual nazis but just the person using the word's outgroup, it becomes easy to feel threatened by a poster like that.
(Mind, I have not seen these posters and thus also presumably don't live where Moon Moth does, so I don't have an opinion on whether this is the actual situation, but I think this is what one can glean from what Moon Moth wrote and I think it's fair to feel intimidated by such a situation.)
Yes, I may have mis-used the word "literally there." I'm not entirely sure what the right word would be. It's less veiled than saying, "That's a nice family you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to them." Maybe "implicitly" would have been a better word?
You feel differently if the poster said "Jew" instead of "Nazi"? How about "Commie" instead of Nazi?
Saying it's a good thing if certain people die is calling for their deaths, although not necessarily advocating murdering them. And given the shortage of literal Nazis, people who say they support the Nazi party, it's hard to see the point of the posters unless they have an expanded meaning for the term.
I don't think the second thing follows from the first. No I'm not ok with the poster referring to Jews. I'm ok but probably squicked out with it referring to Commies, and I'm pretty much fine with the Nazi version. I don't think there's a useful general rule here. I think each claim should be evaluated on its own merit.
In general, I think that the tool of generalizing a particular to a general, eg "Every time an outgroup member dies an angel get it's wings" is overused. The particulars are different, and we should be willing to exercise our judgement.
Yes, "literally" was the wrong choice of word. "Implicitly" might be better. The signs are implicitly calling for people's deaths. Are you happier with that phrasing? What about the graffiti that says "save a life, kill a cop"? Would you consider that literally calling for people's deaths?
As for my personal aesthetic opinion, I mentioned it because I thought it was ironic and darkly funny. It's literally (correct usage there) the least important part of my comment.
As for intimidation, I used to feel more like you suggest. Then some things happened to me. Now I feel differently. *shrug* It's not safe to talk about in public, so I'll just say that this is one of those situations where it's much better to learn from the misfortunes of others.
Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
That's a terrible book. Attempts by both parties to increase their power in Congress are not unique to the GOP. It is, however, true that Republicans are more ambitious on solidifying their hold on power via gerrymandering.
Are Republicans more ambitious at gerrymandering, or just in a better position to benefit from it?
If you understand how gerrymandering works, it's obvious that Democrats have a natural "packing" effect by having very high % of populations in cities, while Republicans are more spread out. Unless you gerrymander extensively to have city cores "spoke out" to the neighboring countryside, the 70+% Democrat cities are going to elect fewer representatives per total population.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
The above comment uses different time units, year vs quarter. So the difference is 3.3 times, not 13.
Where do you get 13? Are you comparing the annual figure for the U.S. to the quarterly figure for Europe? The ratio is 3 1/3:1
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
???
40/12 = 3 1/3 not 10
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/world-internet-usage-index-philippines-10-hours-a-day
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
The irony !
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I've heard there's revisionism on Robber's Cave recently (as with Stanford Prison). A shame since I have cited that example many times. https://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peace-and-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php
Interesting! Thank you for the link.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
I don't have a source, but I've heard it mentioned that the big two in the US basically excluded anyone else from the presidential debates.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
It's interesting to note how France until recently had a system with 2 very dominant parties... then in 2017 both basically collapsed !
I'm willing to bet that some people blamed it too on social media...
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
In other words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog#/media/File:Internet_dog.jpg
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
but that's not true, it was open to everyone in the world by 2006
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
I’m not sure that your premise is true. Do Norwegians use social media as much as Americans?
A more interesting comparison would be amount of time spent on Facebook and changing attitudes regarding politics.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
Unpack this as "geography losing its function as a barrier to interaction and preventer of conflict".
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
I want to say there is an asymmetric warfare going on where one side treats it as something serious, and the other side as entertainment.
But I'm not *really* sure I can say that the first side isn't full of entertainment-seekers, too.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
This is so true.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Depends what you mean with 'recently'.
https://dawum.de/#Umfrageverlauf
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
Aren't wokism and QAnon both internet ideologies?
Wokism is much older than the Internet. It's a university ideology pushed in departments whose purpose is activism and not knowledge building.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
Few countries are as large as the US. Many EU countries are practically city-states by comparison. https://medium.com/migration-issues/who-is-the-city-statey-ist-of-them-all-fccd76f8e683
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
Agreed, but this says we should redraw the state boundaries and still have things done by states.
States might not be the ideal level, cities or counties might be better. But doing everything at the federal level is insane.
"Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not."
U.S. is actually very polarized along state lines: https://againstjebelallawz.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/averagedeviation.png
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
Say we assume the following:
* Dunbar's number is 150
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNELNSvPzI
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
I don't think black Americans under Jim Crow felt very included in the American dream.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment ctrl+f "No Irish need apply"
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
Yeah if we note that 1950's stability that's the anomaly, no explanation can be complete if we don't mention in WW2. I guess that's where USA's asabiyyah is at its highest, while 80 years before it's at its lowest. If we follow the cycle, in around this decade we'll have another civil war, which actually looks quite likely.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
I think people overestimate the effect that adding guaranteed-Democrat Senate seats would be. "Tentin Quarantino" on Twitter (https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1276634862548647936) said in June:
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
David Shor (https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1277781856721743880) replied:
> I lot of the thinking here is driven by the inability to think through the derivative of the (50+x)/(100+x) function
The "always win" framing was mine, not Klein's. I'll edit the post.
Ah, I wasn't criticizing either way. I just think people ought to be more aware of this!
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.
not sure why you were so dismissive of this point, the reason to add PR and DC is not partisan, it's that those are citizens who deserve representation like everyone else
That may be your reason. And it is a good one. But: If PR was solidly republican, and DC was solidly democrat, do you think we would be hearing about statehood for both of them? Or would the blue-tribe news talk about one and not the other?
There are many things in the world that we should do because there are good arguments for them. The news selects a subset that are good for "their side" and talks about those things. The red tribe is right to be suspicious.
PR last governor was Republican, so I don't think the partisan politics are as clear as you do, but I really don't care if it helps the blue team or red team. Unless you have a good reason those citizens don't deserve representation in congress, it should be done and it should be done tomorrow.
These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful - "would the police have been so kind to these coup-rioters if they had been brown?" and "would Democrats believe in expanding the vote even to conservatives?" are equally unhelpful, except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
> These sorts of counterfactuals are never helpful ...
> except insofar as they reveal what the imaginations of the person saying them can imagine.
I find them to be helpful in the following way: They clarify what part of a person's position is a universal standard they truly believe in, and which part is a convenient club to hit someone they dislike for other reasons.
Example: A person says "riots are never acceptable". They apply this rule to riots for the political party that they dislike, and not their own. This tells you something important: Their true belief is that riots are okay when the cause is "just", for however they define "just".
That's true and something I was considering adding in another comment. It feels gross to ignore the basic, obvious object level good that is representative democracy and treat this issue like it's just partisan. Yes, the Democrats have the moral luck that they benefit from the good-for-general-democracy-reasons position, but that doesn't make the position itself any less virtuous.
(misuse of the term "moral luck", but I think the intent is clear)
You have to consider the context in which it was raised. The point was that it should be done so that Dems could conquer, not that there are these poor people suffering in D.C. without substantive national political representation
I notice that retrocession — giving Maryland the land back that was carved out for D.C., minus a non-residential federal district with the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, etc. — is never weighed against statehood.
We already did retrocession back Virgina, it’s why the bottom-left border of D.C. is Potomac-shaped. The city used to be a quadrangle.
Retrocession would be a compromise that would probably meet immediate agreement from Republicans, since it would keep the current balance in the Senate while granting maybe one solid Dem seat in the House.
But Democratic advocacy for D.C. statehood is not about representation, so the Democrats won’t entertain retrocession.
I'm definitely open to ideas like that about DC, although I've heard good arguments against this. I actually had a longer comment written about DC being a more complicated case than PR, but I lost interest halfway through writing it. I don't think you're right about Republicans immediately accepting it though, it doesn't seem like straightforward compromises like that are actually possible in Congress right now.
nor do I think this decision should rest on a compromise between current political interest. politics change. The decision should be about the best thing for the citizens of DC, but I wouldn't rule out that being some form of retrocession
Is it not also an important goal for American democracy to have the representatives of the people be the winners of the popular vote?
Currently Republicans are over-represented in the Senate, so they're getting more power than they have earned in votes. The state lines seem like a pretty arbitrary thing to me, and it seems very bizarre to give extra power to some random rural regions just because of the peculiar history of the country.
It seems quite obviously unfair that your vote is simply worth less if you reside in a city.
Sure what's good for the citizens of DC is important, but this issue could also be a good tool to correct this republican overrepresentation which arguably is a bigger issue.
I'm a liberal, and I'm in favor of retrocession. As I understand it, the sticking point is that Maryland doesn't want it because they don't want to take on D.C.'s problems. (But Baltimore is worse than Washington).
Out of curiousity, are there other tools or suggestions to fix the power imbalance in the senate.
I guess what i'm wondering is, if retrocession wouldn't miss out on an opportunity to correct the Senate imbalance which is actually more important for everyone (including the residents of DC).
I'm not american, by the way but I think as a person living in the world, because of the US's power, it feels like I'm basically being governed by Republican senators from some rural state. Like for example: I feel like the whole world is doing way too little about climate change because certain republican senators like the oil industry.
None of the peoples or governments of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want this. Forcing them to merge against their will as a "compromise" rests on the assumption that this is a partisan exercise and that what the actual people in question want doesn't matter.
Do the people living in DC actually care that they don't have substantive national political representation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Washington,_D.C._statehood_referendum
86% of them do
They made it their license plate and have repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted for it multiple times.
But there's lots of ways to give them representation without making them states, e.g. with two Senators.
PR could just be added to, e.g. Florida. DC could be given back to the neighboring states.
It's suspicious that 'they deserve representation' is somehow always followed by 'they should be made new states'. It's hard not to think that the arguments were form backwards, i.e. to justify a hidden 'bottom line' that was decided first.
A key test for "is this a good way to give people representation?" is "do the people on the receiving end of this want this to happen?"
None of the governments or populations of DC, Maryland, or Virginia want their governments to merge or to share representation.
Your second example, merging Puerto Rico into Florida, is actually likely an even better outcome for Democrats than making PR a new state - but it's still a bad idea because neither Florida nor Puerto Rico want that.
If "do the people who are seeking representation think this is a good solution" doesn't factor into your analysis, you're missing the point of representative democracy.
Why assume that the point of representative democracy is representing people? As far as I'm concerned, the point is ensuring that bums get thrown out with reasonable frequency and civil war is averted because everyone expects to get their turn before too long. Some fairly substantial amount of representation is instrumentally necessary, but I'm not in favour of optimising for representation as an end goal.
Come on – that's just not something that should be weighted very highly. Unless you're also open to succession – in which case, sure, that's nice, but is even (much) less likely to happen than statehood.
Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
This is how we've admitted every state up to this point. It's the basic idea on which the idea of states being united was originally built. It's literally in the name of the country.
> Do all of the other people in the existing states whose representation is going to be diluted also get a 'what they want' vote? That seems only fair!
Yes, that's literally how the process of admitting a state works. The representatives voted on by the people of those states vote on the question.
> And why even bother with statehood? Grant them both their full independence from the U.S.!
No one wants that. I don't understand how this point about how in a democracy what people want matters keeps eluding you.
> Should we stop at just DC and PR too or should every non-state U.S. territory be granted statehood too? Should we allow other countries to join as states at will? (I could seriously consider this!)
Adding states that want to be states is good. It would probably be a good idea to set a minimum population requirement, but otherwise, assuming there aren't extraneous complications (e.g. Kurdistan wanting to join as a state would involve probably too many complications to be viable), entities that want to be states should be considered for statehood.
Merging Puerto Rico into Florida does seem ridiculous on its face, but I think something under-considered in the retrocession argument is how self-serving Maryland and the richer (and therefore more vocal) DC residents are. Maryland doesn't want to take on the poor Black people in DC, despite being a very rich state, and progressives in both DC and Maryland a looking at the Senate.
In any case, there will be something distasteful about a city-state for a large number of people. Puerto Rico has more people than Iowa, even after losing tons of people post-Maria, so that makes so level of sense to the average person. DC (besides being synecdoche for the federal government and therefore completely associated with it in people's minds) just recently passed Vermont in population, and, because it's the most Democratic-voting place in the country by a large margin, seems like a power grab.
I also think "what the people want" when it comes to local people deciding something that has national significance is unimportant. We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way. DC statehood isn't a local issue; it's a federal one
DC has higher per-capita and median income than literally any other state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
"something distasteful"...are you making predictions about polls or trying to argue on the merits? Because on the merits "DC shouldn't have statehood because it consists largely of Black Democrats" is an embarrassingly bad argument with nothing of substance to refute. I don't even know how to respond to an argument of the form "you can't let *those sorts of people* have a state".
> We had a war about if states had the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to peace out and go their own way.
This is the same war in which West Virginia just decided it wanted to be a state and the rest of the country agreed. Yes, the way to admit states is via the democratic process of voting on it in Congress. As a straightforward ethical matter, the preferences of the people in the proposed states should weigh on those deliberations. I honestly don't understand how multiple people seem really confused about this. "The process of adding states requires the endorsement of the current representational system" is obviously true and has nothing to do with the fact that the people in that process should consider the basic principles of democracy and representation in making their decision.
DC maybe. I'll grant you it's at least more complicated. Adding PR to Florida makes no sense. You can be suspicious of whatever you want particularly of Democratic establishment motivations. I'm telling you I'm personally motivated by puerto ricans getting proper representation, and I don't see any alternative to statehood being a viable solution. So you can have a secondary debate about motivations if you want, but I'm more motivated by the substance here.
I was responding to what seemed like a principled stand, i.e. the people of PR (and DC) _deserve_ representation. And it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
I believe you're sincere about PR deserving proper representation and statehood being the _best_ way to do that.
I appreciate the additional details about why you think statehood is best! I genuinely did not know why 'representation' was being 'rounded to' statehood.
> it occurred to me that there are lots of ways to do that beyond admitting them as states.
"rounded to" seems willfully obtuse. They literally can't have voting representatives in congress without being a state. What else would representation mean?
I'm replying again because I'm not sure you realized what your PR+FL proposal implies. It would be a massive win for Democrats, turning 2 lean-R Senate seats lean-D for a D+4 net and potentially swinging the electoral college to favor Democrats again. It would be a massive, massive win for Democrats, far beyond adding PR as a state.
That no one is arguing for this implies the *exact opposite* of what you're suggesting. The tell is that you don't see any of the Republicans who want to coerce DC and VA or MD together advocating for PR joining FL as well, even though that would be a consistent position. They realize that would be a political disaster for them, so they only apply this logic to DC.
The Democrats have the luck of a position that is both just and politically advantageous. The Republicans can't even keep a consistent answer on the two questions because there is no consistent answer that maintains their advantage other than "no representation for American citizens we don't like".
Great point on the politics, but PR as part of florida doesn't make much sense on any level imo. It should just be a state. Republican legislators are working in many states to just make voting more difficult, as the party seems to have decided people voting in general is just not in their interest. That strikes me as quite bad in a democracy, and the party really is quite lost.
Yeah, like I said above, coercing PR into FL is a terrible idea on the merits (like coercing DC into another state). But that Democrats aren't proposing this undercuts the idea that this is all a cynical ploy by Democrats. There are more advantageous cynical ploys than the straightforward democracy-is-good position Democrats are advocating.
Sorry! I'm not arguing for or against statehood as a partisan. I don't think there's a clear ethical conclusion that that's the best thing to do.
I'm also not familiar with the specifics of debates about this.
"Deserve representstion" tends to implicitly mean "representation proportional to population". Which the current senate setup doesn't do
If you were to add 4 Dems today you'd have 54 of 104 though. Particularly in the context of DC being liable to give properly partisan Democrats, you've suddenly got room for a Manchin or a Sinema or someone to defect if the rest of the caucus wants to swing for the fences on a reconciliation package (or kill the filibuster lol)
Thinking through the derivative is of course something plenty of people will get stuck on, but "more Democrats is good for the Democrats" is the important takeaway.
Whether or not Puerto Rico would actually send 2 Democrats to the Senate is another story (a 1-1 scenario is honestly fairly likely), but we'll see what happens (assuming that the 50 existing senate Democrats can even pull it together to let us find out).
It makes some difference, but even a solid blue Puerto Rico and DC would only move the senate bias from R+2.9 to R+1.4. It's the same sort of narrow marginal difference you would get from, say, the effect Democrats taking the Texas state house in 2020 and blocking partisan gerrymander would on the house - noticeable for people who build careful election-forecast models but not really enough to sway the long-term balance of power, and something that would be a sidenote at best in most political history books.
In the context of the 2022 midterms that could surely be the difference between Democrats or Republicans controlling the Senate!
And if the lean had been shifted that much regarding the 2020 senate races then we could hypothetically have had 51 senate Democrats today instead of 50 (this is the dumbest of counterfactuals to be working through but bear with me). Having room for Manchin and Sinema to take turns defecting would be a big deal.
"Does Biden get to appoint any judges to the courts?" is a fairly important question.
My sentences got into the wrong order, so my bad lol.
So it does have some effect in a narrow horse-race politics sense. What I mean is more - when you look at the history of polarization, it has this huge trend from relatively low polarization to almost everyone in the country hating the other party (and often their own). The big trend in polarization is several orders of magnitude larger than the difference between an R+2.9 and an R+1.4 senate.
Also even in the horse-race sense - you're right that it could make a difference, but the probability that that makes the difference isn't that high (it's a bit less than the difference between 2018's ~D+8 environment 2020's ~D+6 environment). "Dems would only need a very good year but not a total outlier to win the senate" is an improvement, but not a game-changer.
Everyone discussing whether statehood is a good idea or who it'll benefit is missing the point. How would it reduce polarization? There's no plausible mechanism. The real reason Ezra Klein includes it in his book is because he wants to increase the power of his tribe, and/or because he thinks the people deserve representation and statehood is the best way to achieve it. Not because it'll reduce polarization.
Give me more power and there will be less polarization.
Its an extension of median voter theorem. To simplify, both parties want to win, so will adopt the set of policies and campaigning to get 50+% of the senate seats. Moving the balance of the senate left, and closer to the median voters, doesn't mean the democrats win eternally, but that the republican party reconfigures to appeal to more voters, moving closer to the centre
how quaint and how surprising it is to hear somebody discussing polarization as an issue between Democrats and Republicans.The polarization is between those who know we are ruled by a corrupt oligarchy intent on bankrupting a majority of the country, and those who like to pretend we live in a democracy.
But Power loves people who repeat that Democrats versus Republicans narrative. They've spent so much money on it, after all.
Yes, I believe it is a club requirement.
That's because of the fact that it's an issue between Democrats and Republicans (or the political left and right, at least), and the "corrupt oligarchy" is at least half mythical.
They all have the same donors. They all vote for consistently for imperial war. They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. They all vote to shovel money to rich financial outfits and corporations at every opportunity. They all forbid criticism of Israeli policy and regularly swear obeisance to a foreign state. They all (still) hate Trump in an irrational manner. They all not to talk about deficit anymore. We haven't had such unanimity in the ruling class since the 50s. This is simply a matter of voting records and published policy, not myth.
You do realize that Trump has been the most pro-Israel president in history, right?
Underscoring their point about the irrational level of hate. Trump largely served the interests of the elite, making the uniform revulsion of him seem strange. Was his low-brow persona enough to rile stir their ire? I think there's more to it that we don't understand yet.
He's gauche in the extreme and played the powerful for fools. The entitled were not amused. Sadly, he basically sat around tweeting shit that went way off-script and playing golf for a couple years, but his existence laid bare for all to see the uniparty for the corporate globalist plutocracy that it is. Note how quickly they moved with EOs to "restore order" and declare "America is Back." Can you really believe Biden is capable of this? He's clearly just a front man they prop up in front of a camera from time to time. Ezra Klein keeps the the script.
> the the script
I saw what you did there.
It's one of many things. He made it very clear that he was Not One Of Us. Not just by his personality, but also by aggressively attacking them at every chance. (And to be fair, probably half of those attacks were deserved). And of course, he's a terrible human being, an incompetent insecure martinet of a leader, and frankly just annoying to listen to.
The funny thing is, only true believers and partisan democrats payed any attention to him. He was easy to ignore, and I was always shocked when a friend starting going off about something Trump had said, suddenly furrowing their brows an spewing flames.
Not surprising with Jared in charge.
Why yes. Who put Jared in charge of that file, again? Was that person blindsided by the fact that his son-in-law was Jewish? Because it sure looked to me like Trump was extremely proud of those deals, and of being a strong supporter of the Israelis.
The fact that American ruling class agrees with Trump on some of his policies doesn't mean they don't hate him.
The donors are much more polarized than they used to be. See https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors - the first one to donate more than $10k to both parties is #32 on the list, and only 10 of the 31 above him donated even a single dollar to each party. In the top hundred, the single most balanced donor is a couple who gave $231,046 to Republicans and $3,380,179 to Democrats, over 14x more. (And almost all of that GOP money was to a PAC that tries to push pro-LGBT views among Republicans, not a more typical Republican group)
The last war that can plausibly be called "imperial" was Iraq, which started 18 years ago. Republicans in Congress voted for it by a combined 263-7 vote, and Democrats voted against it by a combined 110-147 vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#Passage_of_the_full_resolution) That's before Scott's suggested beginning to increased polarization, but even back then there was pretty clear polarization.
The military budget peaked in 2011, and fell for four straight years after that, falling by a total of one-sixth in nominal dollars. Obama left office with a lower budget, in nominal dollars, than Bush did - once you adjust for inflation and population growth, it fell by 27% during his term. (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2021-TAB.pdf, pages 60-61 of the PDF, looking at the top line of each)
They do shovel a lot of money at banks - I can't argue with you on that one.
"Forbid criticism of Israel" in what sense? It's hardly illegal.
I agree that some hatred of Trump is irrational, but some is perfectly rational. He's an overgrown 13 year old with a penchant for sexual harassment and clueless bombast. He is hilariously thin-skinned, taking mortal offense at things that any other politician would ignore. He's incompetent at managing any organization unless he's an absolute dictator. And he did kind of try to steal an election on basically zero evidence, just a couple months ago. But despite that, there's a huge gap between the parties on Trump - the GOP has mostly bent the knee(with a few exceptions), while the Democrats hate him with a fiery passion.
There's a little daylight between them on the deficit. Democrats say that deficits are awesome, and spend accordingly. Republicans say that deficits are terrible, and ignore that when it's spending time. (Only a little daylight, in other words)
So which voting records and published policies are you referring to?
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all still going. Biden is likely to add Iraq sooner rather than later. MSM won't print criticism of Israel or publish pro palestinian views. Hatred is never rational. The rest of this rant isn't worth a comment.
Afghanistan was before Iraq, and Iraq I discussed. Libya was pretty flagrantly illegal, and Obama did it over Congress' objections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Libya%2C_2011). Syria seems to have been approved on the understanding that it was just support for rebels, not an actual deployment, and that trust was broken. But in fairness, both Trump and Obama did that, so you can call that one bipartisan.
More generally, you miss important detail by filing it all into "they support imperial wars". If the Republicans want to triple the military budget and the Democrats want to double the healthcare budget, they're both supporting roughly the same amount of new spending, and you can say that both support big government. But that's still a pretty huge difference in practice, and lumping them together would miss the point.
Sorry, hit Post too soon.
Regarding MSM criticism of Israel, is CNN mainstream enough? https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/middleeast/israel-apartheid-regime-report-intl/index.html
How about the Washington Post? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-vaccine-palestinians-coronavirus/2020/12/18/f1d8d572-4083-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html
(Of note: Those were literally the top Google results for "cnn israel" and "wapo israel", and those were the first two outlets I looked up - I didn't need to go digging for those links.)
Hatred can be quite rational. You're actually supposed to hate sufficiently bad things.
And the points you refused to address because they were a "rant" were two data sources that clearly prove you wrong, me 100% agreeing with you on one point, and me agreeing with you (with a small quibble) on another. So is it me agreeing with you that's a rant, or is that I linked to solid data sources?
"They all approve ever-increasing defense budgets. "
The defense budget as a fraction of GNP has been trending down for the past sixty years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
Let's compromise: we live in a corrupt democracy intent on bankrupting the country.
The thing about this seemingly-enlightened take is that it makes predictions that don't bear out in reality. Rich people would prefer more immigration, especially high skill immigration. Immigration remains pretty locked down, especially high skill immigration. Rich people would also prefer for there not to be extremely restrictive zoning rules in cities so they could build more things, but we don't have that either.
The world we live in looks like it suffers from a lot of dumb populist impulses, not a shadowy elite pulling the strings behind the scenes.
So you speak for all rich people, do you? Immigration, particularly "skilled" immigration, has gone up every year. I know because I oppose it and Trump unsurprisignly did not deliver on his promise to stop it. Are you actually complaining that you can't destroy parts of cities you don't like and replace it with something else? It makes me wonder what kind of people are on this list.
Immigration has not gone up each year. It has actually dramatically declined several times. This chart doesn't have the 2020 data yet, but when it does it'll show a dramatic dropoff:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents?width=850&height=850&iframe=true
H1B (the major high-skill immigration pipeline) has been capped for years, which were restricted further by the Trump administration so that a few thousand more talented people were forbidden from working in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Modifications_in_2020
Regarding development: I am complaining that the same basic free market mechanics that made smartphones ubiquitous aren't allowed to operate on real estate, resulting in catastrophically expensive supply shortfalls and skyrocketing rents and property values. When there is not enough of a thing, I think it's a good idea for people to be allowed to consensually buy, sell, and develop goods to create more of that thing in response to market forces - in this case, housing.
And you'd already know about this stuff if you'd attended the seminar on how to speak on behalf of all rich people with me.
H1-b visas ceilings continue to go up every year, which is what I believe is relevant here, not permanent legal residences, which may very well have gone down, IDK.
The comment about what kind of people are here appears to be an implication that zoning prevents people from destroying other people's property. I don't think that's an effect of zoning, which mostly affects what you can do with the parts of cities you already own.
If extremely restrictive zoning laws were repealed, more housing stock could be built in those cities. And yes, some rich people would presumably do that and make money. But that increased supply would reduce the rental and sale value of existing housing stock in that city, already owned by... Who owns that again? I forget.
Right, I think this is getting to the root of (this) problem: not the billionaires, but the hundred thousandaires. The 1% can't overrule the locally-optimizing incumbents who can vote.
Developers and investors want to build, technocrats want to build, but the upper middle class doesn't, and the populists want to hurt the developers and investors. So the upper middle class and the angry populists team up against the rich and the technocratic to make sure that everything stays expensive and terrible forever.
Maybe we're thinking of different base cities to some extent, but it's making it hard for me to find the hundred thousandaires argument compelling. I know zoning is a huge problem in SF, too, with more traditional residential housing. I'm from NYC.
When I sit in a 60-story residential skyscraper in NYC and look out at the smaller buildings below, and wonder who'd want those adjacent lots not to also become highrises, the first people I'm thinking of are the people in the already-developed building I'm sitting in. Way more new units in the same spot (impeding these units' view) would tend to hurt the current skyscraper owner more than the 4-story owner. The 4-story owner can flip their lot for a lot of money if it's gonna become a high-rise. Renters obviously want there to be more housing stock so landlords can't bend us over the barrel quite as hard.
The people living in the buildings I'm thinking of are definitely millionaires, and obviously their developers/owners are many times more wealthy than that. You don't think there's literal and figurative rent-seeking behavior happening from the Trump/Kushner set? It's hard to think billionaires are my natural ally in this situation. If I'm a developer, why not keep the zoning laws in place generally and just secure specifically favorable treatment for myself vis corrupt means? Then I have the best of all possible worlds. This has happened in NYC for decades.
Ugh... Via* corrupt means. You can't edit these, right? Following SSC here is my first substacking experience.
Because it's hard to get all the rich people in the world to cooperate on a rule that only helps a few of them while denying opportunities to the rest. Jane Q. AmoralInvestor just wants to make money however she can, and if that's by financing the construction of a new building and renting out units, who cares if it cuts into John P. Incumbent's profits?
Competition is the secret sauce that turns greed into everyday utility. It's why I'm composing this reply on a device that would have been an impossible miracle a few decades ago that now costs me under $1/day including amortized device cost, electricity, and network data fees.
Zoning restrictions end the competition before it starts - so greed instead channels its energies into extracting the most value it can from the fixed situation. But the answer to this is just to let greed fight greed and walk away holding all the profits greed had to give away just to stay in the game against itself.
You don't have to sell me on competition being good, and that's not the question I was asking. At least we agree, it seems, that John P. Incumbent himself isn't going out of his way to kill zoning restrictions. Certainly we agree Jane doesn't care if his profits stay up.
But let's say I'm Jane Q. AmoralInvestor... it's also my incentive to buy lots whose value is depressed by current zoning laws, and then secure rezoning for myself. Once I have that stuff, I don't want to abolish zoning law entirely (unless I just bought the whole city), just the zoning law that impacts me. Because as soon as I get that, I'm Jane Q. Incumbent, and new development not undertaken by me is also to my detriment. (I guess I married into the family, under these naming conventions).
> Klein links this polarization to "vetocracy", the idea that it's impossible to do anything nowadays because somebody will prevent you. Sometimes this is a literal presidential veto. Other times, it can be something as stupid and venal as the party out of power using filibusters and every other dirty trick to make sure nothing improves, because if something did improve the party in power would get the credit
This seems a little scrambled to me. More polarization actually could make things move! "Nothing" gets done now because in a closely-divided Senate, there are a few holdouts on both sides - Collins, Manchin, and the like. If they gave into polarization, the majority would be able to ram through its agenda.
Partisanship and Polarization are not quite the same thing. People can be intensely loyal to their own party whilst in practice the two parties do not differ substantially from each other.
This is because of a) the fillibuster, and b) different parties often controlling presidency/house/senate. It's incredibly rare for either side to have a filibuster-proof majority, so they almost always need votes from the other party to get anything non-budgetary through the Senate alone. And then if you don't control the House and the Senate you need the permission of the Chamber controlled by the other party. And unless you have a big majority in the Senate you need the President not to use their veto as well.
These structural features of US politics are really really important in explaining why nothing gets done (insofar as it doesn't.) In the UK parties are strong and ideologically sorted, but we usually have one of them with a majority in the single chamber that can basically make laws all by itself (Commons can always overrule Lords after a delay). So for us polarization hasn't led to paralysis. (I know we've had two coalitions recently but neither have involved the need for co-operation between the two main parties that hate each other.)
I'm struggling to understand the 'loss of geography' section. In particular:
> As cable TV, Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment, it turned out that almost everyone in Kansas was more similar to everyone else in Kansas than any of them were to people in New York, and so Kansas went solid Republican and New York went solid Democrat. But a national Democratic Party that has to include Kansas Democrats under its tent is a Democratic Party that's going to naturally be a bit conservative, a bit sensitive to the interests of religious people, a bit sensitive to the interests of farmers, etc. Once you move from within-state sorting to national-level sorting, things get a lot more sorted very quickly.
Wouldn't this *decrease* polarisation at the national level? I think I get the first bit: when people are focusing on local or state-level politics, the Kansas political parties find their way to the Kansas center, so that ~half of Kansas voters see themselves as Democrats; but when people start focusing on national-level politics, most of the Kansas Democrats realise that they lean right relative to the rest of the country, and so they become Republicans. But I can't figure out the last two quoted sentences.
If the national Democratic party was half Kansans and half New Yorkers, and Kansans are all rightist and New Yorkers are all leftist, then the national party is half rightist and half leftist and probably compromises on being centrist. If the Kansans leave and more New Yorkers come in, then the national party is all leftist, and moves to the left. So moving from geographically homogenous to geographically sorted increases polarization.
It's weird to describe that with the phrase "loss of geography" - but I think this is an issue that comes up in a lot of these related discussions, because what we see is that regions no longer matter, but urbanism does. One aspect of geography (that is arranged in a chunky way) has stopped being relevant, but another aspect of geography (that is arranged much more fractally) has become extremely relevant.
The point is that while you may impose a new geography on it, the only thing *required* for Scott's hypothesis to work is that the old geography no longer holds sway. If instead of being along an urban/rural split, democrats were now 60% of New York at random and 20% of Kansans at random, his proposed mechanism would still work.
Huh, if we instead think of it as the Democratic party exchanging the left half of Kansas for the right half of New York, then this actually doesn't guarantee that the party will become more uniform. That happening is dependent upon the right half of New York for being more left than the left half of Kansas.
But I think this factor mostly goes away when we imagine more than two states. If I picture a bunch of bell curves, with medians uniformly distributed around the origin, then it's pretty intuitive that exchanging the left halt of bell curves to the right of the origin for the right half of the bell curves to the left of the origin would result in more uniformity within the parties.
Even better if, instead of exchanging halves of bell curves, you just put a uniform cutoff at the origin. There is still a Democratic tail in Wyoming and a Republican tail in Vermont, but they're only about a third of the state.
I think what he's saying is that in the pre-communication era, the e.g. Democrats would have to incorporate the Kansas Democrats in their platform. And the Kansas Democrats would be more to the right than the national average perhaps, dragging the Democratic platform a bit more to the right. Whereas now, ~everyone in Kansas is Republican, so you don't have that effect.
It's the difference between taking the average position of the most liberal half of 50 random populations, some of which as a whole are more conservative than others, and just taking the most liberal half of the entire population. In the first scenario, the pre-communication era one, you still get some signal (within each state, the Democratic party is more liberal than the Republican), but it tempered by the difference in the base local orientation.
Another way to phrase this point is that politics became less a way to get things done locally than a game or entertainment for self-expression.
In a way, this lowers the stakes, and makes people less immediately accountable for indulging in pure partisanship.
If indulging in partisanship means the local library or road won't get built, I might rein myself in. If the effect is more diffuse, I have less incentive to do so.
While this is an argument some people might make, it is not the hypothesis Scott put forward, so you should avoid saying things like "Another way to phrase this point" that imply the two hypotheses are similar or isomorphic.
Its not necessarily a entertainment vs. "getting things done" split. On a purely self interest level, whether the national government implements universal healthcare or not, or crashes the economy, or starts wars, etc. has a massive impact on my life, bigger than local issues. And people's judgements aren't purely self interest but include moral/ideological preferences, if in another part of the country something bad is happening, then I would want to vote to stop it, even if it doesn't influence my daily life.
I read this book earlier this year and I found it very engaging (read it in 2 days), but was overall unsatisfied with his proposed solutions; particularly it did read to me that he was saying that the cure for polarization is for the Democratic Party to achieve complete and total victory.
What's amusing to me is that for some (myself included) this prescription is seen as accelerationist.
I picked up the exact same thread before reading your comment. So count me in, I guess.
'Total politics' - I'm sure that someone has coined this before but it seems a good term for the optimize-for-short-term gain Scott talked about.
Also interesting are the parallels between the 'cure for polarization by going *through* polarization to a total Democratic victory' thread you pick up on and the post-Landian discussions around accelerationism. Klein could be read as espousing a very moderate form of left-accelerationism (or perhaps a moderate u-accellarationism, if that is even coherent).
I think what you have to remember here is that we have a two-party system, and over time that system will always self-correct so that both parties have roughly equal access to power (averaged over decades).
If you change a rule so that Democrats have a big advantage (like, popular vote), Democrats may win the next election cycle by a lot, but that but means it's time for Republicans to re-adjust their branding and strategies to be competitive under the new rules. The system re-adjusts to equilibrium.
So, the question is, is the re-adjusted system better than the old one?
For instance, from Klein's perspective, does the new Republican party that wins under the new rules do so by being less focused on white identity politics, or less hostile towards sexual minorities, or some other compromise with centrists/mild leftists, in order to grab more of the centrist voters who were on the fence? If so, that's a win for the country from Klein's perspective, even if the Republicans end up winning elections again next year.
I think Klein is mistaken about what would improve Republican chances of success. Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
Yes, but he still did abysmally compared to Biden.
This is sort of like the 'eating burnt food increases your odds of cancer by 50%' thing - that's from .000001% to .0000015%. I'm not sure how meaningful it is to any larger discussions of population-level trends.
Trump actually won majority Hispanic parts of Florida & Texas vs Biden. And he'd already done better than prior Republicans with minorities when he ran against Clinton, so this was a continued trend. He lost this time because suburban whites shifted against him.
'hispanic parts of florida and texas' is getting into local weather records territory (eg, 'highest recorded windspeed during a storm of 2-5 inches rain/hour during March in Minewok, Illinois).
Given the number of different minorities and the number of different 'parts' (ie small geographic areas) across the country, you could easily get many thousands of such groups to measure. You should expect some of those to be outliers just by random chance, assuming anything like a normal distribution.
I'm not saying there was zero real effect - I'm just saying it was small, and cherry-picking the very specific places and measures on which it looks largest doesn't actually make it more impressive.
Florida & Texas are some of the most heavily hispanic states in the country, with multiple majority hispanic districts. There was initial skepticism of whether the exit polls showing his higher support were reliable, and place-based data confirmed it. Here are some actual numbers from those exit polls: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wins-highest-percent-of-nonwhite-voters-of-any-republican-in-60-years-doubles-lgbtq-support-from-2016-exit-poll/ar-BB1aJJJS
There are very few majority Hispanic areas that Trump actually *won*. He did a lot better than he did before, or Romney, but not reaching a majority.
> Trump did better among minorities than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
I'm having a very hard time seeing metrics where this is true, other than something facile like "raw number of votes received not adjusted for turnout or total population". For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?
To the core point, Trump outperforming GOP candidates that lost isn't quite tautological but comes damn close. It also isn't to surprising if there is a regression to the mean due to Obama's extremely strong minority support in '08 and '12.
Percentage, not raw numbers. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wins-highest-percent-of-nonwhite-voters-of-any-republican-in-60-years-doubles-lgbtq-support-from-2016-exit-poll/ar-BB1aJJJS
If you are treating a retracted tweet as a source, *several* thing have gone wrong with your process.
That url isn't to twitter, it's to a news article. The news article does contain one tweet, but goes through a lot of data in an exit poll which was not in that tweet. Could you provide a citation regarding Adrian Gray retracting anything?
"For a start, where does he beat Bush '04?"
Rio Grande Valley.
Apologies, that was an epistemological "where" instead of geographic. You can absolutely pick individual areas that have trended one way or another (and this is useful data for ground-level operations), but it's a large enough degree of freedom that it kills your statistical power. Broad claims about demographics absolutely require aggregated data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Exit_polling
According to exit polls on Wikipedia, Bush did much better among Hispanics and Asians than Trump, especially in 2004.
As someone who went from complaining about polarization/broadly skeptical of liberal orthodoxy to a 100% unmovable Democratic partisan in the Trump era, that's basically my take.
It's not possible to settle on a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium with people who cannot accept the bare results of an election: they are playing 'defect' right up to the destruction of the game itself. As of polls *after* 1/6, 70% of Republicans thought the results were illegitimate. (The number was nowhere close to as high - 28% - for Democrats even when their ultimate boogeyman Donald Trump was elected. Source is Morning Consult polls as cited at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/)
Actually, this might be an interesting question for the next survey. Conditional on partisanship, how many people think the 2020 election was fairly counted?
Counted? Or run?
The (IMO) unconstitutional election law in PA says to me that it wasn't run fairly, but I have reasonable confidence that the ballots were properly counted and probably weren't fabricated. (Modulo the usual trivial screwups)
The poll was framed as "counted", but I suspect respondents probably did not strongly distinguish the two.
I recall reading some comments that a high % of Democrats actually thought there was significant election fraud in 2020 as well, like 25%+, which I find bizarre
There is not a good chance they actually believe that. It goes down overtime. Its also worth noting that majority of democrats believed that russia hacked machines to win the 2016 election.
I vote mostly for Democrats but I don't know if this is the best idea. States like California where this has happened aren't exactly all that well governed -- and being a de facto single party state gives voters less influence & represents less healthy competition. The Republican electorate isn't about to go away, and Republican senators/representatives mostly seem more thoughtful and reasonable than the electorate they represent, so wrecking the GOP might just see those people replaced by true believers.
In case you are interested, here's my review from last year of Ezra's book:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-anti-larry-david/
Probably I should have some strong opinion on this, but I'm still focusing on the part where Ezra had a staff of eight for his blog. Not in a negative way - just trying to think about what I could do with a staff of eight. It would probably be a disaster - I don't have his managerial talent.
I believe Andrew Sullivan had a staff of ten at one point for his Daily Dish blog a number of years ago.
Maybe you should be one of the staffers rather than the manager then :P
You joke, but that's basically how a lot of small businesses based around a particular talent (musician, writer, artist, etc) work. The talent works on their area of expertise, and has someone else to do the "business stuff". Whether that person is notionally their manager or their employee is somewhat irrelevant as they are the main source of revenue.
Here's my issue with the Zach Goldberg chart: If you made one of those 60 years ago, most of the issues would have been stuff like interracial marriage, Jim Crow laws, damming the Grand Canyon (which Goldwater proposed). Go back another 50 years and you have child labor laws, women's suffrage, workplace safety laws. Go back further when public libraries, national parks, belief the Chinese will never ever assimilate, and the question of should humans be allowed to own other humans - were the hot button issues of the day. Stuff we basically identify now as progress.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now. Same with healthcare - of course the US shouldn't be the only wealthy nation on earth to deny people healthcare based on pre-existing conditions - that's just common sense. Of course [X group] will assimilate, and of course immigrants aren't a net drain on society.
History leans progressive. Many of the hot button issues of today become common sense of tomorrow. You can always make a chart that makes it look like progressives are going off the rails.
The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
The chart is agnostic as to whether the direction the Democrats are moving in is progress or insanity, it's just conveying the point that the Democrats are moving in a direction and the Republicans are staying still (or moving slowly in the same direction), rather than the sort of polarization where both parties move in opposite directions, or the Republicans get more conservative and the Democrats stay still, or anything like that.
Democrats aren't about to allow the Republicans to achieve any policy goals that their base actually wants, so the best they can really do is stay still.
Republicans had the "trifecta" from 2016-2018, and it seems like they did achieve their goals.
"Republicans did indeed secure their big high-end tax cut. They also got a major boost in defense spending, though mostly via appropriations deals with Democrats that gave them corresponding generosity in domestic spending the GOP would have preferred to reduce. And they did indeed use the budget reconciliation process for both their tax and Obamacare-repeal legislation to sidestep the Senate filibuster."
from: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/what-did-republicans-get-out-of-their-lost-trifecta.html
I suppose it was also a long term republican goal to avoid acknowledging climate change is real so leaving the Paris Accord was a major achievement?
And I suppose that having fresh new conflict on the border of turkey and Syria was another accomplishment?
Its a bit hard to know exactly what Republican's goals are some times. But i guess we can assume that a Republican's actions are achieving Republican goals.
And they captured many of the courts for the next million years which I guess is considered progress towards their policy goal of overturning Roe V Wade and maybe getting of workplace protection for LGBT people.
I guess they didn't build as much Wall as they wanted.
My question is to you: If there was some big, long-term policy goal that Republican's are trying to do, did they propose it in 2016-2018 and it failed?
In my opinion the Republicans simply don't have that many grand shared policy goals and seem more interested in obsessing over pop-culture social issues.
My point is if you don't take into account basic incremental progress that all society undergoes, of course it will always look like the progressives are going off the rails to the left.
If we're going to say it means something that Conservatives won't budge while progressives change their opinions and move left, then let's take it back further to the hot button issues of yesteryear. I think most would consider it fairly radical for someone to still be against interracial marriage today. Yet if it's somehow illustrative to look at who moved and who didn't - I guess the person who is still against interracial marriage gets some kind of credit for being the one who didn't change? If not, then why are we implicitly giving Republicans some kind of leg up here for being the ones who didn't budge on gay marriage or pre-existing conditions?
Refusing to budge on slavery in 1860 is pretty radical when you take into account what the rest of the world was doing at the time. Who changed their opinion on the issue and who didn't really isn't illustrative of anything. Or if it is - I would contend the group who doesn't change their opinion generally comes out the worst in history on most issues - which I am pretty sure is not the intended point those charts showing Dems moving left.
The point isn't that there hasn't been social progress over the years, the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong. If you include the issues from yesteryear, what you'll see is that the Democrats have gotten significantly more liberal on them, and the Republicans have also gotten more liberal. Obviously, slavery is outside the Overton window right now, along with your other examples.
What the chart shows is that Democrats have gotten much more liberal on a host of issues, while the Republicans have gotten more liberal on some, and more conservative on others (with a long tail towards more liberal, just eyeballing it). Adding older issues would just make the Republicans look more liberal-trending, which is the opposite of the original claim, that the Republicans have "gone completely off the rails".
I understand that. But my point is if you could somehow subtract out basic progress, it could easily look the other way. You might see that Democrats are basically drifting with the current of progress, while Republicans are actively fighting against it. That's the reason I don't find these "who moved where" charts very meaningful.
I'm not sure what you mean by subtract out basic progress. How would you construct a chart that makes it look like Republicans are going off the rails while Democrats are remaining constant. Do you mean adding points like "view of gay marriage vs the societal mean" and showing how those are trending more conservative (because the mean changed while the Republicans stayed put)?
Republicans and Democrats used to generally agree about increasing the minimum wage over time. Nixon and Johnson both did it. Now, Democrats still think that we should increase the minimum wage over time, while Republicans don't. A similar framing can be used for basically all of these issues.
Imagine the underlying chart was moving to the left (as progress does). Now Democrats are just drifting with the chart and Republicans are actively moving against the chart. All of this is based on looking at past hot button issues which became the common sense of the next generation and extrapolating out that stuff like gay marriage will be the common sense of the next generation.
Obviously there's no real way to quantify it. But then again these charts are pretty subjective to begin with. If you want to make a point you can always run the study enough different ways and cherry-pick the results you want. I used to work for a statistical consulting firm. That's all we did.
Plot the two parties against the median voter, basically.
The dataset can be shifted to make the republicans look like they are going off the rails instead of democrats.
If we plotted the Democrats' and Republicans' viewpoints against the average trends in peer nations like Canada, Germany, Uk, etc., then we would end in a chart where the Republican's are swinging further and more extremely to the right, and the democrats, are all also shifting more slightly to the right.
So including and focussing on the above chart where Republicans stay the same, is implicitly suggesting that America n years ago was some kind of ideal that its good to stick with. Choosing to compare against other peer nations shifts the values to a more progressive set.
So I guess you can just choose which chart you want. You want the Democrats to look like they are going off the rails, then compare them to the Democrats 20, 50 or 100 years ago. If you want the Republicans to look like they are going off the rails, compare to similarly wealthy nations.
I feel like people sometimes willfully forget how comically right-wing the american left-wing is by international standards.
>the point is that the claim "the Democrats have been getting more liberal, and the Republicans have been getting more conservative" is wrong.
But as I understand it, that's very much *not* the claim.
The claim is something closer to 'Democrats are relatively stable, and Republicans have gotten really crazy over the years.'
If social consensus/civilizational advancement is trending in one direction, and one party stays in step with it while the other gets further and further away from it, then this would seem to loosely support *that* argument.
Your argument is based entirely on rejecting Republicans as being part of American society:
'Democrats are rapidly moving to the left, so society is moving rapidly to the left, which means that Republicans are radicals for not moving along with society.'
Yet if you accept that Republicans are as much part of society as Democrats, then this framing is absurd.
Yes or no, average approval rating towards legalizing gay marriage across all Americans has increased dramatically in the last 30 years?
'Republican voters' is not half of the population; in a year with record-breaking turnout, Trump got 75million votes, or about 23% of the total population of the US.
It's very possible for Republican voters to stay still, and for society as a whole to move on without them. Even when you average them into 'society'.
Yes, if you set the frame to move at 20 mph, then the progressives moving at 22 mph look stable and the conservatives moving at 5 mph are veering into a ditch.
If you set the frame to 0 mph, then the 22 mph progs are in the ditch and the 5 mph cons look stable.
And the best part of all is that where you believe the frame should be set will be determined by, you guessed it, whether you're a con or a prog and the prior associated with each.
I think its a mistake to try and map polarization to some particular set of issues. Better to map it to what the views of the population are. As the median voter has shifted more "progressive" on the issues you mention, the democrats have also become more progressive, staying slightly more progressive than the median voter. Whereas if the set of beliefs the republicans have the unchanging, but fewer and fewer people in the general population hold them, then they are getting further from the average voter
By "the rest of the world" do you just mean the British empire? Because they were forcing what we would now call the third world to give up slavery. It didn't have to be abolished in continental Europe because it had already been replaced by serfdom there long ago.
It depends on the framing! If your question is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no". If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no".
But surely that framing, which uses a nominal dollar amount, is just silly, right? $7 in 1980 isn't $7 in 2021. The first "Inflation calculator" I happened to google says it would be $22 in 2021, and even if that specific number is off, it would certainly be much higher than $7.
You make a mistake in this analysis focusing on particular policy positions. The reason Republicans are seen as going off the rails is their relationship to the truth and democratic systems, not because of their positions on capital gains taxes or infrastructure spending. Storming the Capitol, rejecting election results, believing a deadly virus is a hoax, arming as if for war, embracing violence, casting their opponents as pedophiles — these are the things “going off the rails” means. The Republican Party has been less and less concerned with public policy (Republicans didn’t bother to draft a platform in 2020), and more and more concerned with maintaining power, with or without democracy. Malcolm X wasn’t considered radical because he sought expanded civil rights; so did MLK. It was because he advocated doing so “by any means necessary.” The Republicans are analogous.
These actions are attributed to republicans by democrats. You describe fringe group activity and falsely attribute it to all republicans. This is nonsense.
On this issue, a majority believe there were serious violations of constitutional law, software "glitches," and ballot shady ballot harvesting that may have and probably did effect the outcome. There are statistical arguments warranting an investigation, of which there was none to date. This is a legitimate concern, though your use of that slogan, though catchy, isn't helpful. The other things you mention are in fact edge cases not much crazier than the last four years of screaming Russia did it talk and investigations that came to nothing from Democrats.
There was quite a bit of investigation - several dozen lawsuits, most obviously. Zero of which won, and quite a lot of which were thrown out for a lack of evidence before even making it to trial - basically, that's judge-speak for "Even if everything you say is true, and the other side doesn't show up, you /still/ couldn't prove your case".
I'm fine with investigating, and defended Trump's right to file those lawsuits. But let's be honest, the investigations turned up nothing more than dry wells and stupidity.
Months of nationwide leftist rioting. 25-30 deaths. Over 2 billion dollars in wanton destruction. Thousands of assaults and injuries.
All of it institutionally encouraged, supported, and even funded by the corporate, institutional left at every level.
Your faux-righteous indignation over January 6th is hilarious.
I'm curious, did any Democratic house or senate members ever condone the violent part of the protests/riots?
I don't know the answer to that^, just genuinely curious.
To me it seems like maybe Trumps actions immediately prior to, and during the jan 6th thing were on another level.
What I mean is, from what i know most Democrat representatives have tweeted support for Black Lives Matter. But did they, knowing send messages of support for rioters during a riot, when members of congress were being threaten with nooses, etc? There's also the difference of communicating from the presidents office, being the one who is supposed to call the national guard and keep the peace, etc.
Not to mention stoking tensions and inflaming your base, by drilling lies about stolen elections into their heads for months.
I also dispute that "leftist riots" are to blame for all the terrible things you mentionned. Its a well known and well documented fact that police used aggressive and violent escalations against protesters and turned many peaceful situations into violent ones. Who's to blame for that?
There are many videos of police kettling protesters, tear gassing them for no reason, knocking them down for no reason. Just remember trumps bible photo op that he did.
And the left is seen as going off the rails because of things like riots, destruction of property, CHAZ, Covid restrictions selectively enforced against religion, conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, Title IX, Biden getting a pass with #metoo, etc.
Some other equivalents:
believing a deadly virus is a hoax - believing travel restrictions are racist
casting their opponents as pedophiles - casting their opponents as racists, sexists etc.
how are those in any way related to each other?
If some people believe that travel restrictions are racist, thats an independent claim that could be evaluated on its own. You could look into whether there's a clear scientific basis for the travel restrictions, or whether experts are recommending it, and you could probably come to a conclusion.
its not related to some other people thinking a deadly virus is a hoax. that's a separate thing.
I'm not saying it's related, I'm saying it's equivalently crazy.
What's key here as well is the radicalization of the right following the widespread overreaction to 9/11. I suspect Republicans' stances on issues like accountability for war crimes, torture, surveillance and the place of Muslims in US society have shifted pretty far "to the right."
Aside from the thematic conflict of the metaphors involved, I don't think that 'staying in one place' and 'going off the rails' are mutually exclusive.
Consider evaporative cooling of group beliefs. As the beliefs of a group are either proven to be flawed or merely go out of fashion, we expect a lot of people to abandon those beliefs. The ones who still hold them in the future may be much more abnormal (in ways that could be called 'off the rails'), and they may hold them in ways that are very different (more fanatical, more oppositional, less data-driven, more conspiratorial, etc).
X years ago, it would be pretty normal for most enlightened scholars to believe in phlogiston. But if a scholar today believed in phlogiston, it would be very likely that they were 'off the rails' in some important way, even though they 'merely stayed in place' all that time.
> The point isn't that "progressives are going off the rails", the point is that if you claim polarization is because Republicans are going off the rails, you have to contend with data that Republicans are just staying where they are.
Staying where you are in a time of such rapid change *is* radical.
The Amish stayed where they are for the last century and a half or so. I don't think anyone alive would say they aren't the very definition of a fringe group. So why doesn't the same go for the religious right?
At one time, everyone thought smoking was fine. Then we found out it wasn't. Someone who refused to update their beliefs about smoking and continued to claim it doesn't cause damage would rightly be considered a dangerous lunatic today. So why doesn't the same go for climate-change deniers?
Polarization may not be the right word for it, but to stay where one is is not a passive act. For a person who is informed, it requires an active choice to take the knowledge one could gain and reject it. It isn't sitting still in a calm sea, it's swimming against a clear current so as not to move with it.
Policy positions are largely not knowledge based, but values based. The comparison with smoking is not appropriate.
They made the comparison between smoking and climate change. The comparison is extraordinarily appropriate and extremely common, because second hand smoke and carbon emissions are negative externalities illuminated by scientific research.
Carbon emissions are also positive externalities. They decrease deaths from cold winters, increase crop yield through CO2 fertilization, make more land warm enough for humans to live in. The popular catastrophic climate change rhetoric counts only the negative externalities and makes no attempt to actually calculate whether the net externality is positive or negative, as an actually knowledge-based argument would do.
I am skeptical-at-best of these claims, but I don't think we even need reach them. The value judgement has to follow the acknowledgement that (a) the planet is warming and (b) human emissions are why. Virtually all experts with any knowledge in the area agree on these facts. But the public does not.
84% of liberal Democrats say human activity contributes "a great deal" to climate change; only 14% of conservative Republicans agree (it scales smoothly from one to the other, source: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/). Conversely, 59% of conservative Republicans think natural forces contribute a great deal; only 14% of liberal Democrats agree.
Again, one of these positions simply is in line with overwhelming scientific consensus, and the other is not.
So is second-hand smoke, right? Also a positive externality? Because some people like the smell. And it keeps away people who would whine about the smell, which many appreciate.
Sorry I'm having trouble figuring out why "but this could also be good in some ways" means we can't call things negative externalities anymore. My belief is actually that emissions are a *net* negative externality.
Is your complaint in this reply, then, that I have to say "net" whenever I say negative externality now? You haven't really specified in this reply whether you just want to point out that many have failed to do a cost-benefit analysis, or whether you actually think warming nets out positive.
Wouldn't a knowledge-based argument accept that we simply don't know or can't know the entire effects of Climate Change at this point?
Is it really possible to sum up all the pros and cons of co2 emitting activities?
I think the consensus on the left is that its bad to take enormous unnecessary risks that could potentially cause enormous amounts of human suffering.
I mean, potentially that suffering will never occur because someone will invent some amazing tech solution next year that blocks sun rays, or captures carbon from the air, but that doesn't change the fact that the wise thing to do now is to take the careful route with less risk.
I think I head somewhere that the anti-second-hand-smoke thing was unscientific as it turns out?
But by staying still they are getting further from what the median voter believes. So are more polarized in the sense that they are getting further from that midpoint. Whereas the democrats may be further left than the median voter, but they are staying consistently the same amount further left, and updating as the middle moves.
Seeing the things you list and others as being part of a singular tradition is your interpretation of them. Certain people on the center right will insist that the modern definition of racial progress is antithetical to the definition of racial progress as concerns the civil rights movement. old school Feminists being outflanked by Tran rights issues is another example where depending on your outlook, progress 1.0 and progress 2.0 run parallel, orthogonal, or opposite. This hasn't happened quite yet but the very notion of universal healthcare in the US might be undermined by the idea that race-based-means-tested government healthcare is morally superior to universal healthcare.
Moral outlooks, including and especially those of the last hundred years, are not mathematical conjectures that are suddenly proven by some academic and then accepted for the rest of human history.
It's certainly true that all intentional change which catches on gets called 'progress' retroactively, regardless of it's actual direction on any number of axes.
That said, society does *change* consistently, in one way or another; anyone who doesn't change with it is out of step with society for some reason, and that trait of being out of step is likely correlated with a lot of other traits that might be of interest to this discussion.
How is this different from 'might makes right,' where you are not radical if you have the power to shape (and indoctrinate) society?
By the same reasoning, Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
It isn't. There is a sort of natural selection of ideologies and policies, where the victors get to be called progress and natural order of things, and the defeated - backwardness and villainy.
I think one of the reason for polarization that isn't often mentioned is the total ideological victory of the West in the Cold War, led by USA. The Civilized World was happily united in their fear and hatred of the Obviously Evil Extremely Dangerous enemy for many decades, and then suddenly it disappeared, or at least was greatly diminished for a time.
There was a brief euphory about this, The End of History and all that, but it turned out that the West still had many problems and no obvious enemy to blame and hate, and so it began hurting itself in its confusion.
> Stalinists nor Nazis were radical, because their beliefs were in step with society...
I'm pretty sure this just isn't true, and that's why they both needed strict police states to keep their own populace in check. But I'm not a historian, so I won't argue it.
But nothing I'm saying here is about right vs wrong. It's merely an observation that people who are many standard deviations away from their culture's accepted norms and values tend to be weird people, regardless of what those values and norms happen to be.
I'm not really smart enough to grasp what all this means. I just like to keep it simple and go with examples I can wrap my head around. Off the top of my head here's a list of progressive causes in the last 200 years in the US that were controversial hot button issues in one generation, and common sense in the next:
40 hour workweek
child labor laws
women's suffrage
ending slavery
ending Jim Crow
ending poll taxes and literacy tests
desegregation
toll-free interstate highway system
national parks
public libraries
miranda rights
Medicare/medicaid/disability insurance
unemployment insurance
OSHA
USDA
Americans with Disabilities Act
Labor Day
Clean Air and Water acts
California emissions
workplace harassment laws
interracial marriage
gay marriage
minimum wage
smoking bans
seatbelt laws
nutrition labels on food
calorie counts in restaurants
killing onerous bank overdraft fees
lemon laws
pre-existing conditions shouldn't make health insurance impossible to get
.
.
**Now here are the ones I think went wrong:**
Prohibition
55-mph speed limit (although we probably should have stuck with that for our grandkid's sake)
rent control (maybe causes more problems than it helps)
That's my list. What am I missing?
.
I'm not talking about something someone yelled at a protest, or a scientific fad in the 1800s when science was basically in its infancy and doctors still used leeches. I'm talking about actionable progressive policy - like the examples in both my lists above - that went wrong or right. I get the idea of survivorship bias. But surely we should be able to come up with a few more actual implemented progressive policies that went wrong, right?
It looks to me like several of those in your list are still being opposed, or are being given lip service while being commonly evaded, and not just by those on the fringe.
Official (legally required) segregation seems to have been replaced by an individually chosen form of the same old thing. Jim Crow also seems to be protean.
Minimum wage is routinely opposed - by some respectable set of US right wingers. And some economic orthodoxy.
Workplace harassment laws seem to me to be frequently seen as on the one hand, excuses for empathy-less HR reps to make trouble for innocent people - and on the other hand, to be a toothless tiger for any employee seen as sufficiently valuable, particularly managers, executives, etc. At least in a subset of companies, some of which are notorious. (Uber is my go-to example of such a reputation.)
The "Americans with Disabilities Act" is another case of a bureaucracy decried for imposing meaningless requirements to accommodate hypothetical people - while at the same time Apple's architectural award winning new headquarters building had to have retrofits for simple things like access to washrooms for people in wheelchairs.
And I haven't noticed any reduction in absurd fees from rapacious banks.
And oh yeah, public libraries are great - but there's very often no room for them in the civic budget. I tend to be pleasantly surprised - and spend a lot less at e.g. Amazon - when I live somewhere that has such a thing.
And poll taxes and literacy tests seem to just get replaced with other ways to keep the "wrong" people from easily voting. I.e. lip service, from most, but inadequate implementation. again.
Clean Air and Water acts - it's politically mainstream in the US to decry the EPA for imposing excessive costs, delays and uncertainty, in favor of species that aren't cute or photogenic and thus don't matter. Few people want the river they live near to catch on fire, or smog to the point of measurable impacts on life expectancy <em>for them</em>. But they seem a lot less clear about the environment that other people live in.
I think you're much too quick to dismiss survivorship bias, honestly. There have been thousands of ideas brought up by what we might now call progressives that have been rejected for various reasons. This often happens in their infancy, killed by other progressive types who know it will not work. Often it happens when the ideas are introduced to a wider audience and their flaws are identified.
In a functioning society, very few ideas will live to get implemented without a thorough vetting. When that happens (prohibition), it's often regretted and reversed.
Your list appears to be an attempt to recommend further progressive policy, but may in fact recommend the thorough vetting of thousands of ideas more than it recommends cart blanche approval of progressive planning.
I'm late to the party, but I think you're missing Social Security as something that went wrong. Regardless of whether you are in favor of such social programs, the implementation was based on faulty premises: the larger, younger population will transfer money to the smaller, older population; that population will generally continue to increase; that 30 years working is enough to fund indefinite retirement.
We now know that it's a better plan, generally, to have forced savings. If each individual's Social Security taxes were instead invested for the benefit of those paying them, then the plan could never run out of money.
As a conservative, I think people should be responsible for their own retirement planning, and am against the government getting involved in it. But I accept that many people don't know even the basic principles of financial planning, and that liberals want to provide help to everyone. As a compromise, then, I understand the need for government intervention. But the implementation of Social Security is fundamentally flawed.
Who is the we that knows this thing?
I thought it was generally recognized that 401k plans are the way to go, instead of Social Security, which I also thought everyone thinks is going to run out of funding. Easily found example: https://www.cnbc.com/select/will-social-security-run-out-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
From where I sit, that's merely a US conservative talking point, that they hope will be believed if they repeat it often enough.
The advantage of social security and similar schemes, is that they distribute risk. In particular, the risk that you will live longer than expected, and outlive your savings. When planning for retirement, I had to save as if I might reach 95th percentile or even higher life span. It's equally likely that I'll only reach 5th percentile. With any kind of pooled risk scheme (like social security, or old fashioned private pensions) that risk averages out, and the amount needed per person is only the 50th percentile amount. (Perhaps a bit more, to allow for potentially increasing lifespans.)
The rest of the common talking point is social security running out of money, for what seem to me to be primarily political reasons. If politics doesn't allow social security to be managed providently, or contributions to be increased, or for that matter the country to import young adults to pay into the system, that doesn't mean that an entirely different type of scheme would be better. It means that US politics is dysfunctional.
I see your point, but even if you subtract a "basic progress" metric it still looks like democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm - for example, net support for gay marriage moved up 45 points in ten years (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/06/26/support-for-same-sex-marriage-grows-even-among-groups-that-had-been-skeptical/), while it took over twice that for the same shift in interracial marriage.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Public_opinion_of_interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States.png )
In the pew research link you sent, there's a chart breaking down support for gay marriage by political party between 2007-2017.
Republicans go from 20%to 47% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
Democrats go from 49% to 76% (2017) in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
It looks like they both parties followed the same trend and went up 27% to me. So i'm a bit curious on what you mean by:
"democrats are moving much faster than the historical norm".
I guess you mean that the whole population is changing its mind faster on this issue, than it did for interracial marriage?
Then maybe a new question is: how fast should progress go?
I would argue as fast as we can while maintaining strong democratic institutions. Its hard for me to think of a way to make this specific though. Did we go too slow changing our minds on interracial marriage or too fast on gay marriage?
How fast do we want the other party to be able to move?
"In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married. The only people opposing it will be the hardcore wingnut types who still oppose inter-racial marriage now" I think the same-sex marriage vs interracial marriage equivalence doesn't work.
You have religious and cultural traditions about marriage going back thousands of years, which are still adhered to by a majority of people in the majority of countries in the world; the idea that those traditions are wrong is (to a great extent) a historical novelty, an idea which is less than a century old, 20 years ago most people in first world countries opposed it, and even now, the majority of countries still have majority opposition to it.
By contrast, interracial marriage bans are much more of a historical anomaly. You can count on one hand the number of countries that have ever had formalised bans on interracial marriage – the vast majority of countries never have. It is not an idea with thousands of years of heritage behind it, in fact it only really dates to the 17th century.
Overturning something which has existed for a few centuries maximum, and only ever in a handful of countries, is a lot easier than overturning something that goes back thousands of years, and is found in the majority of countries around the world.
In 20 years time, there will still be a substantial minority opposed to same-sex marriage. It quite possibly will have shrunk somewhat – although the high birth rate of religious ultra-conservatives counteracts that – but it certainly will be a lot larger than the minority opposed to interracial marriage will be.
Just to be clear your position is that interracial marriage bans are easier to overturn because they only existed for a few hundred years, while you believe formal gay marriage bans have exited for thousands?
How does your hypothesis account for Shaked Koplewitz's comment above, that gay marriage support went up 45 points in ten years while it took 20 years to elicit a similar shift against support of interracial marriage? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-why-were-polarized#comment-1227231
Because the interracial marriage work was done first. Part of the gay marriage argument was "this is the Civil Rights of our time!" and part of that was deliberately making the comparison with interracial marriage. So people who had grown up with "ban on interracial marriage wrong and bad and evil" were much more likely to be persuaded on "ban on gay marriage wrong and bad and evil" because the deliberate comparison had been made "you don't want to be a *racist*, do you? of course not! but being anti-gay marriage is the exact same thing as being a racist who was anti-interracial marriage!"
That argument only really works in the US though, because it is one of the few countries in which a ban on interracial marriage existed and became a big political issue. The vast majority of countries never banned interracial marriage; even in the few others that did, it almost never became a major political debate. (A good example of that is France, which had on-and-off-again bans on interracial marriage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they often went unenforced, and eventually finally disappeared without most people even noticing – indeed, most French people forgot they ever existed, if they ever knew they existed to begin with.) It probably also has some salience in highly Americanised Western countries (especially English-speaking ones), but that says more about the cultural dominance of the United States than anything else. I don't think you'd get very far with that kind of US-centric argument in most of the Middle East, Africa or Asia.
I know your topic is specific to marriage, but how does your thesis account for what appears to be the greater overall stubbornness of racial discrimination in the United States? It's been 165 years since the end of the Civil War, yet racial discrimination and bigotry hang on stubbornly. Marriage equality and other civil rights for gay Americans seems to be gaining acceptance at a much quicker pace. Seemingly, if the taboo against homosexuality, because it is so ancient, has a stronger hold on the culture than bigotry on the basis of race, there would be far higher resistance across a host of issues. But that seems to be the opposite of what we see.
So one big difference is to what extent we are dealing with a US-specific phenomenon versus a global phenomenon. Interracial marriage bans were largely specific to the US, few other countries have ever had them, and their defenders in the US found few supporters in other countries. By contrast, a majority of the global population – even in 2021 – still supports limiting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Conservative American Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have been receiving support from Christians in Africa (and other parts of the world) where opposition is still the clear majority position, and there is no certainty it won't still be in 20 years time – witness the strong support African Anglican churches gave to the conservative ACNA breakaway from the US Episcopal Church, and their strong support for a global Anglican alliance in defence of traditional sexual morality, GAFCON. By contrast, American Christians who defended interracial marriage on religious grounds found very little support from overseas Christians. I think globalisation and increased diversity of immigration add to the picture – conservative American Christians can today call on support from conservative Christians in the Global South, in a way in which they couldn't have in earlier decades even if those Christians had been inclined to support them (which on the issue of interracial marriage they were not). And I think broadly the same point applies to some other religions as well, such as Islam.
If you made one of those charts in the prior progressive era, it would have included major progressive issues like eugenics and prohibition. It's easy to construct a narrative saying that things are coherently moving in a certain direction if you ignore everything inconvenient to its narrative. It's a teleological view without a clear telos, and a historiography, quite frankly, based on flattering the preconceptions of people like you.
History leans Christian. And at least a Christian view of history has a clear telos. Yet somehow I doubt you believe that Jesus is coming back.
Eugenics was quack science seized on by racists. That's nonsense. I'll give you prohibition.
Sure, that is how we view it now: quack science seized on by racists. But plenty of intellectuals of the day championed it. Maybe people a hundred years from now will say similar things about any number of progressive issues out there right now. My point isn't that X issue is good and Y issue is bad.
My point is the opposite: some perspective and epistemic humility make it quite hard to view something as progress before you really know how it will turn out.
The fundamental problems with eugenics aren't scientific, even though the science used to support some specific implementations of eugenics has been rubbish.
There's no fundamental scientific problem with the idea that people would overall be better off if more people tended to be born with genes for better health, fitness and intelligence, though. The problem is in translating that into an actual policy that isn't somewhere between "horrifying" and "really really really horrifying".
Eugenics is a classic "progressive" policy. "Progressive" policies tend to be about boldly making big changes to society because they sound like a nice idea at the time while giving insufficient thought to the unintended consequences which in practice tend to always outweigh the intended ones. Eugenics is one of those idas that sounds like a great plan when you've thought about it for five minutes but turns out to be horrible when you've actually done it for two decades.
The reason that I'm (mostly) a conservative is not that "progressives" are always wrong, but because they often are, and because I think the world right now needs more people capable of saying "Hey now, stop right there, think about the unintended consequences" and fewer who say "Hey guys I have a radical proposal to fix everything!"
Matt S, a lot of people think that woke beliefs are in large part based on quack science seized on by anti-white racists.
Being quack science seized on by racists doesn't mean it's not a progressive issue. It was promoted by progressives as part of a progressive ideology to remake society.
The science wasn't the problem — some human characteristics that matter are heritable, and humans have been changing animal strains by selective breeding for a very long time. And the people who "seized on it" included Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, ... . Its principal opponent was the Catholic Church.
"History leans progressive" is an illusion created by survivorship bias. Only the issues on which progressives eventually win get branded as "progress".
When the "progressives" win, things change, and this is branded as progress. When the progressives lose, nothing changes, the issue is forgotten, and the change for which they fought is retrospectively rebranded as "not progress".
I was really struck by this when I started reading GK Chesterton. Now, GK Chesterton was a fusty old conservative even in his day, so in a world where "progress" was a genuine direction in political space you'd expect his writings to be busy defending ideas that nowadays seem ridiculously old-fashioned. And yet he's not, he's mostly out there defending sensible principles, because the "progressives" of his day were in favour of forms of "progress" such as the abolition of private homes and families for the benefit of a government-mandated eugenics program.
Prohibition was a massive progressive failure. But it's not like we all forgot about it.
I can rattle off about 50 off the top of my head where one era's controversial issue became the next generation's common sense.
This is my observation too. I've tried to think: "If I take an outside view and place my self randomly sometime in the last 200 years, were the liberals or conservatives more likely to be correct / moving in the right direction?" And I found that both sides are likely to be wrong about a ton of things, obsessed about a ton of things that really don't matter, but when they have clearly articulated differences the liberals are probably more right about social issues and more wrong on economic ones.
There's plenty of exceptions. But if you're trying to figure out what your priors should be: liberals are probably right on social issues and more likely than not to be wrong economic ones is probably a good place to start (then obviously update on the evidence in the specific case).
How are you measuring "right on social issues"? Are you simply determining which you agree on today, that were argued [X] years ago?
"the correctness of that world view was so clear, so dominant"
Actually the majority of British people today would welcome a massive nationalisation programme – at least for rail, water and energy. See the survey below. "State ownership is still the preferred option for a majority of people across most of the industries we asked about."
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/05/19/nationalisation-vs-privatisation-public-view
Everyone is in favor of lots of stuff when responding to surveys and costs are not factored in. This is true of every pet project of any camp - not just nationalization. Ask people if they want better sports stadiums on surveys and they are in favor. Ask them in the next election if they want to implement a tax hike to pay for better sports stadiums, and they vote it down (at least here in the US). Thus, the joke about Abortions for Some, Free tiny American Flags for Everyone!
'Corbyn, who got crushed in the last election and was since replaced'
This is true, but a bit misleading. Corbyn fought two elections not one, and although he got crushed the second time, he did quite well in the first one, only losing narrowly and improving on Labour's performance 2 years earlier. Indeed, Labour gained their largest % of the overall vote since 2001 in the 2017 election. Further, what changed between 2017 and 2019 was not Corbyn's leftist economic policies (it was something of a factor that the 2019 manifesto promised more spending, but by no means the most important) but the fact that anti-Brexit people had become radicalized and didn't see Corbyn as anti-Brexit enough while (more important) pro-Brexit voters now saw him as trying to overturn the referendum.
You're take that Corbyn lost because ordinary voters saw that his economic policies were crazy-because-socialist is suspicious, because it implies voters vote on policy, and there is very little evidence that that is true. I have to say that when Corbyn was elected Labour leader, I thought his leftism would doom him, because people would trust the mainstream media's claims that he was extreme (which of course, in one sense he was, he did represent a big shift to the left, love it or loathe it). But after 2017, I stopped thinking that this was anything like a strong enough effect to guarantee that a politician as far-left as Corbyn couldn't become PM.
To be fair, it is a little hard to say just what 2017 indicates, because the Tories ran a famously shitty campaign, resulting in Labour soaring in the polls relative to where they were at the start, when they were 20 points behind and it really did seem like 'Corbyn too socialist to achieve anything other than massive defeat' was the right take.
That doesn't mean that the current beliefs of progressives will become the common sense of the future. For example, racial 'blindness' was the progressive standpoint of progressives of yesteryear (see MLK's most famous quote), but current progressives advocate judging people by their race. So either people who had similar beliefs to MLK were radicals who didn't have 'common sense', or the current progressives are radicals who don't have 'common sense'.
You entire argument hinges on your claim that you know that the current beliefs by progressives will become the common sense of the future, which you cannot know. We can certainly point to others who falsely thought the same thing, like communists.
'Progressives advocate judging people by their race'. This is something of a strawman. It probably fits well with how some social justice types on twitter actually behave on twitter. But virtually no one actually defends 'form a judgment of how virtuous any individual is on the basis of their race.
There are scores of articles and papers on the evils of whiteness and white people. Just one example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/racism-white-women.html
I'm honestly getting real tired of people who claim that this is not happening.
Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. I don't think anyone would call them anything other than progressives.
That framing in that article-treating this as something white women do as a collective rather than as something individuals have done-is bad and racist and bigoted (doesn't *necessarily* mean the phenomenon it's talking about isn't real: compare a racist on the right talking about high crime rates in black inner city areas) but it's not advocating for the position 'judge individuals on the basis of their race' but rather saying that there is a problematic trend in white culture with using the idea that black men are a threat to white women to control or drum up violence against black men. I actually think very few bigots on either the left or right *ever* advocate directly for "judge individuals on the basis of their race', post-Jim Crow, apart from actual Nazis* and Nation of Islam black supremacist-types. King's famous remark in the I Have a Dream speech made sense because he was talking in the context of laws that forbade *all* blacks from doing certain things, but that's seldom advocated for these days against either whites or blacks. (At least at a legal level.)
*Even not all of them maybe. The son of the guy who runs Stormfront once said in an interview with the NYT about him abandoning white supremacy that his parents were generally fine with people of colour on an individual level, and that there
'Every university to argue in front of SCOTUS in favor of affirmative action was doing so in order to retain the power to judge people based on their race. '
Again, not really (regardless of one's views on the wisdom of affirmative action, a topic on which I don't have strong views.) They usual defences of Affirmative Action are that it will a) make society equal overall by giving blacks more power (on the assumption that they currently have less than their fair share), b) will somehow compensate blacks as a group for past injustice, c) will lead to greater "diversity" of experiences amongst the student population and hence a richer educational experience (maybe no one actually believes this one, but officially this is the *only* legal justification for affirmative action) or d) help compensate for the fact that the grades of black students don't reflect their actual levels of talent because of racism. Now maybe all of a-d) are total bullshit, I'm not taking a stand on that, but none of them involve deciding that whites are worse students or worse people because they are white.
In 20 years gay marriage will be the same - duh, of course gay people should be allowed to get married.
Maybe. But what about bet on other progressive ideas? What is your bet on efficacy of "defund the police" movement and overall policies on crime? What about progressive ideas on how to solve homelesness and drug addiction problem we see on West Coast? What about progressive ideas on housing crisis? What about progressive ideas on fighting systemic racism by implementing large scale diversity trainings? Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?
I think most of these will fail spectacularly and then will be just whitewashed. "No true Progressive" believed in these ideas back then. They only believed in ideas that proved to be successful.
"Are all of these the beacons of the future inevitably resulting in bright future?"
Seems like it. Under what circumstances do you expect the Republican Party to seriously fight them?
"History leans progressive" isn't even true for one country (America) in one short time period (1960-2020). Economically, public policy since Reagan is significantly to the right of where it was in the 1960-70s. The anti-tax movement is one of the most successful political movements in American history. Unions are far weaker than they used to be; the minimum wage has plummeted when adjusted for inflation; state control of the economy is largely anathema, replaced by a neoliberal consensus that both parties subscribe to.
Following up on my previous comment, it's definitely not true that history leans progressive overall. History is fundamentally unpredictable. In 100 BC, Rome was a semi-democratic republic where you could more or less express your political opinions and believe in whatever religion you want. Its philosophers tended to be rationalists, skeptical of religion and smiling on its absurd pieties. Then the centuries-old republic fell, replaced by the Augustan autocracy. Then an obscure religion rose out of a backwater desert in the Middle East and took over Europe. By 500 AD, this religion had an iron grip on politics and philosophy; the rational skepticism of 100 BC turned into the all-consuming theological autocracy of the Middle Ages, an orthodoxy enforced by the mob, the kings, and the clergy. Christianity was spreading so fast that Christians must have thought it would take over the world. Then a random orphan in another brutal desert invented a new faith and united the tribes of Arabia; shortly after his death, his followers destroyed one superpower (Persia) and nearly destroyed the Christian Roman Empire within a single generation.
What will happen in 500 years? There's no reason a theocratic autocracy enforced by mass digital surveillance can't happen. Insert your favorite boogeyman as the religion (Christianity, Islam, social justice...)
I hope someday you sincerely try to tackle the "why cant we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" question.
It seems to be the most pressing current question. Unfortunately, It does not appear to me that the left takes it seriously. The left answer appears to be "more of what we have been doing, and do it with new people."
On the right, there are some who write directly about the question and try to sincerely answer it, though very few people of stature bother to address the arguments.
I would love to see you take a serious shot at answering that question from the ground floor.
You should read the left more. "Everything stopped working around 1970, because neoliberalism" is basically dogma on the left; "why can't we go to the moon and why is our government objectively awful?" was <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/issue/failure-is-an-option">the theme of the most recent issue of Jacobin</a>.
Of course you might think that the left diagnoses are wrong, or that their remedies would make it worse, but that's separate from the left not taking the question seriously.
I probably do not pay enough attention to the non-neoliberal, non-woke left. Though my impression is that's just communism with more epicycles, which may be wrong. I would be interested in going down the rabbit hole. I wish your link wasn't paywalled.
On the link: if you scroll down some, you can click on most of the articles
On the left: there's a wide range between the US and communism that leftists tend to advocate for. Nationalized health care is obviously a big one, and one which most of Europe is to the left of the US on. There are a number of individual-focused changes like parental leave, vacation time, and work hours. Leftists also often advocate for more societal-focused changes like nationalizing natural monopolies, increasing the funding for public transit on a national level, increasing the power of unions, or mandating that company boards have workers on them.
Those are all policies that could entirely be part of a capitalist society, where businesses are still generally owned by individuals instead of by the state. Of course, many on the American right would describe those as communism (apparently Joe Biden is a "communist"!), but doing so isn't really an accurate description of anyone who would call themselves communist. And some on the left certainly are communists, calling for a revolution by the proletariat and an abolition of private property, but that's a small minority.
I assumed the Seth Ackerman article that's paywalled was the one addressing my question. Which of the others addresses the issue squarely? There are quite a few.
Just so we share a mindspace, I've read Oligopsony's comments on SSC for 10 years and am aware of non-US politics.
I am extremely extremely doubtful that the problem is variations on policies such as parental leave, funding levels for various nice social programs, or making company boards more diverse. I am curious how you think your examples would result in some general improvement in government capacity? Would government with the various policies you mentioned be able to tackle COVID effectively?
The problem I identified in the original post extends to basically all of the western democracies. Europe spectacularly failed on responding to COVID and also generally appears moribund and unable to act efficiently or effectively. Perhaps its not as bad as the US, but there does appear to be a general phenomena in the west on this front.
Ah, I was mainly answering what the "non-neoliberal, non-woke left" has that differs from communism.
The Ackerman article talks about how most of the systems at the top of the American political system are set up to stop change. The Supreme Court can override the legislative branch, the legislative branch needs the president to approve, the president needs the legislative branch to create laws, and House and Senate need each other to agree, the Senate needs a supermajority to get past the filibuster, and so on. Thus the system as a whole can't actually produce any significant change that hasn't been wanted by a large majority of the US population for a long period of time.
That's obviously not entirely true, but it is true for a lot of the issues. 67% of Americans want a $15/hr minimum wage[0], but it's looking doubtful that it will happen, despite the president and most of the House being in favor. Similarly, 69% of voters want Medicare for All[1], but there's almost no chance of it.
Of course, that doesn't explain Europe, other than perhaps saying that they too have too many checks and balances, and that they need a more unilateral populace-based control. But, on a lot of issues, European governments do have a lot more government capacity. The US pays a lot more than Europe (other than the UK) for building public transit, for instance.[2] Leftists would probably explain it as partly caused by privatization.[3]
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/two-thirds-of-americans-favor-raising-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-an-hour/
[1]: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-poll-69-percent-of-voters-support-medicare-for-all
[2]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/08/01/case-selection/
[3]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/10/30/what-is-neoliberalism-anyway/
Sorry for the paywall, but glad I inspired some interest!
On the contemporary socialist-or-social democratic left (I won't say "non-woke," because that's a very elastic term, even moreso than socialist) I'd say there are two schools of thought on the stagnation question: the fatalist Marxist response and the anti-neoliberal response. The first is generally a bit further left than the other, but not perfectly so (because there are other issues at stake.)
For the fatalist Marxists like Michael Roberts, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Cockshott, things are slowing down because of capital accumulation. Specifically, rates of profit are falling, and *have been falling*, for a very long time, in accordance with the dynamics of capitalism. This long-term secular trend was slightly obscured during the middle of the twentieth century, which had plenty of new places to build and destroyed old things to rebuild, and which was throwing a lot of growth into consumer goods rather than capital accumulation - there's your epicycle, if you like - but then reasserted itself. These agree with the anti-neoliberal social democrats that the slowdown is associated with the shift to neoliberalism, but see neoliberalism as a way of reasserting profitability by privileging capital - a response to slowing growth rather than its cause. (Although the politics are quite different, you might notice a similarity to some of Tyler Cowen's explanations in a steady decline of low-hanging fruit.)
For the anti-neoliberal social democrats like Branko Marcetic, Thomas Piketty, or many of the MMT types, neoliberalism led to a slowdown by shifting the income distribution upward and encouraging that upward wealth going towards financial assets rather than real production. A change within capitalism - one that empowered labor unions and governments alongside shareholders, and that increased the share of effective demand coming from consumers as well as investors - could change the incentives structure of production towards more long-termism. These groups also tend to see public goods as underinvested in. A nice blog series that outlines some ways of thinking about how neoliberal solutions can be anti-growth - written in the kind of insight porn that SSC readers are likely to appreciate - can be found at https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/category/coasian-hell/
I'd say Jacobin is a good place to go to start keeping tabs on the left, not because they're perfect by any means - they can often be quite shallow, as any publication that tends towards mainstream success can be - but because they represent a nice sampler of thought in this sphere without presuming that you've memorized everything about some particular weird inter-left debate. Getting from there to less shallow stuff is often as simple as following an author to their private blog.
If you had to recommend a book length in-depth treatment of the "fatalist Marxists" position (or just another long running blog i could pick through) I'd be very interested to read it.
I've read picketty, i wouldve put him in my "neolib" camp, lol. whoops! I'll read harrowell.
Thank you for your links, I appreciate it.
Michael Robert's blog, or for a book-length treatment, Andrew Kliman's "Failure of Capitalist Production" may be helpful (though Kliman is a cranky fellow in both senses and can be somewhat exhausting to deal with at book-length.) Roberts also has edited a book of papers from this perspective entitled "World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability."
I don't know what Substack's linking policy is, but you should be able to find these wherever fine books can be found.
that's good enough for me. Thanks!
If the problem was neoliberalism, Japan wouldn't be doing worse than the U.S. (which is still the richest real country in the world).
I'm probably missing something here, but I'd always heard that profit margins are pretty high now - how does this interact with the decreasing-profit-margins case?
The decreasing profit margin on building something tangible... Physical capital. Instead, the system is now set up to be more profitable for those who invest in financial instruments.
But the opposite is true. It's much harder to earn a living by investing compared to working.
Profit margins are the ratio of sales to profits, whereas Marx was talking about the ratio of capital investment to profits. So, if you invest $10,000,000 and sell $5000 of products, but $4000 of that is pure profit, your profit margins are great, but your rate of profit (profit relative to capital investment) is appalling.
I don't know what a good reliable source for rate of profit over time graph would be, but this was the first google result I found, which shows the claimed downward trend: https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/image001.jpg
More generally, I *think* a big conceptual disconnect is that Marx is working on the labor theory of value. The claim is that capitalists can only make a profit by capturing the surplus value created by human workers, so as the ratio of human workers to automation falls, the ratio of profit available for capture to overall capital investment also falls.
The claim also explicitly includes the caveat that capitalists can temporarily fend off this fall in profits by exploiting the workers harder - longer hours for less pay, worse conditions, etc. I think adherents to this view would vaguely gesture at graphs of wages not rising for a long time, wealth inequality spiking, etc. as evidence that capitalist are doing exactly this right now, allowing profits to stay high, but that this is not a stable system and can only lead to a long economic bust when exploitation reaches intolerable levels.
The relevant distinction here is between capital share of income (how much new wealth goes to capital, currently high, as far as things go) and rate of profit (how much income you expect per time period per amount invested, currently low, as far as things go.) Ceteris paribus raising one will raise the other, but if rates of growth are low - precisely the situation we're trying to puzzle out! - then you can have low rates of profit even with a high capital share of income.
For the neoliberal take on what happened in the 70s, you can read Scott Sumner:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/more-evidence-that-neoliberalism-worked/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/on-or-about-december-1978-the-worlds-ideology-changed/
Importantly, he compares countries that embraced neoliberalism to a greater vs lesser degree rather than just having everything after some date represent neoliberalism while everything prior to it doesn't.
I think your point is a little lost because I have no idea who you're referring to on the left or right. Are we talking about mainstream Republicans and Democrats, in which case I dont see any attempt at big diagnosis on either side, or a bit further to the poles?
I didn't want to get into a debate on the relative merits of these authors and their politics, I was just noticing a trend that may or may not be real. I was not speaking from a mainstream politician perspective, but the various intellectuals that address these questions.
For example that may prove the rule, Matt Yglesia does write about this issue, and he gets quite a bit of flack for it. His most recent book One Billion Americans book can be considered a "take" on this question.
Something that bothered me about the book is that it doesn't link the people's affective polarisation with the political parties. There's definitely an increase in political polarisation across the world - incl Marine le Pen in France, Brexit, German far right parties rising fast, India, Hungary and more. I'm not sure how to square that seemingly benign affective polarisation chart with the political outcomes. And while Dixiecrats move would've had a role in creating a better party mix, I'm not sure why that would've led to more polarisation relative to all the other party mixes that have happened in the past.
One option, which I wish the book had discussed better, is the rise of mass media. Media creates a transparent information economy for the whole country. It ensures the speed of information transmission is rapid or instantaneous. So any political action you take has to have an immediate and positive effect. If that's the case, then naturally compromise gets harder, because you compromise to get something you want later. But the immediacy of feedback makes us all hyperbolic discounters. Makes us do things like McConnell not giving everyone $2k even though that would've won him all 3 branches of the govt.
Ultimately it makes us all greedy algorithms. And that's not a US specific topic, it's true around the world.
I take all your points. It's a very fair characterisation.
However by that metric can we classify anything as polarising? It'll always seem like "this is a fringe view" until it wins and then the Overton window shifts, and the PM and the Tories now take Brexit on as 'their' issue, so it means we're never actually polarised, it's just that a new view has emerged.
Not saying that's incorrect btw. But by this thought process, polarisation on any one issue is the normal way for any idea to become popular. And if multiple ideas start getting held together by the same people, then overall polarisation, which is a sum of people's preferences that seem autocorrelated, also rises.
So for example it would be like if Brexit view becomes correlated with other policies like immigration, taxation, social services etc, partially through the sales pitch and partially because it's the same people. And if any "popular" issue gets adopted by a party, and you have feedback loops that make their position entrenched (because you can't back down etc) then it'll seem like polarisation would naturally increase as time goes on.
Thank you - you've made me rethink the polarisation theory. Which is fun because I wrote about it a while back so good time to revisit :-)
My amended thought is that people have a grabbag of positions. Say
x1 = f(a, b, c, ...z), same for x2 all the way to xn as people, and a to z as 'positions'. and f() just multiplies each position with a coefficient from -1 to +1 and creates an array.
Initially let them be randomly distributed.
First comes a level of media that helps everyone know what the general consensus is on positions a, b and c. So some folks start updating their own positions towards either extreme.
Then comes new issue z, which originally wasn't an issue, but now is. z now moves from being a 0 on everyone's scale to now be bimodally distributed (this is Brexit).
If z, or any other position like a, b, p, becomes bimodally distributed, and it's public enough that enough people now know it's bimodally distributed, people will start sorting "for" and "against" it, and within each of those camps the positions start becoming similar. The 'a's update towards becoming similar to other 'a's and so on.
That is the argument for overall polarisation. Admittedly it's an observational argument and not a deductive one.
The next step very well might be that new issue comes up and preexisting polarisations get dissolved, or they sort into existing camps. That part's harder to predict. Just like it's harder to predict if Republicans will go full Romney or full Margaret Greene.
> The polarisation it revealed is often posited to in some ways actually transcend or have replaced the traditional left/right polarisation. I don't think that's quite true myself but it's a not uncommon take, at least in the British political press.
I don't think leave/remain will ever replace left/right. But I do think a cluster of issues and positions that is crudely encapsulated by leave/remain -- but crucially does not actually include rejoin/don't rejoin the EU -- may well replace the current left/right.
If the Tories move closer to a pre-Thatcher conservatism with a stronger focus on the nation and an acceptance of a role for the state, and lock in the change by making a success of "levelling up" retaining some of their northern gains they could redefine the meaning of right wing to something you might describe as "leave". There's some signs to be oquptimistic if you like this stuff. The success of the vaccine taskforce taking the sting out of the words "national industrial strategy", the failure of the global marketplace to deliver PPE and success of moving production back onshore. My reading is that the party is divided, Boris is pro this shift and Sunak is less so. But I'd say there's a reasonable chance it happens.
If this happens the question is how does Labour respond. Does Starmer try to copy the plan leading to something like the very unpolarised Blair/Cameron years - https://www.youtube.com/watch/PPgS7p40ERg. Or does Labour position itself as it's anthesis and embrace globalism and, dare I say, anti-Britishness. There's definitely a faction in Labour that want to (witness the reactions to Starmer saying he wants to see more union jacks around) but I can't see the party letting that unelectable faction take power... again.
So I don't know too much French history, but if Le Pen really is more extreme and more polarizing in France than previous politicians, wouldn't you expect to see an increase in French people with a negative opinion of her party? (and, among her supporters, more hostility towards Macron)?
I think we are seeing some of that, though I think you meant a positive opinion of her? - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/01/macron-camp-clash-le-pen-border-closures-poll-sees-closing-french/amp/
https://www.ft.com/content/6d8b9c7a-412c-11ea-a047-eae9bd51ceba
So to clarify, what I meant is that you should see a reduction in people who think both major candidates are fine, and an increase in people that really hate one (or both) of them. If you assume the alternative to Le Pen is a more mainstream centre-right figure who appeals less to the fringe, then you would expect to see less net hostility to the mainstream alternative than you do to Le Pen - and if we're assuming Le Pen's predecessors as the main opposition figure were more like that, then Le Pen should get more hate than they did.
I can't see the body of the articles because paywall - going by the headlines it looks like Le Pen is seeing more support? But that's not necessarily a sign of more partisanship (or of less partisanship - you can have a Reagan-like fringe politics figure or a Biden-like mainstream figure both pick up a lot of support against the incumbent, for opposite reasons).
Ah I see. That makes sense. Sorry about the paywalls.
But this is one of those cases where defining "polarisation" is interesting. You could see it as the chart above re Rs and Ds creating a nice bimodal distribution, or you could purely look at % of people with antagonistic views towards the other party, or you could look at the level of pushback against the "mainstream" parties in the middle of said distribution. My point was that most of the world is seeing the latter.
But yes, if MLP were more moderate, the reaction would be to cause less net hostility to her. But she's not, which is what creates the furore. So MLP does get more hate than her predecessors. But she (much like Trump) also gets more love for her extreme views. Whether this is a strategy (get visibility through extreme views, moderate to get acceptability) remains to be seen.
Also, to your point, to me the interesting aspects would be to see how it plays out too - there's a likelihood that her route from strong minority to majority relies on relaxation of some of the views, which could be a victory (much like Scott writes about the Democrats).
To me whether or not a party becomes polarising is therefore more easily explained by the efforts of the party to have clear, simple policy positions, and ensure that the media-feedback-model shows them as always on the attack + never giving in. It's less about the specific person, and more the fact that such political polarisation is not purely a US phenomenon.
You should really, really, really read Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He makes a pretty compelling argument that the things you are pointing to are due to the current communication infrastructure where "NO!" is easy to get behind but proactive solutions are easy to get behind. Then those ultimately fall apart once the NO! take effect. In the US, Occupy and the Tea Party were two faces of the same coin... that ended up changing nothing. He has many international examples. For a small taste, check out his Pairagraph: https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686cf7fce19/1
Cool - ordered!
I think both the comparison of whether Democrats or Republicans are radicalizing more, and of the relative success of their "rebel flanks," might be improved by separating economic and cultural issues.
QAnon and "it's racist for white people to eat sushi" have something in common: elites think it's dumb, but it doesn't really affect their bottom line, so they're willing to play to it when the polling says they can pander to those activists without weirding out normies.
Social democracy, much less a more vigorous model of socialism, *would* threaten the people who run the Democratic party. So Democratic leadership is willing to move left on race and gender, at least on the representational aspects of those issues, while making sure to keep the economic and foreign policy left out of control of the party.
Good to see you around again! I miss you on Tumblr, though maybe I just haven't figured out the right oligops- word to search to find the new one.
Happy to be around! If I get back on tumblr (which is still the least bad general-purpose social media site, so maybe) I'll certainly let you know.
But Democrats have moved left on economic issues - see e.g. $15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A.
That said, I think there is something here, except the "people who run the democratic party" isn't politicians or oligarchs, it's journalists (or occasionally younger office staffers), who grew up UMC, went to fancy ivy-league schools, and spend too much time fighting culture wars on Twitter. And the things they control aren't so much actual politics as the narrative around politics - you see this a lot with Democratic politicians trying to talk about healthcare and social security, and the media bringing everything back to race and idpol.
It may be significant that the two issues you list "$15 minimum wage and the increasing popularity of M4A." are both, at the moment, purely theoretical. Neither has happened. Biden has now explicitly called for a delay on a $15 dollar minimum wage and long ago ruled out backing M4A, explicitly promising to veto it if it passes.
Not saying it won't happen, but if it does it will be after a great deal of delay.
The minimum wage was put off the table for legal reasons (and has been passed in states by a bunch of blue state governments) though.
No state, ignoring DC, has a $15 minimum wage.[0] Some individual cities do, although the living wage there is often a lot higher than $15/hr.
[0]: https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/minimum-wage-by-state
NJ is legally moving towards it believe a $1 increase every year passed a few years ago.
You may be surprised to hear that FL, land of conservative rubes and yahoos, passed an amendment last election instituting a statewide minimum wage of 15/hr by 2026, I believe it is, with more than 60% approval. The republicansin the state legislature concerned primarily with corporate profits would never have approved this. We'll see what happens. Medical Marijuana was approved here a few years ago in the same process, but the state found a way to delay or prevent it's implementation.
I'm not sure a $15 dollar minimum wage affects too many democratic voters? I'm pretty sure I haven't taken advantage of any labor that was less than that in the last year. Lots of poor people take advantage of low income labor by shopping at Walmart or such but not really welathy professionals. And my sense is that employers of people at less than $15 tend to vote Republican but employers of wealthy professionals tend to vote Democrat.
Ignoring the last year being COVID, would you have eaten at any restaurants that aren't fine dining? Bought food from a grocery store? Those are both minimum wage jobs.
I've been ordering out so not counting waiters. Probably there are dishwashers I should have included? I've been doing a lot of ordering things online through Amazone but I have actually used a CVS so that's actually probably another less than $15 job. Still, not too many of them.
What planet are you from? A very large percentage of democratic voters are dirt poor. And Walmart gets the gov't to pay the expenses of its neglected work force though food stamps and medicaid and so forth. An argument for the $15 wage is that this would greatly reduce the need for gov't programs due to this scam Walmart currently runs agains the American people.
That assumes the raising the cost of low-skill labor has no significant effect on how much of it is hired, which is unlikely. If half the minimum wage workers get a raise and half become unemployed, surely the need for government programs goes up, not down.
That's a different issue, isn't it? Walmart can't fire half their workers. If that were true, they'd've done it already.
Walmart, or MacDonald's, or any other employer faces tradeoffs. Capital can substitute for labor — consider the increasing use of self-service checkout lanes. Skilled labor can substitute for unskilled labor. Walmart uses unskilled labor instead of alternative inputs if and only if doing it that way costs less.
The same is true between firms and products — if MacDonalds gets more expensive because it has a lot of workers whose wages have been pushed up, that may mean people buy more TV dinners and fewer Big Macs.
What you observe at any instant is the solution to an elaborate optimization problem. It's natural to assume that if one of the factors changes, everything else stays the same, but that isn't what happens.
To add to Dr. Friedman: regardless of whether Walmart can replace a worker with a machine, they can and will fire a worker if they can no longer employ that worker profitably. If you hire someone for $11 an hour and get labor out of them that is worth $14 dollars to you then that's great: if you suddenly have to pay them $14+ dollars an hour then you're just losing money on the transaction. And who goes through all the trouble of hiring someone to lose money?
I think what you mean is that Walmart cannot operate as large a business (in terms of stores, amount of goods sold, etc) if they fire half their workers. Which is true: that just means they'll have to scale back if they can't employ them profitably.
There's a decent chance that Walmart could successfully pivot to a model where they have fewer but better-skilled workers.
Note that the low-skill workers who used to be employed are out of luck in this case.
Americans support M4A consistently at about 60% or above. It is no longer a partisan issue, if it ever was. It's the Insurance industry lobbyists against the American people. The congresspeople of both parties simply do as their told by the lobbyists to thwart the will of the American people. From Obama onward DNC pics promised it in some form then reneged once in office.
This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost. Trying to make a version of it that penciled out (which required raising taxes and limiting coverage) sunk Warren in the democratic primary.
The polls are consistent on this -- it isn't just democrats, it's everyone. The poor aren't concerned about having to pay more in taxes, and plenty of studies show how much cheaper single payer is than the mess we have now.
Vermont has a GOP governor because the voters didn't want to pay the cost of M4A.
> This isn't totally right - Americans like the idea of M4A, but don't want to pay the cost.
Which is ironic, because the US already spends more per capita on health care than any other country. Arguably, having a single payer conveys more bargaining power to negotiate lower bulk pricing, so Americans would probably end up spending much less overall under M4A.
So there's a case to be made that it could help (I do support some form of M4A overall), but I doubt it would bring American costs anywhere close to in line with other countries' - there are a lot of other reasons US healthcare is expensive. Some of those are general cost-disease reasons (which implies we shouldn't expect M4A to significantly lower prices), but others might be due to the issue where the US government has massive spending for worse results compared to other rich countries (see e.g. transit, infrastructure, education), which implies that socializing healthcare could potentially make it more expensive overall (because the US government is bad at cost control). The Sanders plan specifically seems to go that way - it differed from other government-provided healthcare plans in that it basically planned to cover everything for everyone (for comparison, the NHS only covers things that fall below their Pound/QALY threshold).
I'm Canadian, so I'm well aware that socialized medicine typically doesn't and shouldn't cover literally everything, but from my understanding, Medicare already doesn't cover everything, so M4A wouldn't either. I think Americans would be happy with M4A that doesn't extend coverage any further, with the option to supplement insurance with a private insurer.
I think one of the reasons the US government is bad at cost control is because they try to implement half-assed pseudo-market "solutions" in an effort to appease numerous special interests rather and give the illusion of choice, rather than simply and directly implementing what makes sense (too much money in politics).
So they could do a simple but bad M4A where all of the existing insurance companies continue operating as-is, and they just bill the government for standard coverage. That would be horrendous and I agree, it probably wouldn't cut costs, because the unnecessary bureaucracy is still there and the pricing is not standardized.
Doing it right means bargaining with the hospitals to establish standardized pricing for what's covered (all emergency care should be covered), and creating an independent agency to pay the bills issued by hospitals.
I can't imagine this wouldn't cut costs, because it eliminates all of the bureaucratic and administrative red tape, hospitals can no longer just make up a bill for whatever they think you'll be able to pay to make up for shortfalls due to non-payers and no need for collection agencies, and negotiated bulk rates would be cheaper.
But I share your skepticism that the any administration for the past 20 years, including the current one, would actually be effective at achieving such an outcome.
Democratic donors are left of Democratic voters on economic issues too.
The idea that political elites could or would put down otherwise popular ideas because they would lose out on money falls apart as soon as you notice that politics doesn't pay very well. Almost everyone in politics could make more money doing something else. Senators don't rent out dilapidated townhouses in DC to share because they're in it for the money - it's because actually care about some issues, institutions, or have an egomaniacal need for the validation that comes with winning elections and having titles next to their names.
But it's almost never about the money. If money rules politics, immigration policy would look much better than it actually does.
Can I get a source for the claim about Democratic donors being to the left of Democratic voters? It wouldn't be too surprising, but this seems to suggest the opposite: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Whose%20Voice%20Whose%20Choice_2.pdf
Also, is this Democratic donors in total (which would include small donors- including the enthusiastic Berniecrat donors) or is it Democratic donors *weighted by size of contribution*? When people talk about donors in this context, they surely mean people who make donations, at minimum, in the tens of thousands- really at least the hundreds of thousands.
Here's one article https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/23/21035165/donors-political-views-wine-cave
In general donors do seem like true believers.
The problem is- unless I'm misreading- it doesn't seem to be weighted by contribution size. When people talk about the donor class in this context they're really talking about the small portion of the donor class whose contributions are so individually significant as to give them a palpable degree of power as an individual or corporation over politicians.
That didn't come out right. They do do an analysis excluding donors <$1000, but I'm talking about the people on this sort of list: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors
This feels like cheating, but it's a strong data point: Sanders vastly outraised Biden in the primary running to his economic left. Sanders is an overwhelming economically-oriented candidate, and pretty close to Biden on social issues.
Biden nearly went broke in the primary, and none of the economic moderates came close to Sanders in fundraising - in number or total raised.
I think when people talk about donors in this context, they're primarily talking about big players who make very large donations with specific policy strings attached- or at least on a money for access basis. Small donors are a wrinkle in this narrative, but they're relatively new, and so their effects have been modest so far, plus they'll never have the leverage of the big donors, because their money is spread out between far more heads, making it harder to bargain.
But the even more decisive argument is that Bernie lost. For that reason, his small donors are effectively cut out of influence.
So I think it's sensible to talk about a "donor class" re: the dems that doesn't include Bernie's small donors.
Doesn't this seem like a just-so story? If Bernie won, it would have proven how important money is. But since he lost, it just proves that only some kinds of money matter. Are there any possible observations that would cause you to update in the direction of money not being very important?
I don't think it's at all clear that donor money is important- I'm very open to the possibility that it's other factors that discipline politicians. Personally I'm probably 50/50 on it. I just think that if we're going to grapple with the idea that it is important, that hypothesis is usually focused on a very specific sort of donor- the kind of donor that has conversations with politicians in smoke filled rooms.
Two things:
When people talk about "donors", they often blur the lines between whether they are talking about the small number of megadonors that fund the SuperPACs, or the large number of small-dollar donors that fund the parties. I'm not sure that one of those groups gives more money in total.
Also, there's a specific set of issues that Democratic megadonors are right of partisan activists on, but on most issues they are still left of the median Democratic voter (but not left of the median Democratic small donor).
I thought the claim in the "Republicans suck" section was similar to what's discussed in "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly.
The "Neutral vs. Conservative" post was more about the dynamic, and how the lack of neutrality of the mainstream institution plays into things. Klein's argument (I imagine) is more about the fact that this pattern exists. (Klein maybe also puts more of the responsibility on the rightward offshoots rather than the left-neutral institutions which inspire them, but that seems like a secondary question).
"The "neutral" mainstream institution leans left, which leads to a conservative offshoot which is more extremist. Fox News is not just the mirror image of CNN - it is more extreme, more actively aiming for partisan ends, more detached from reality & echo-chambery. And something similar is true of US polarization writ broadly."
Not sure how true that is anymore in present year. Fox started the open tribalization of media outlets, sure, but when "neutral" outlets run lines like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" amid a backdrop of burning buildings and "antifa movement seeks peace through violence", we're pretty squarely in the realm of reality-distorting partisanship, not just neutrality with some preference for one political camp.
It's not a huge issue with the article, but the impression I got on the first read through was that at the start of part 3 you were only linking Ezra Klein's article as an offhand reference, as you often do. So I did not expect the next paragraph to be outlining what Klein said in that article instead of his book stance, which you had been almost solely quoting him on up to that point. It took me until most of the way through the paragraph to realize my misreading, thinking at first that you were going to detail Klein's argument for something to the effect of "Polarization causes problems but the alternative is so much worse."
I like Ezra Klein, but this sounds a bit like "The problem is that the outgroup is too polarized."
I guess there's no such thing as a completely objective and neutral analysis of this stuff though, so I'll probably still read and enjoy the book, and just price in the fact that he's a Democrat to my own biased interpretation of it.
That is pretty close to what he's saying, modulo s/too polarized/responsible for the current polarization, and fwiw I think he's more right than wrong. I think it's dangerous to use pattern-matching to dismiss "the problem is that my outgroup is acting badly" without consist the object-level issue - many conflicts are not six of one and half a dozen of the other.
"One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be. "
If anything, I think causality might flow the other way, if there's any relationship at all. IIRC, Fox is by far the newest of the bunch; all the others have been around for many decades, and Fox filled in a gap starting in the 90s by being the only one that wasn't extremely liberal. (Perhaps part of the polarization story should include why all the major news networks were liberal by that point in time! Were they always that way? Did they follow Congress, but precede the public? Has media trust decreased over time? My impression is yes, but I don't know, but it might be relevant.) I think the most likely explanation is really "there aren't enough conservatives who want to go into journalism to support more major networks."
(If you're interested in questions of media bias, I recommend the book Left Turn by Time Groseclose).
But also, I would want to see data indicating Republicans actually are less ideologically diverse before accepting that there is anything to explain. I don't trust Klein's impression, since Republicans are his outgroup, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity exists. Speaking of, you discussed party identity, but perceptions about the other party might be more important than the reality: http://gsood.com/research/papers/partisanComposition.pdf
That paper suggests perhaps the easiest intervention for decreasing polarization, namely literally just tell the truth about both parties: "When provided information about the out-party’s actual composition, partisans come to see its supporters as less extreme and feel less socially distant from them."
Moreover, if journalistic bias contributed to popular polarization, could academic bias have done the same? Academia is probably even more liberal than journalism (e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264003803_Political_Diversity_Will_Improve_Social_Psychological_Science) and it looks largely like liberals and leftists pushing conservatives out rather than conservatives choosing to leave. Much is made of the "decline of trust in expertise" but if major institutions are increasingly biased, isn't distrust a logical reaction?
On the question of ideological diversity within the parties ... . Throughout my lifetime, libertarians have tended to identify as Republican, although less so recently. Insofar as the Republican party had an ideology, it was fusionist, a hybrid of libertarian support for laissez-faire and conservative support for traditional values. I'm not sure the post-Civil Rights Act Democratic party contained as sharp a split.
Perhaps the polarization was mostly kicked off by the Democrats finally stepping on a couple of middle Americas sacred cows and middle America deciding to dig in. Specifically in regards to Christian moral values being the guiding factor in our cultural/political norms and American patriotism/nationalism/exceptionalism no longer being a widely accepted truth. That split seems to more or less have solidified around 2005 with the Iraq war and lgbt issues being a couple of the main splitting points.
I'm honestly surprised that you missed two related, enormous, obvious-in-retrospect things:
1. Polarization among people tracks with the development of a right wing ecosystem, starting with talk radio in the 90s, then Fox, up through today. This ecosystem, in particular Fox, were explicitly built to cultivate a monolithic partisan voting block. It worked and continues to work. The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
2. The GOP didn't get more *ideologically* extreme, but more *institutionally* extreme - or rather, anti-institutionally. The GOP of 20 years ago would have balked at sending out checks, but Trump backed it. Third is because the GOP is ideologically rudderless, and not really more conservative than it used to be. The old GOP also wouldn't have encouraged an angry mob to attack the capitol by perpetuating bald-faced lies about election fraud. This is the dimension on which the GOP has gotten much more extreme - dangerously so, as Klein correctly points out.
The institutional degradation under Trump was genuinely new and concerning, along a dimension completely divorced from liberalism/conservatism. If that's the only lens you look at things through, you're missing most of the story.
How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Also, what are your thoughts on my claim that polarization was mostly driven by Democrats going further left while Republicans stayed the same? And if it's true, what would that look like in the absence of FOX News? The Democrats go just as far left as they did, but the Republicans come with them and so maintain a lack of polarization? Or would the absence of FOX somehow have prevented the Democrats from going left?
(pasting to reply to the still-existing version of this comment)
You're still thinking about this in ideological terms. I don't know what happens to the party platforms in that alternate universe, but I'm fairly confident that the disagreements focus more on policy and less on the fundamental nature of reality, and consequently don't result in a level of reality-disconnect that leads to a large crowd taking control of the Capitol in an attempted coup because they think the election was stolen.
Guess: Median voter theorem suggests that the absence of a GOP monoculture means there are more conservative voices in mainstream media that are incentivized to appeal to a broad audience instead of a radicalizing subculture that's tuned out mainstream sources, while mainstream sources are still incentivized to appeal to conservatives as much as they can. So that would tend to suggest that at least some conservative ideas would fare better than they have and ideas on the left would get more (sane) pushback than they have in the world where the GOP exists in a parallel media reality.
The left is massively amplifying the narrative that the right are detached from reality.
Do you mean to suggest that this amplification is taking an under-appreciated fact and bringing it to light, or taking an appropriately-appreciated fact and making it seem bigger than it is?
Or maybe even a third option, spreading a falsehood.
Not the OP, but I'm pretty skeptical of it being the Democrats moving left that generated polarization. There are two things that might be measures of how polarized a group is:
* the physical party platforms, which mostly doesn't matter
* how much your people hate the other people, which matters a lot
What Fox and talk-radio made widespread was the fomenting of targeted hatred at Democrats, rather than any particular voting bloc. In an era of bipartisan news, people still hated people, but hatred was more based around stereotypes, or local issues, or race or ethnicity. Now you just hear about all the awful actions of either "libtards" or "trumpies" and that's that.
You haven't dealt with the Right's attack on empiricism. Or the market forces there. It's the line from hpmor about telling one lie and the truth ever after being your enemy.
Take something like global warming. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive. Two parties should have tracked eachother on this. There was some policy dispute... but the Republican party mostly went to the "global warming is plot by grant hungry scientists and evil globalists in support of agenda 21). That's not.... "The right stayed in the same place". Nor does it contend with how right wing media served the Republican donor class.
Walter Cronkite didn't have Phillip Morris on to promote cigarette use... Therefore he's a raging liberal.
The directionality goes the other way.
"Tune in to hannity where we interview a scientist who says that he was told to publish climate research because he was told that it would make Christians cry."
That's going off the deep end on the right.
This is cherry picking. The science has only gotten better and more conclusive that different gender outcomes are due to a strong gendered difference in interests.
Yet even saying that among leftists is going to get you branded as a hateful person.
>How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
Well, for starters, there is the fact that one of them happened before the other: Fox News started in 1996, and you've argued the polarization of regular people started in the early 2000s.
> How would you distinguish "more polarized media drove polarization" from "the existence of polarization created a demand for more polarized media"?
I don't have a test but perhaps a mechanism.
You already told the story of how local news (& politics) was subsumed into local news (and politics). When Kansas had their own newspapers & TV stations, they were able to tailor their stories to local populations and could be as conservative as they needed to be. As those local media outlet disappeared (because of the internet & cable TV), there was a need for a national, conservative media outlet and Fox filled it.
Someone else up-thread addressed the point that the culture all over the western world has been moving left on (e.g.) SSM, healthcare and a host of other cultural issues for decades. Perhaps we should be measuring the movement of progressives and conservatives relative to that current rather than to where they each were 50 years ago. The cultural river has flowed since then.
>The other party is just "everyone who opposed this", with a plurality of that coalition backing/sorting into a vaguely liberal policy platform.
It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. If you disagree w/ the American right on 90% and agree on 10%, they will invite you to come learn more.
There's asymmetric cultural extremism there.
That common observation predicts that Biden wouldn't have had a chance in the primary and Sinema and Manchin shouldn't exist. It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. The common observation definitely implies that the most popular and widely respected leader of the blue tribe wouldn't go on record telling people to cut out the woke scolding, but Obama did just that.
This "common observation" is wrong because it extrapolates from the most obnoxious people on twitter, which is not real life. Everyone's takes will improve when they recognize that the social dynamics of Twitter, while real and important, only describe a small part of the world.
You're mostly answering a different question here. It's perfectly coherent to say that the American left will ostracize you for dissent, *and* that dissent wins when we use a secret ballot. As for Obama, he's among a very small number of people who've been able to get away with saying stuff like this, and they've also been going for his blood recently.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter" seem to be having a substantial influence on Biden's admin: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression-fc4 Twitter is the social media that comes closest to being our "public square", where politicians, academics, company founders etc. spend unhealthy amounts of their free time posting under their real name. It is very much not the case that "what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter", and a quick look at recent US history confirms that.
There's also the question of how stable this situation will be. Have you seen any of Christopher F. Rufo's reporting on critical theory trainings in elementary schools and places of employment? It could be that the "dissent wins at the ballot box" thing is mostly a function of an older generation that was raised on different values. This stuff was previously dismissed as "just crazy college students", but those college students are graduating and exerting major influence on their workplaces etc. What do you think the endgame looks like? Overall your objection seems a bit like saying "global warming isn't a problem because the Earth hasn't warmed up very much yet".
Im replying just to highlight your comment. Wholeheartedly agree
> > It's a common observation that if you agree w/ the American left on 90% and disagree with them on 10%, you get ostracized. [...]
> [...] It also predicts that the affirmative action ballot question should have passed easily in California. [...]
Note: ostracism doesn't matter at the ballot box because it's secret.
Odd to say the right isn't keen on punishing people who agree on 90% of issues, since literally in the last week they've been voting on whether to expel one of their congressional leadership who agrees on everything except the question of if Trump should be impeached. And were threatening to kill the literal vice president, of their party, because he didn't agree the election was stolen.
What do you mean by "common observation"? Sounds like a Weasel word to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
It sounds like you're saying that in your personal experience you enjoy hanging out with Republicans more than Democrats.
What does it mean to be "ostracized" from the American left?
Like they're not inviting you to dinner parties or something? Or they post mean twitter comments at you?
The current governing Democrats includes a pretty wide range of viewpoints, from maybe AOC on the left to the more centrist representatives from swing states. and they're working together i guess without ostracizing each other.
If you mean in terms of the workplace or something, then yes i think both the left and right often make work decisions informed by politics, religion, and other personal beliefs. Like firing someone who refuses to use a colleagues' preferred pronouns on the left, or a church group refusing to hire Lesbian or even just female preachers on the right.
You didn't mention it in this review, but does Klein discuss the transition from delegates picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms to open-primary systems where every step is determined by the popular vote? To my eye, one of the primary drivers of polarization has been politicians becoming more afraid of primary elections than general elections.
This explanation does have the merit that it predicts polarisation changing differently in the USA compared to other countries.
I actually have no idea how this happens in other countries. How do the UK/Commonwealth parliamentary systems decide who stands in West Eastershire or whatever?
Was Abbott overpromoted because she was a black woman, or because she was Corbyn's ex-girlfriend and long time political ally?
In New Zealand, the majority of politicians get there through the party list, which means that they personally did not receive the votes as a candidate but their party did, and they are chosen by the party to fill the seat. I don't think there is a particular way parties have to construct that list, in practice most parties do it differently, but parties have very low membership in New Zealand so it's a lot more akin to the closed door agreements than a public contest.
The UK Labour party famously had a change in leadership selection procedures in 2014, from unions and parliament having 2/3 of the vote to having none of the vote, which promptly led to Jeremy Corbyn being selected leader:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Labour_Party_leadership_election_(UK)#Procedure
But it's not clear that the new system caused anything, because Corbyn won by so many votes that he would have won under the old system, or at least come close, depending on assumptions about new voters. You might suppose that voters didn't know that and were afraid of "throwing away their votes," but the previous system was a ranked choice system with little cost of expressive voting for the token left-wing candidate. Something weird happened and I think many people are too quick to draw a lesson from it.
(Incidentally, you could say that unions lost their special votes, but you could also say that they were promoted from half votes to full.)
In the UK, the various parties have very different systems for choosing their leaders.
In the Labour Party, the electorate includes all members of the party or of affiliated unions. Around half a million votes were cast in last year's leadership election. The Lib Dems have a similar system.
By contrast, Conservative MPs hold most of the power. Conservative party leaders are chosen by multiple elimination rounds by MPs only until there are only two candidates remaining. All party members vote in the final round but, even then, the conservative party is much small and only 140,000 voted in the last leadership election.
Crucially, the four biggest parties in England require that their leader be a member of Parliament so you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Leader of your party the way that Trump and Sanders did.
The way that parties choose local candidates has changed a lot in recent years. It used to be that Conservative candidates for parliament were chosen by local conservative parties but the rules were changed to require that candidates be selected from a central approved list.
Labour had this rule until recently but now gives local parties more autonomy.
Again, you can't just show up and say Vote for Me as the Labour candidate for East Westchester.
In the UK although the candidates are chosen by the parties, The Party as an organization is much more powerful. The US is fairly unusual among developed countries in how candidates raise a huge amount of personal funding and run on personal brands.
Parties as institutions have more incentive to be moderate than individual candidates, because they need to win with the general electorate. So the party being more powerful means you tend to get more moderate policies, and the successful politicans are mostly the ones who buy into them.
Other European countries are broadly similar in that respect
This is an important point, and I can't remember if Klein discussed it.
The U.S. was fairly polarized pre-1920s, which was definitely still the smoke-filled rooms era. Presidential candidates George McGovern and Jimmy Carter weren't in a polarized era, but Mitt Romney was.
McGovern and Carter were the two candidates that took advantage of the new party primary system, and are often seen as major left outliers from the party at the time, because of their knowledge of how to run under the new system.
Klein does discuss it (unfortunately my copy of his book is at the office so I can’t cite chapter and verse). But it is clear that he thinks the old smoke-filled rooms with party stalwarts picking candidates is better than the primary system. Partly this is because the only voters who turn out for primaries are hyperpartisans, a fact which leads them to vote for more extreme candidates.
Good thing primary elections are never rigged in any way!
Political scientists seem to think the primary system is not a big driver of polarization. See e.g. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9949294/ansolabehere_primary.pdf?sequence=1 (though I wouldn't update too strongly on this, since finding this was the result of a *very* brief literature search on my part).
Fivethirtyeight also had an interesting interview recently https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-what-could-the-gops-future-look-like/
with some GOP commentators who claimed that [around t=23 min] a) From 1988 onwards, the winner of almost every Republican primary has been someone who assembled a coalition from the center and left of the party, b) Trump was most supported in the 2016 primaries by voters who described themselves as "somewhat conservative" or "moderate." I don't know what to make of this - on the one hand it sounds like primaries are having a moderating influence, but on the other if "moderating" means Trump gets elected than that's not very reassuring...
I can't put much credence in a paper published in 2010, because 2010 was the start of the big Tea Party wave in which an unprecedented *three* incumbent Republican Senators and dozens of representatives were knocked out in the primaries, and culminating in 2014 when they took down the party's number two House leader and heir apparent to Boehner. This in turn cemented a shift among the GOP from Clinton-Gingrich deal-cutting to white-knuckle obstructionism because any compromise was seen as selling out. Perhaps it's open primaries combined with some other factor that caused them to be an actual threat as opposed to incumbents mostly cruising until then.
A bunch of people are replying to my comment as though it is about Trump and responding with observations about Presidential primaries, but it's not. Trump's "radicalism" was largely a matter of affect and disregard for process. He ended up signing pretty much every bill Congress put in front of him and only really vetoed restrictions on Gulf arms sales. The real difference has been seen in Congress.
Thanks, the clarification that you meant Congress is helpful!
Oh and as to that "other factor," I wonder if it's predominantly geographic sorting + gerrymandering? It looks like 2010 was right around when the percentage of landslide districts crossed 50% https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/as-swing-districts-dwindle-can-a-divided-house-stand/ so it would make sense for that to be the time when House primaries started mattering more than general elections.
hi everyone. i'm a "it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium" guy. so i just wanted to chime in to say: i think it's because of single round, first-past-the-post elections, resulting in a two-party equilibrium.
What happened in the 1970s then, to cause this shift?
it's a good question. i sort of implied the "it" here to be "polarization", but i guess i'm also including "dysfunction due to polarization". if we really have the same level of "affective polarization" now as sweden or norway have had for a long time, why does it seem like their governments work way better? i think "because proportional systems result in centrist reform rather than pendulum swings" is pretty plausible.
but i could also make up a bunch of ad hoc forces that previously kept polarization in check that are now gone, like, the US used to have lots of powerful international enemies and now it doesn't. after all, one of the few things democrats and republicans can agree on now is that china is bad.
The Dixiecrat thing still seems like a reasonable hypothesis: the system we have always trends towards polarization, and there was a big weird thing happening that fought that trend for a few decades.
This exactly. The issue seems to me, and it's surreal that no one else mentioned this, the US only allows two parties to exist. Negative partisanship only works when they're are exactly two options. On the graph showing international polarization trends, consider that most other countries have more political parties -- I know that Germany and NZ with MMP certainly do, and the UK does as well.
(This doesn't explain any of the historical change in the US, so please take it as more prescriptive than descriptive).
because if you go with prop rep, you get too many parties, worse polarization, and extremists that have their own parties, out of control from the center. Two parties at least should tend to keep the extremists under control
That's only if you use proportional representation. Use range voting or approval voting, which eliminate spoilers, and you get multiple parties without it. Also, the most moderate candidate tends to win in those systems.
idk, should i really believe this? in the US, the republicans have obviously done a terrible job of keeping extremists under control. when i think of "countries that spun out of control because of proportional representation", where should i be thinking of if not all the stable european countries using it right now?
Several European countries now have 10-25% of their elected representatives from nationalist parties (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006). This is enough to produce significant influence when they enter into a 51% coalition government. Also, Brexit. From the other side, most of Europe was much quicker to adopt socialism during the Cold War.
I'm not sure how Brexit is relevant? It was passed by popular referendum in a country without proportional representation.
Part of the benefit of a multi-party system is that you aren't forced into a coalition on one side or the other of the spectrum. AfD may have 13% of the vote in Germany, but the center-right CDU forms a coalition with the center-left SPD instead. Similarly, the conservative government of Austria is currently in coalition with the Greens, keeping the nationalist FPO out of power.
I tried to check on a bunch of other countries listed in that link, and got sucked down a rabbit hole of trying to understand idiosyncrasies on other country's political spectrums. Suffice it to say, sometimes the center-right forms a coalition with the far-right, sometimes they don't.
This seems superior to me to what happened in the US, where a populist very few intuitional Republicans supported got the nomination and won, becoming the leader of a majority party. It's hard to imagine this happening if a Trump-populist party had to compete with / form a coalition with a christian democrat party.
The UK uses proportional representation. The vote may have been a referendum, but the voting system obviously affects the country's politics.
The problem with PR is that it is often the case that the two centrist parties together don't break 50%, causing all possible coalitions to include an extremist party on one side or the other. You can easily get dangerous results like 22% far right, 29% center right, 20% center left, 29% far left. Then the center right has to choose between far right and far left, and has the obvious disincentive to choose the far left which allows the far right to exercise outsized influence.
Whereas Trump was a brash, arrogant liar who was pretty objectionable as a human being but from a policy perspective did a lot of largely boring mainstream Republican things like enforce existing immigration laws and try to promote domestic industry. There was plenty of room for reasoned disagreement but despite the hyperbole it was hardly concentration camps and Jim Crow.
Moreover, the point isn't that the US status quo is ideal but rather that we should use range voting or approval voting instead of PR. I don't think Trump wins an election with range voting.
Duverger's law is false. It's a theoretical argument, but the conclusion is only true in the USA. Lots of countries have FPTP and all the rest have third parties (non-geographic). I don't know how they manage it.
I'm not American, but the poetical story I always told myself is that Americans are fighting themselves after they lost the things they fought for together. To me, it seems that over the past 50 years Americans cared about lots of cool things like spreading democracy and capitalism, and now they only care about dealing with local problems. And who causes all of the local problems? The other party.
And this isn't a chicken and egg thing. Everyone seems to say Americans care about local issues now because of Polarization. I think it is very clearly the opposite, Americans are polarized because they don't clearly perceive any external threats to themselves (which bdw, America looks like it has a ton of external threats it should be concerning itself with).
I think both parties are worried about what Russia and China are doing, but we're filtering that concern through partisanship: The other party are shills for a hostile foreign power!
I think of "local issues" as being things like zoning, not things that would be decided in DC.
This is one of the hypotheses discussed in the WaitButWhy megaseries on polarization and tribalism:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
There's been an interesting mitosis effect where the US and USSR were allies against Nazi Germany but then turned on each other during the Cold War. Dems and GOP were allies against the USSR but turned on each other after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This is my working hypothesis as well. The end of the Cold War removed the main constraint that was suppressing polarization. The specific manner in and rate at which it reemerged were not easy to predict, but I'd claim that its reemergence was predictable.
I am cautiously optimistic that, if China does not change in ways that make it a worthy successor to the US on the international stage, it will unite enough Americans against it.
I think you're missing a crucial point with the "Republicans moving further right vs Democrats moving further left" issue, which is the social versus economic split. I don't have the fancy data to support this, but if you look at social issues (such as gay marriage or race equality), I don't think many people would say that Democrats haven't moved further left. However, if you look at issues like reducing poverty, increasing labor laws, etc, you'll see a very different view. In the into the 1970s, both parties often supported increasing social security (Truman created Social Security), labor rights (Nixon introduced OSHA), nationalized healthcare (Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid), the minimum wage, and more. George H.W. Bush signed a tax hike while every Republican president since has been in favor of tax cuts. Right now, Democrats support continuing those changes while Republicans generally prefer to go back on those changes.
To clarify a bit, I think it's about the framing of an "issue." If the issue is "Should we increase the minimum wage", then Republicans and Democrats generally agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Democrats still say yes while Republicans say "no." If the question is "should the minimum wage be <=$7, then then Republicans and Democrats agree "yes" up through the 1980s, while today Republicans still say "yes" while Republicans say "no."
Republicans have stayed at the same place, while Democrats have stayed at the same velocity.
The Republican position on minimum wage has stayed at the same place only if you don't account for inflation.
Some events that could have contributed to polarization of the general US population around 2000:
* Newt Gingrich's strategy of partisan obstruction.
* Founding of Fox news
These are coincidences, not causes. I don't think it was a coincidence that the 2000 election was the inverse of the 1916 election.
This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
>I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People. Here he makes all of the impassioned and convincing arguments he avoided in his book
Regarding how Ezra has different styles in the book and elsewhere, he said in a podcast 'I only put things in the book that I think I could prove...this is my first book and I wanted it to be very grounded. So there are things that I think are true but cannot really prove it, so they did not go in the book'. It is at 19:40 in episode 'Your Questions Answered'. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-questions-answered/id1081584611?i=1000479525981
Robert Putnam taught us that social capital (i.e. the network of relationships among people, both formal and informal) has been dropping in the United States for 75 years across all incomes, education levels, and demographics. This has led to decreases in social trust, cooperation norms, and a sense of shared identity. It is not hard to believe that this alienation of the American people from each other is leading to higher degrees of polarization. The specifics that Klein talks about certainly are part of the question, but it all sits in a much broader context.
This goes beyond the United States though - suburbanization and the internet have happened in many places.
I want to chime in on the idea of polarisation being some kind of lynchpin of problems, that if we fix everything would become a lot easier. I live in New Zealand, which is less polarised than the USA (you can see that in the graphs above). But despite this, our government (whether red or blue) has been strikingly unable to do anything to solve a number of the big problems the country faces. NZ has the worst housing costs in the developed world, one of the lowest productivities in the developed world and has so far done almost nothing to reduce our carbon emissions despite having a substantial proportion of our capital and people deployed in areas threatened by flooding and sea level rise. We're going in backwards in education levels, too. This seems inconsistent with the idea that if polarisation were reduced, the USA would find a way to solve its problems (but then again, maybe aside from the polarisation the USA otherwise has very good institutions? I'm not sure).
I'm surprised to hear that. NZ has a reputation in the US as a very well-governed country, though I can't remember how much of that comes from the coronavirus response.
People are often surprised about areas where New Zealand isn't doing well. For whatever reason, our reputation continues to punch above our weight. I'll absolutely grant that our coronavirus response was very good. Most politically inclined people I know here sort of agree that we've been very good at handling sudden emergencies, but relatively poor at dealing with long, chronic problems.
In some ways we have the opposite problem to the USA in that we have a large group of swing voters that genuinely do switch from one major party to the other election to election, and that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are. This has made it difficult to make the kind of changes that would reduce rent and housing costs, reduce carbon emissions etc.
New Zealand's COVID response succeeded through good luck far more than good management. Case in point, the latest outbreak in Australia is due to the fact that they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice. Had we had a higher population and been less isolated we would have been in the same boat as everywhere else.
Australia has had a very good pandemic by the standards of almost everywhere but NZ, and the latest quarantine-hotel outbreak currently consists of 5 people plus the family of 3 who seem to have been the source. So 'no better than Australia', even if true (which it doesn't seem to be; NZ showed more willingness to lock down hard and early, which clearly paid off) wouldn't be all that bad.
> they were late in implementing rapid, daily tests, which is being described there as 'mismanagement of the highest order'. New Zealand still only tests people in MIQ twice.
That quote is about inadequate testing of staff, not of quarantinees. I believe the latter are tested twice in most parts of Australia; the current debate is over whether to follow the lead of one state which recently added a test on day 16, i.e. two days after release.
A quick search does suggest that mandatory testing of staff may be more lax in NZ, though. This article (https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/voluntary-saliva-testing-offered-quarantine-workers-monday) says they recently brought in optional daily saliva tests, "in addition to their regular weekly testing".
> that group mostly wants things to stay the same as they already are.
I see a lot of people becoming more conservative due to the dysfunction of government. For example, a lot of Dutch people are in favor of green energy, but don't want wood burning plants that are very dirty and that don't achieve a reduction of greenhouse emissions in the medium term, even though the treaties and such say that we need to achieve a reduction fairly soon.
The government also claims that moving to electricity is 'green,' regardless of how that electricity is produced, which is obviously wrong.
Converting gasoline powered cars to electric coal-powered cars is actually green, it turns out :)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/?sh=787d496d2320
The article actually claims the opposite. It claims that when most electricity comes from coal, like in Poland, EVs are more polluting. It argues that EVs are cleaner when a high enough percentage of the electricity comes from renewables.
However, the article makes a very common error.
It assumes that the emissions caused by EVs can be calculated by looking at the average carbon emission of creating electricity. However, you actually have to look at the emissions caused by the production of the additional electricity which is used by moving to EVs.
There is widespread agreement by experts/scientists that we cannot reasonably scale wind and solar beyond a certain point. In the absence of a electricity storage breakthrough (or such), we can probably only increase the percentage of no/low-emission electricity by building more nuclear plants, but the West, the trend seems to be to get rid of existing nuclear plants, rather than build new ones (if we can even still do that, with the current level of regulations).
So there is a pretty good chance that the extra electricity used by EVs, comes from coal plants. For example, right now in Germany, coal plant capacity is kept in reserve to match supply to demand. Every extra EV that goes on the road in Germany, will cause more electricity to be generated with coal plants.
Not something I've seen in NZ, mostly people here are becoming more radical due to worsening personal situations, but of course that could just be my bubble. I didn't notice it when I lived in NL either, but I wasn't very plugged into the politics there at all!
Most overseas coverage of New Zealand is a form of romanticism. Obviously it depends on the metrics you choose, but there aren't really grounds for holding up New Zealand as a poster child for good governance. On the contrary, our unicameral parliament allows politicians to follow extremely poor process when it suits them. In the last term of parliament, one minor party in government was effectively granted a $3b pork barrel fund.
New Zealand has some structural advantages in this area over the US. In particular, local government has much less power:
(a) Local government does not have a general power of competence, i.e., it can only regulate on any given subject if the central government has explicitly granted it the power to do so.
(b) In particular, local government does not have the power of eminent domain.
(c) The police are run by the central government, not local government.
(d) Schools are run by the central government, not local government.
My gut feeling is that it also helps to not have a separate layer of state government, but I'm not sure that would work for a big nation.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that New Zealand is badly governed.
Enjoyed the post, minor nitpick, you refer to both Bill and Hilary Clinton as Clinton in the same paragraph, and it's a little confusing.
Thoughts.
I think liberal, conservative, and polarized are terms that are all used in unclear ways here. For example the graph linked to in the twitter post reads to me as Democrats have become more Democraty than Republicans have become Republicany. The issues in the graph, for the most part, don't have an accepted coherent philosophy unifying them, other than Republicans take one side of the issue, and Democrats take the other. Reading the graph this way fits with the Democratic narrative that most Americans agree with the Democratic position on most issues:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics/democratic-positions-majority/index.html
So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular. In this respect the Republican party is more extreme because it differs more from the median American position.
The other graphs also make me wonder. Does it make sense to measure historic liberal and conservative values of various parties, if the hot issues of the time were different, or the opposite positions on said issues were considered progressive? As an example I challenge you to consistently map US foreign policy to liberal or conservative over US history.
Along a similar set of lines I wonder what is being measured by the polarization over history graphs. Is it measuring difference in opinion or willingness to cooperate? Difference in opinion probably reduces the likely hood of cooperation, but it is not sufficient. Both parties may want to pass infrastructure reform, but are unwilling to make minor concessions lest their opponents get a policy win. Regardless of how polarization is measured, I think it's fair to say that we are not at a polarization high point considering we have not had any duels or canings on congress recently.
I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization since this is a common talking point in Vox among other places.
"I'm surprised Klein doesn't raise Gerrymandering as a possible cause of polarization"
It can't be a cause of gerrymandering because the Senate has also polarized.
In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists.
"So it's not surprising that Democrats are more Democraty, because Democratic positions are more popular."
Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
People point out gerrymandering as a cause of polarization because it negates the need for a representative to appeal to the median voter. In this respect you could consider the senate gerrymandered as well because Republicans hold a fundamental advantage in the senate map as well.
"In Congress, Democrats are more extreme, but the Republicans have a larger portion of extremists."
I don't really understand what this means. What does extreme mean? I think you have to define along the lines of the overton window, in which case I would say that Democrats and republicans are roughly symmetrical in how extreme they are, but Republicans have a larger portion of extremists. In other words an extremists is just someone who hasn't gone mainstream yet.
"Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump."
If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats. Even if you are talking about democrats, I don't see how the electoral college is the correct metric in the context of this conversation.
"If you read the link I posted it's about democrat policies not democrats."
Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is. Medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases are very popular, while handing out drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants and affirmative action are not.
I should note that I don't know that I buy the democratic narrative. I haven't looked into it enough to decide, but I disagree with you that "Election results are the only reliable way to know how popular a policy is". Polling exists and is very useful for this kind of thing. Yes people can ask biased questions and it's hard for a layman to interpret what the results mean, but it's far better than elections for determining how popular a policy is. Elections carry so much more baggage such as the candidates who are running, and most voters probably don't even know all of the positions their candidates have.
> Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point. For that matter, so did Trump.
Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes. Democrat positions - or at least Biden compared to Trump - are more popular among voters.
Oh please. Trump hatred, a deranged of off-the-rails extremism if there ever was one, got Biden installed. He had no policy position other than Orange Man Bad and He's Killing Us!
Look at the presidential elections since 1990 then - Democrats won the popular vote in all of them except for 2004, and that was at the peak of Iraq and with an incumbent president.
Seems you're changing the subject.
Itamar Levy-Or: "Democratic positions are more popular"
Eharding: "Joe Biden won the electoral college by less than a point."
Me: "Joe Biden won the popular vote by 6.4% though - 7 million votes"
radrave: A comparison of Trump with Joe Biden doesn't tell you about popularity of Democratic positions
Me: A comparison of all the recent presidential elections might tell you about popularity of Democratic positions
Does that seem reasonable, or did I miss something somewhere?
Joe Biden won the electoral college 306 to 232. Trump won the electoral college by 304 to 227. Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes, a 4.5% differential. Trump lost the popular vote by around 3 million, a 2.2% differential. It seems to me that using the popular vote as a proxy for popularity isn't unwarranted.
The gerrymandering-polarization narrative never really made sense. The Republicans got to draw a lot of districts following the 2010 census, and supposedly their own gerrymandering made them extreme. But Republican gerrymandering means cramming Democrats into a few super-blue districts and spreading Republicans across numerous slightly-red districts. But you'd think slightly-red districts would elect moderate Republicans.
You're failing to take into account elasticity:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/swing-voters-and-elastic-states/
Congressmen aren't tailoring the districts so as to have a competitive election they just barely win, they want to have an competitive election they just barely win.
Certainly they build their red districts with a margin of safety to make sure they win even when elasticity goes against them. But still, concentrating the other party's voters and spreading out your own is fundamentally how gerrymandering works.
Would you mind rephrasing your final sentence?
I don't know the details of real world districts, but consider a state where 60% of the population is a member of your party. If you drew every district to have 60% of the voters be members of your party, you will have gerrymandered the state to grant your party all the representatives with only 60% of the vote, without it ever being close.
"Trump holds basically the same positions that Americans in the mainstream of either party would have held in a less polarized time (eg 1995); Clinton holds positions that everyone in 1995 (including her husband) would have thought insane, radical, and ultra-far-left."
Yes, except if we rewind to 1970, Clinton's positions (at least the economic ones) look moderate and Trump's... well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions, but the Republican Party would look insane and ultra-far-right. Both parties shifted to the right a lot in the 1975-2000 period, and the Democrats starting to swing back left is part of the more recent growth in polarization.
My belief remains that having political differences between parties is a good thing, though I'd distinguish between 'ideological diversity' and 'polarization', because the latter case implies having precisely two poles (/tribes), which *is* a problem but also may be decreasing a bit now (and in any case is the fault of the two-party system).
<i> well, 2016-Trump didn't have any coherent positions</i>
Trump's economic positions go back decades. He hates trade, he hates getting involved with other countries outside of mercantilism.
The economics goes back centuries, it's the view of trade that Adam Smith attacked and Ricardo demolished. Unfortunately, the false version (absolute advantage/favorable balance of payments) is easier to understand than the true version (comparative advantage), and makes a better fit to the political interests of many of those controlling trade policy.
I didn't say he was right. I said Trump had a coherent (and consistent) policy.
> If you had some limited number of resources, and you wanted to improve (US) politics as much as possible so that the government made better decisions and better served its populace, what would you do?
Lawrence Lessig makes a compelling argument in Republic, Lost (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11814478-republic-lost) that the best way to improve US politics would be reversing Citizens United and getting money out of politics. Because both parties are in such intense competition, they spend all of their time fundraising instead of governing. If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
Voting system reform is far wiser. Implement score voting so the most popular candidate wins, rather than the candidate most popular among the plurality of the plurality. But I oppose democracy and instead support a wise government by superforecasters.
Was US politics doing just fine prior to Citizens United but suddenly got a lot worse after that? Because this polarization trend discussed above preceded that.
I was more making the point that if we could only solve one problem in politics, "money in politics" is more impactful than polarization, and might have a side-effect of decreasing polarization.
Polarization was already increasing prior to Citizens United. And is it really that "impactful" if it started after 2010?
Ignoring candidates trying to argue about CU itself, how does an alternate-universe without CU play out the 2016 or 2020 elections any differently?
I'm saying that if Citizens United had a big impact, shouldn't we be able to see it by comparing what things were like before vs after? Some kind of trend-line test?
We'd be far better off if we reversed Wickard v. Filburn so that most policy was handled locally, like it's supposed to be.
Yes.
> If we made fundraising illegal, they'd have nothing better to do than good government, and they'd stop trying to get you to hate the other party.
I agree on getting the money out of politics, but I doubt very much they'd stop trying to get voters to hate the other party. When real currency is out the window, votes are the only currency left so it will become a battle over different populist positions with all the same incentives.
Operating on the assumption that "populist" means "popular but useless or harmful", and "good policy" is "popular and helpful", I think that populist positions require advertising (aka money) that you are doing them and that they are working in order to get people to vote for you. Good policy should be self evident with a "are your circumstances better than they were four years ago?" test.
Policies that are unpopular and unhelpful (using public money to build yourself a private waterpark) or unpopular and helpful (force-feeding people vegetables) feel mostly unconnected to how much money political campaigns have to work with since the political incentives are to keep them quiet anyways.
The article about polarization data from 9 countries article doesn't seem to totally back up the idea that the internet/social media isn't to blame. Looking at their raw numbers, instead of their 2nd derivatives, Britain and Australia are roughly equal to the modern day US (which matched my understanding of their political climate), but are shown as having about an unchanging level of polarization over the past 20-30 years.
It could be that one conclusion is that the internet has nothing to do with polarization, but another potential one is that the internet raises polarization up to a certain cap, and other countries were already at that cap and have been even before the internet. Looking at the graphs, only 3 countries show a trend downwards from their current level of polarization, and they are all still (excluding Germany) currently at a level of polarization that roughly equals the US (45).
While this is a more complex explanation and thus goes against Occam's razer, it also seems really unlikely that the internet has nothing to do with polarization. After all, the Loss of geography section seems like it perfectly fits with the internet being to blame.
"That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness."
Republicans are less ideologically uniform in Congress. Probably less ideologically uniform among the general population, too. In both the Democratic and Republican parties, the primary opposition is from the right.
All evidence suggests the American party system (based on the electoral college) naturally tends toward polarization. America depolarized beginning in the 1920s largely because old debates were becoming less relevant, and the 1930s created the left-right ideological axis as the new primary difference between the parties, resulting in depolarization over the next forty years as the old pattern of polarization dissipated. In the 1970s and later, party constituencies became increasingly coherent to match the left-right ideological axis on which issues were debated. Even as late as 1976 you could see a presidential election that wasn't TOO different from that of 1876. No longer.
I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion. A big part of the changing dynamics of the 80s into the early 90s was the complete embrace of the Republican part by evangelicals, along with their re-entry into the political sphere after generations of trying to separate from society. Much of the socially cultural issues that caused deep divisions from 1980-2010 were in that area - abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, flag burning. The weird thing is that seemed to have a delayed effect up through the mid 2000's, when you people started abandoning organized religion, and the Democrats really started to be the party of the youth. This then naturally merged into the racial divisions that were exacerbated by right-wing opposition to Obama as a legitimate president.
I would have liked to see much more discussion in the book about the dimensions and correlations of religious/political polarization in the US. That could explain why we are so different from other WEIRD countries.
Evangelicals weren't especially anti-abortion early on. Catholics (who leaned Democrat at the time) were. They basically captured the intellectual heights of the conservative movement (how many Protestants are on SCOTUS?) and converted evangelicals to their cause.
You're right that evangelicals weren't that anti-abortion early, and until the 1980s they were still holding over a lot of anti-Catholic feeling. But the disappearance of Protestants from the SCOTUS didn't really get going until the late 1990s/2000s.
But the bigger issue stands, in that starting in the 1980s the parties developed a strong religious polarization. And the religious issues tended to drive some of the bitterest division. People weren't screaming about marginal federal income tax rates the way they were about abortion and gay rights. I think there is a part of this story about how certain issues that inspired the deepest division were religious, and that the religious polarization by party intensified that trend.
>> "I'm a little surprised to see so little discussion of religion."
Yes, I also think this is a MAJOR part of the story.
I'd frame it a little differently, though: America used to be united by religion, which set a limit to how far its political divisions could go.
The cultural glue that gave Americans a sense of investment in a set of meta-level norms for resolving political disagreement was the civic religion Will Herberg in the 1950s called Catholic/Protestant/Jew. That religious mainstream has undergone a long, slow collapse, of which we're only now beginning to reap the fruit.
> America used to be united by religion
It was. But then the elites started letting all those Catholics in ....
From some folks I've talked to, it seems like the leadership of many organized Christian denominations in the US seems to be much more Left than their followers. So it's possible that the leadership was pro-abortion, but it took a while for the signal from the congregants to get out.
It's also possible that the law-and-order impulse of people recoils against Roe v. Wade, which ultimately is a *terrible* legal opinion, even if I mostly agree with the results.
Many "Mainline" Protestant denominations have leadership that is much more to the left than their followers, but they're hollowing out, while Evangelicals (who have very conservative leadership) stay roughly the same. I don't have the best data on hand right now, but according to Pew in 2007 Mainline Protestants made up 18% of the US population while today they are only 14%, while over the same time period Evangelicals went from 26% to 25%. And in 1970 Mainline Protestants made up 30% of the population! It's been a long steady decline for Mainliner's while Evangelicals are holding out (or at least declining, much, much slower). So while the Mainline Protestant leadership is getting further to the Left, there are fewer of them overall year by year.
This is a good essay that gets to a good place and raises lots of good points, but I'm going to quibble with you on one point and then just point something out, but let's just understand I'm only quibbling on the point, not the overall piece.
OK? Cool.
Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
That's more an observation.
To quibble: I don't agree with you that the GOP is reacting to the craziness of the Dems. I agree the Dems are crazy! But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party.
That was quite crazy too. Not as crazy as now but it was crazy. And it sewed a lot of seeds for today's identity politics, particularly along the sexual faultlines.
In sum, each has brewed their own crazy and they both go way back. Each has also positioned themselves in contrast to the other, as well, though. Both things have happened. History is a mess. Anyway: Moderatism doesn't sell tickets.
And as an aside I've always had a hard time with moderatism on some issues. For example: I want to see a pretty hard ass approach to climate change. The time for moderation has passed. And even if it hasn't passed, if it turns out we go to far, we'll still come out with a nicer, cleaner, more healthy world on the other side of going hardass on it, so it's fine regardless. The utility value of going green is quite high to all even if the threat is overstated.
But I don't think it is.
This feels a little like a digression but I don't think it is. A mushy middle isn't really the answer. Restoring a consensus of nationhood and we all have more of a responsibility to that consensus than we do to political points seems more important.
To your point about an EA of politics: I've long thought crushing gerrymandering would be the best effective altruist solution here. If districts were more politically muddled and primaries were more of a contest we would see a different politics.
Gerrymandering is more important than the money. Usually people get mad when I say that but I suspect this crew won't.
>> "But the GOP has had its own crazy that presaged the current crazy for a long time. I feel like people have forgotten the late 90s era of the Christian Coalition not-quite-dominated-but-heavily-influenced Republican party."
Do you remember the "black helicopters"? And SNL's "Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol"? :-)
>>>Observation: I just don't think it's very useful to compare the United States of America to Germany (as Klein did in the post you cited), because America is just so big. Let's see a polarization graph for the whole European Union and then we can talk.
More size, more types of people, more extreme people, more differences in culture that make it harder for people to communicate.
People in small countries have a great deal more culture common ground which makes communication easier.
A small town Kansan (like I grew up) does not have a lot of context in common with a Brooklyn-native (the people of where I live now). The mutual suspicion there is acute. I don't think it's quite so acute for a rural vs. Urban German.
----
Out of curiousity, have you been to different regions of Germany and spoken to different types of people?
Half the country that is like 40+ years old, grew up in the Soviet Union, and the other half didn't. Some cities like Berlin have far-left ararchist movements that are blockading streets and burning cars when a squat is evicted, other cities are majority catholic and have huge beer festivals. The west and east had different immigrant populations that were arriving from ww2 on, like all the vietnamese in the east, and the turkish guest workers in the west.
I'm not sure why you would assume that farmers would get on perfect with city folks. Its my understanding that a lot of the far right party AFD, has a more rural base.
but yes, Germany is smaller than the US.
To be honest, I've been to about 15 states in the US (i'm Canadian with family there) and sure you're a diverse country, but but not strikingly more so somehow than other countries.
caveat: I'm just responding to your comment, I haven't read Ezra Klein's book or that article in a few months.
The thing that always strikes me about US political polarization is how clean of a rural/urban split it is, where urban areas all over are strongly Democratic and rural areas all over are strongly Republican. When did it start being this way? Do other countries see this same split?
"When did it start being this way?"
Most straightforwardly, the 2000 election.
I'm no historian, but wasn't there long migrations of black people, moving north, and out of rural areas into city centers. And then white people moving out of city centers because they didn't want to live near black people?
If that is true (and correct me if its wrong), then I guess its pretty easy to imagine that the white people that moved to suburbs and rural areas because they didn't want to mix with Blacks ended up in the Republican Party. And that conversely the city people were more progressive, also included immigrants from elsewhere and ended up in the Democrats.
But I'm curious about your take, how did the 2000 election drive a rural/urban split?
In Australia we have three parties -- to first approximation the Labor Party is for the city-dwelling poorer-than-median, the Liberal Party is for the city-dwelling richer-than-median, and the National Party is for rural areas. The Liberals and Nationals are in a permanent centre-right coalition.
As a city-dwelling rich(er-than-median) person I find it strange that I have no natural place in US politics. When I first moved to San Francisco I thought it obvious that rich city dwellers should support the right-wing party -- after all, they want to lower our taxes while the other party seems to spend their time talking about how evil we are. I never understood why my fellow rich city-dwelling friends didn't see things the same way.
It might be useful to look at the 1896 election also.
The urban-rural divide is global. e.g.
- India: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2009/4/16/indias-growing-rural-urban-divide
- Europe: https://www.era-learn.eu/network-information/networks/governance-14-2018/democratic-governance-in-a-turbulent-age/the-rural-urban-divide-in-europe
- Japan: https://thediplomat.com/2014/02/japans-rural-urban-divide/
- Argentina: https://www.thebubble.com/argentine-urban-rural-divide
Heh, after I collected that list, I found this Atlantic article which uses the same examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/electoral-college-trump-argentina-malaysia-japan-clinton/512153/ So if you want nicely organized analysis, start there.
"I'm not sure I fully understood Klein's explanation of exactly how this happened. After all, since identities are not 100% correlated (ie not all farmers are Protestant and not all city-dwellers are poor), you can't actually do this for the whole population at once. I think Klein would say that these correlations went from kind of random, to the ones that capture the biggest slice of the population."
Two things here:
1) People underestimate how very NOT diverse America was until recently. We were an 85%-90% white country from 1860-1960, and over 90% Christian, so those were not identities that you even could polarize around. There was some slicing and dicing of the various Christian sects (e.g. Catholics overwhelmingly supporting Democrats), but I think that's how this has shifted--the "big" identities have become much more polarized because they've become smaller.
2) Klein sort of misses something in this analysis, which is that polarization can be explained as much by the *erosion* of identity as by the *realignment* of identity. The question of the book is of course "Why are we polarized?" but as you do a good job explaining, the real question is more, "Why did we go from a system where you had conservatives and liberals supporting each party, to one in which conservatives overwhelmingly support Republicans and liberals overwhelmingly support Democrats?" But you could also pose the question as "What kept a bunch of conservative white people in the Democratic Party for so long?" The answer in the South was that the Democratic Party was completely tied up in white Southern identity. In the North it seems to be labor unions, or more broadly that they saw the Democrats as the "working man's party," that kept them in the party. I think the breakdown of the labor movement--and the class consciousness that came with it, not just the material benefits--kept a lot of conservatives in the Democratic Party.
As far as what polarized the parties, I see it as (in chronological order):
1) Civil Rights Act: As you said, this led to the decline of the Democratic Party in the South, essentially pushing conservative white Southerners closer to the GOP)
2) Reagan: He actively campaigned against moderate Republicans before becoming president and strongly pushed the idea that the Republicans should become a conservative party, basically making the conservative wing of the party ascendant
3) Iraq War
4) Obama: I don't think he tried to polarize the country, but he was basically the liberal dream candidate--black, son of an immigrant, intellectual, more dovish than Kerry, Gore, and Clinton--and the conservative nightmare. The 2010 election was basically the end of the conservative Democrat in Congress, and I don't think you can disentangle that from conservatives who had historically voted for Democrats being turned off by Obama.
5) Trump: Basically the mirror image of Obama
"Iraq War"
Seems quite irrelevant; 00 election was very strongly correlated with 04 election and Democrats are fine with neocons now.
1972-PREZ seems more like an election for the post-2000 era than 1984.
You are correct that the parties changed due to certain identities (e.g., Catholic v. Protestant) becoming less important.
I actually feel more confident about the Iraq part than the rest. The lead-up to Iraq was not very polarized, but the 2004 election seemed to polarize strongly so that if you were FOR the war, you were absolutely for Bush, and if you were against the war, you were for Kerry. Even though basically all of the pro-war Dems kept their prominent positions in the party, they all had to self-flagellate over their original support for it (and arguably, Iraq is why Obama beat Clinton in '08). That's very different from previous wars, which other than the Civil War seemed to not have a strong partisan division, even when they were unpopular. And that hard line also aligned with some regional polarization and seemed to beget a lot of the "Red State=Jesusland full of hicks trying to shove Bibles down your throat, Blue State=Latte sipping socialists."
Why was the 2004 election so strongly correlated with the 2000 election? https://againstjebelallawz.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/1916correlation.png
It's a great question. I think that--to use my examples--basically by 2000 the realignment caused by the Civil Rights Act and Reagan had taken shape, and then Iraq just solidified it. If you didn't like Bush in 2000, you HATED him in 2004.
Maybe even if you liked him. Bush the first time was the last time I voted for a Republican president.
I don't know, it's true the country was 85-90% white by today's standards, but back then the different European ethnicities were quite distinct and there wasn't really a monolithic 'white' culture the way we see it today. Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white, and even the germanic/nordic communities throughout the midwest largely spoke their native languages and held onto their native customs. Yes they all treated each other as superior to black/brown populations, but to say they were an assimilated mass with little diversity between them would be wrong
You're right, and we did actually see partisan sorting along those ethnic lines that trumped ideology--you had strong support for Democrats among "ethnic" whites until Nixon and strong support for Republicans among WASPs in the Northeast. I just meant "white" and "Christian" weren't identities you could polarize around, so saying "white people are starting to drift to the Republican Party" would have just meant "America is shifting right" and not "America is polarizing."
"Most the anglo-saxons back then looked down on Italians/Irish immigrants as not really being white"
Looked down on, perhaps, but "not really being white" certainly not. America had a legally enforced racial caste system, and European immigrants always classified as white under it.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/
Yea they never legally defined Italian/Irish as non-white, but I think my comment still stands that the prevailing opinion among Anglo/Germanic communities was that non-Anglo/Germanic Europeans weren't really 'white' like they were.
I wish there was an ungated version of the paper linked there available, because it does actually go into social (rather than merely legal) distinctions. They again find that European immigrants were lumped in with other whites, not African Americans or Native Americans.
There was a tiered hierarchy. Angle-Saxons at the top, then European immigrants (who themselves were divided based on their origin). Then they drew the line and declared those to be "white." Then there were African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and others.
The European immigrants still counted as "white," but they definitely weren't treated the same.
There's an important sense in which your 3, 4 and 5 are horribly missing the point.
For 4 and 5, Obama *spoke* like a dove but governed no less hawkishly than Bush while Trump *spoke* (kind of) like a hawk but governed more dovishly than any American president since Carter. Which gets to the meat of why 3 matters: Obama cultivated the persona of a political outsider at exactly the time when the Iraq war and the 2008 recession demonstrated incontrovertibly that the political insiders running our foreign and domestic policy were at best disastrously incompetent and at worst malevolent. When his neoliberalism turned out to be indistinguishable from Bush's neoconservatism in practice, just with rainbow flags in place of crosses, a lot of people in both parties started looking for the door.
Which is, to my mind, the essence of today's partisanship. If you reject the Washington Consensus which formed the mainstream of both parties pre-Trump (and which has been desperately trying to claw back control of the Republicans post-Trump) then your choices for elected officials are very limited. Without a genuine outsider to vote for, the best bet is just to gum up the gears of the Washington machine by threatening to primary any politician who tries to reach across the aisle to pass another part of their shared agenda. If a new war or a a new bailout or a new expansion of the surveillance state is worth it to their donors they'll take the risk, but forcing them to play defensively on the smaller issues means Democratic and Republican elected officials have that many fewer opportunities to defraud the American people.
I don't think you're wrong or I'm wrong here, I think we're describing different but simultaneous phenomena that pushed the country in the same direction. You are right that Obama was not (as he may have seemed at the time) a strong departure from the Washington consensus, so people who wanted that probably were turned off by him. What you write helps explain why we're seeing rising numbers of independents but not rising numbers of swing voters; there are a growing number of people who do see the two parties as indistinguishable and/or just bad actors, but who nevertheless have strong policy preferences one way or the other.
I think the synthesis for our ideas is this: Obama was not that different from previous iterations of Democrats, and people on the left saw him as basically a normal Democrat. This actually turned off some people, who had been hoping he would push against the grain more, and lead them to demand a more extreme version of liberalism a la Bernie Sanders. Many conservatives, on the other hand, perceived Obama as a radical, dangerous departure from the norm, possibly more because of who he was rather than the policies he pushed, though I'm sure they had their reasons. This led them to demand from the right for less cooperation and more ideological rigor. You could basically argue the same thing about Trump--Republican voters saw him as a businessman who deviated from Republican orthodoxy in speeches, but ultimately his big accomplishments were tax cuts, deregulation, and appointing conservative judges. If you asked Democrats, though, he was a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics, pushing them to cooperate less, and the cycle repeats.
Er, no, it had nothing to do with "who [Obama] was". It wasn't even what policies he pushed. It was what political tactics the Democrats used under him.
What both wiped out the "conservative" Democrats in 2010 and convinced the right that the Democrats had radically and dangerously departed from the historic norm was that in 2010 the "conservative" Democrats in Congress took the radical and unprecedented step of committing mass electoral suicide in order to push through a massively unpopular program on behalf of their party leadership. When even the people of the State of Massachusetts were opposed enough to Obamacare to elect a Republican in a special election to try to stop it, the Democrats went ahead and rammed it through.
You want "a HUGE deviation from the norm of American politics", THAT was the moment.
At that point, the idea of there being such a thing as a "conservative" Democrat, or even one who would reflect and respond to his constituents' desires, died in the minds of America's right. They're now convinced that there's nobody to persuade or compromise with in the Democratic Party. And so any Republicans in office who act like there's any Democrats in office who can be persuaded or compromised with are either idiots or traitors.
And so that illustrates what they're really demanding of Republican politicians. The demand is not for ideological rigor; Trump went ahead and talked positively about the British NHS in a Republican Presidential debate, after all. What they demand is that the Republican politician agree that all that's possible with the Democrats is war-to-the-knife, and pledge to fight it.
RE international comparisons: which other developed countries have two-party systems? From a cursory Wikipedia, it seems like the answer is Malta and that's basically it.
Other contenders:
South Korea often only has two big parties, but which two seems to change every election.
Australia has two big groups, but one is the Coalition of two parties, and the senate is elected via PR and has 20% minority representation.
I am more familiar with the UK and don't think it counts, we had a coalition government pretty recently and the Scottish National Party are pretty big.
Any others?
Taiwan.
I think the UK definitely counts as they have only had two major parties for pretty much their whole history.
Many countries have a mostly dominant "natural governing party" and then a smaller opposition party. In Canada that was the Liberal Party, while in Japan it was the Liberal Democrats, and in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Singapore is a more extreme case of this, where the natural governing party has (so far) never been out of power.
There is an argument that this is just like a single city always electing Democrats: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/11/democracy_in_si.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/the_puzzle_of_o.html
Its not just the two party system, but that we don't have a parliamentary system, so the coalition politics of a parliament don't apply.
Arguably the American system is more analogous to various south American and African countries with strong presidential powers. Who tend to have the presidents party and the other one.
As a Canadian I feel like while we are multi party, we share some of the problem's with the US because we use the first past the post. Because there's basically just 1 party on the right and 2 big ones on the left, we basically have a constant spoiler effect on the left where the vote is split too much for either major left wing party to win. And so we end up sometimes with the Conservative (rightwing) party winning, even though 65% of the country voted for a left wing party.
I think of being a 2 party country and being a first-past the post country as almost one and the same problem. It greatly incentives voting against the one you hate rather than the one you want. And that's a huge barrier to entry for new parties and so should trend over time towards 2 consolidated parties.
Inequality began its explosive rise starting in the late 70s due to globalization, the loss of labor bargaining power, the rise of the managerial class, etc. As the producer of the world’s reserve currency, the US has a unique role in globalization which magnifies the effects (both good and bad). The massively divergent outcomes among members of society, plus what I would argue resembles stagnation at lower rungs, created fertile ground for a loss of social trust and a rise in angst. In the absence of deep, productive debates on the true underlying issues, we simply default to tribal partisanship and culture wars.
Economic inequality has been rising since around the late 60s. I agree globalization is a major factor (but it increased bargaining power for workers in many other countries), but automation has also been a major factor. I'm not sure what constitutes a productive debate on the underlying issues, but it seems to me that economic inequality is possibly the single most constantly talked about issue there is.
Sure, we talk about inequality but mostly in naïve, tribal ways that fail to address root causes, nevermind actual solutions. What i mostly hear is "tax the rich," "systemic racism," "throw more money at failing schools," etc etc. Regardless of what you think of such issues, they are not going to put a dent in inequality - which has been rising ever faster the more we "talk about it."
We need real discussions on trade policy, monetary policy, dramatic tax reform, supply-side revolutions in healthcare/education housing etc. Mostly what i observe is the use of emotional issues to avoid having the real discussions that are necessary - and which would probably prove financially costly for the elites.
Inequality and "economic inequality" aren’t problems. They are mathematical relationships. Inequality isn’t even remotely the same thing as "unfairness", which we can probably agree on as an actual problem.
I guess my point is that to the extent that unfairness is an issue, if we wish to address it we should start by labeling the issue correctly. Inequality of outcome is not necessarily an indication of unfairness, nor is greater economic inequality intrinsically worse than less inequality.
While I agree in theory, it may not mean much in practice. If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable? If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable? There are no clear answers and the way society finds the "answers" seems to be a very messy process, which i believe we are going through now.
I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair. We do a very poor job of this...the winners of the current configuration aren't "policed" much at all. I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative.
Thanks for the reply!
"If a country pursues a policy we'll "globalization" which has the effect of growing aggregate wealth, but at the expense of leaving x% of people behind, is that unfair? undesirable?"
Globalization doesn’t require a country to pursue it. Individual and corporate actions are sufficient to achieve global exchange absent country interference. And I really don’t understand what "leaving people behind" means. I decided to retire ten years ago. Was I left behind? Others chose not to move to booming markets (perhaps for good reasons), or chose not to make the transition to booming, higher paid professions. Were they left behind? Or is this just a euphemism for the fact that change creates winners and losers, pretty much by definition?
And I will add that wage inequality in a market is actually acting as the incentive to correct for the lack of transition (to the new job or area). The market is sending an incentive and a signal for people in declining areas and professions to adjust their behavior if possible.
"If we patch the system up via transfer payments instead of job opportunities is that unfair? undesirable?"
Not if we agree to play by those rules. If I agree to play by certain rules and we all follow them I would consider the game fair (and presumably desirable), even if the final score is extremely lopsided. I am not arguing against redistribution, I am suggesting that the system can be both fair and desirable even when it leads to inequality of outcome.
"I do think that the more inequality your system produces, the more you need to (at least optically) "police" bad actors such that the system at least seems fair."
I agree we should police bad actors and ensure that the system is as fair as possible. But I do not believe it is logical to look at an unequal outcome and make an assumption that the system is unfair nor even that more equality would be better. Inequality of outcome and fairness are not necessarily correlated. Indeed I could argue that a market based system would be dysfunctional if every course of action led to the same results.
"I think this is all the more important in a country where "equality" is a core pillar of the national narrative."
The equality pillar has nothing to do with equality of economic outcome. It refers to equality of process — it is about treating everyone fairly using the same rules.
I agree but I feel like that's a problem with pretty much every issue. With inequality, I think there are some 'inconvenient truths' that obstruct discourse, such as the fact that rising productivity inequality is probably at least one driving force behind it. Of course one can still argue for redistribution from rich to poor even if the gap largely reflects productivity difference, but I think many find it less palatable to demand recompense based on abstract moral valuation of equality than on the basis that one is being shortchanged by fatcats and is merely demanding the rest of one's rightful compensation.
Of course for some big inequality-related issues, like housing and education costs, Klein's point about the nationalization of politics is probably pretty relevant. They're local/state issues and thus can't command as much popular interest as national political issues.
Surprised I haven't heard anyone saying this - what about wealth and income inequality? Given the correspondence, seems as if an explanation would have more power if it related to them both. https://images.app.goo.gl/biMLpT78K9rK1QJr7
High levels of blatant inequality in the 1880s-1910s, pushes polarization until enough solutions get passed, things go down, people are happy, welfare state starts stagnating and retreating, inequality goes up, pushes polarization.
Why would wealth inequality push Polarization? People are unhappy, don't know why, blame the outgroup.
Alternatively, only way to suppress class consciousness is to give people some other identity to care about.
Inequality wasn't falling during the 1920s, though polarization was, and Britain and Australia don't fit the pattern.
This isn’t an exact science. It may be that inequality + a very large diverse society + an “all created equal” national narrative creates problems.
U.S society was fairly large and diverse in the 1920s, although African Americans were restricted from taking part in politics in the south (where most of them lived).
You could substitute "what about the share of foreign born Americans?"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/30/immigrant-share-in-u-s-nears-record-high-but-remains-below-that-of-many-other-countries/
It was high in the second half of the 1800s, reached a peak in 1910, fell to its low in the 1970s, and has trended up ever since.
And that's also probably a contributing or correlated factor. No need to limit causality to one thing when there are probably a host of things that contribute
Alternative: most of the income inequality has been eaten up by other forms of compensation. Not just healthcare benefits, etc. Also regulatory benefits. With the introduction of OSHA, ADA, EEOC, etc., everybody is getting a large boost in non-monetary benefits through the regulatory apparatus rather than through the labor negotiation process.
If there's any discontinuity around that time, it'd be 9/11 and Iraq. I think 9/11 was the original cause, but it took a couple years to show up, because in the short term it was a unifying factor. It wasn't until Iraq happened, and started to go differently to how Bush suggested it would, that it exploded into polarization.
This is a guess, obviously, but it seems to fit well enough.
2000 election was inverse of 1916 election, so 9/11 wasn't important.
I'm not following you.
Does the chart of polarization show the UK becoming less polarised? Because that does not match my impressions. I would say less until the mid 90s and then flat for a bit (maybe not quite - Blair was dominant so the Tories going down weird routes for a bit did not affect much) and then the left reaction against Blair started with Iraq/Bush which started moving bits of Labour apart just as the Tories went centre enough to have a chance to grab back power - the 2008 crash made this worse and then the Tories won and while socially liberal they were harsh cutters of government services, which made polarisation more urgent. The Lib dem implosion as part of the coalition destroyed the middle for a bit, then Brexit/Corbyn/Boris sharpened the cultural aspect until there was very strong polarisation.
So I would expect a U shape with the minimum late 90s early 00s
The UK chart shows ultra-high polarisation during the Thatcher years, calming down a bit during Major, reaching a minimum with Blair, and then increasing until we reach Thatcher levels again with Brexit. That matches my intuitions.
Which suggests that maybe polarisation levels are just strongly influenced by specific issues and personalities. What's really interesting is that the Iraq war was a polarising event in the US but a depolarising event in the UK, because in one country it was supported by a right-wing leader and in the other by a left-wing leader.
Perhaps the best thing for depolarising the US would be for Joe Biden to start a war.
I don't think anyone has mentioned Bush/Gore and 9/11? Those are two events that were huge in the popular consciousness that fit the timeline. Of course you can't draw a line in the sand, can you - just why was the 2000 Presidential race so evenly split - in my memory both Bush and Gore were pretty unremarkable candidates. All I know is that you still can find people bitter over the outcome, which naturally ought to contribute to a "win-at-all-costs" mentality. And then you had 9/11 and everything that followed. Attack on American soil! It was quite a shock to the system after a decade of relative peace and harmony. People were digging in on jingoistic patriotism versus the other side advocating a more measured response and saying, No the US is the true aggressor here. And throughout the Iraq War the justifications became more murky and Bush expanded his power in unpopular ways and you had things like the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Bush was so hated that a faux-documentary was made about his assassination and what would be the aftermath. I don't have a point to all this, perhaps it's too much of a just-so story. But I definitely see some of the origins of the current culture war in those times.
Bill Clinton mastered "triangulation" which serves to increase tensions. This preceeded The 2000 election. It's Moloch all the way down.
I think an interesting subject for further inquiry is why the Democrats have been more successful at fighting off insurgencies that Republicans.
My moderately informed opinion is that institutional Democrats have a lot more institutional support than institutional Republicans.
If someone primaries Mitch McConnell, they will get a lot of favorable coverage (in the primary campaign) even if that person's views were much more abhorrent. If AOC were to attempt to primary Chuck Schumer, it would be seen as a threat to the republic.
When Trump was launching his campaign, everyone thought it was hi-larious how he was taking down the Jeb Bushes and Marco Rubios of the world. I recall a lot of tweets about how Trump maybe really nuts, but what's really nuts is the numbers in Rubio's tax plan!
Meanwhile, the leasing institutionally conservative publication published an "against Trump" cover. But it didn't matter.
Bernie Sanders was always a threat. He was pressured to quite. People were really concerned about "Bernie-bros.", etc. Try talking about Jill Stein in certain quarters.
I think the Democrats are heading down that slope, though. They're doing what the Republicans did, resisting the direct challenges to the people in charge, but bending policy and appointments toward the insurgency to appease them. But eventually the old Democrats will be called some equivalent of DINO for holding on to something (anything) while the current is pulling them leftward.
I think may you have something here, but I want to quibble. AOC got into congress by primarying one of the prominent dem house leaders. I don't think she got much pushback for it, and if she did it didn't matter. The movement that put her in is dedicated to finding and pushing out dems that are too far to the right.
Also, in my state legislative district, the local Democratic party did not endorse their long-time centrist representative in the primary, when he was being challenged by two inexperienced activists on the left and the far left. It was also interesting to see a local news source completely avoid mention of the left challenger, in favor of the far left one. Like literally, their editorial recommendations didn't mention her name or acknowledge that she was in the race. (Fortunately they have a robust online comment section.)
I'm more than a little surprised that population density didn't come up once.
The simplest way to describe the difference between republican and democratic coalitions is population density. Democrats are predominantly an urban coalition, and republicans are more rural / suburban.
When you factor in that most economic growth has taken place in cities, and cities are always where almost all culture is produced, you see a pretty obvious pattern:
- cities are where almost all economic power is concentrated
- cities are where almost all cultural power is concentrated
- cities are dominated by democratic politics
He's got a point that AOC/Bernie have less influence inside party politics - but there are plenty of SJW extremists writing in the New York Times. Sure, QAnon is totally off the rails and there isn't anything like that on the left, but the closest left wing equivalents are tenured sociology professors.
Whenever I leave California to go visit my parents in Ohio, I feel like I understand the sense of despair and anger and frustration that people here feel, towards the place that took a lot of their kids, and responds by calling them racist, bigoted people for not going along with this increasingly radical agenda, which seems coupled to economic policies that are AWESOME if you leave your hometown and move to a big city and learn to do really insanely complicated things for a giant corporation, but otherwise are kinda meh.
It's been difficult for me to escape the conclusion that you can't possibly have a stable political coalition that covers "city dwellers" as more and more of the country movies into cities - unless those city dwellers are united against a common enemy. All around San Francisco in 2014, there was a big tech backlash, with people spraypainting '#DieTechieScum' on the sidewalk. It all went away around the time Michael Brown was killed. I watched how quickly all the big tech companies joined into BLM, and remembered thinking at the time "now we have an enemy that we can all feel good about hating."
If this hypothesis is true - that increasing urbanization drives political polarization - the solution would be... some kind of ... thing.. .which caused lots of people to start leaving big cities all at once. Maybe spreading tech wealth all over the country, and increasing the frequency of interaction between highly trained technological professionals and blue collar workers. Who knows what would cause such a thing?
Why not just have everyone move to cities? Seems easier to me - cities have economies of scale, whereas rural areas have... cows which do not require the rural population we currently have
>> "Why not just have everyone move to cities?"
That is in fact roughly what's happening, at what may be close the maximum rate consistent with aggregated individual choice as opposed to coercive state policy.
The present urban/rural political dynamic is what you see as a result.
I think you're wrong. America has instead gotten more suburban in the more recent decades. Restrictions on building in big cities pushes real estate prices up, and people out. There are many blue suburbs now, but it's not because a smaller portion of the country lives in rural areas (that has stayed steady at a low percentage of the population for a while).
I'm beginning to suspect that a great number of people here live in a bubble. So many people are fleeing San Francisco that rents have actually dropped by hundreds of dollars. Same in NY.
That's only been true since the start of the pandemic. Expect the trend to reverse itself as soon as it's safe to go outside in a city.
Reactions to covid are merely an accelerant. Conditions is San Francisco regarding homelessness, public sanitation, rising crime, and educational shortcomings are factors that won't go away anytime soon. And it looks like companies are finally waking up to the benefits of allowing folks to work at home. There's no going back.
Work from home is just going to accelerate urbanization. So many people that have jobs in suburban office parks would love to live in a city - and particularly people with jobs in a small city that would rather live in a big city.
All the data shows an increase up until last March, at which point the rents dropped drastically.[0] Just like they did in the rest of the country.[1] Perhaps it has multiple causes, but the data doesn't show it.
[0]: https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/san-francisco/
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/These-charts-show-just-how-extreme-the-rent-15848320.php
The move from large cities, which continue to deteriorate in every possible way for various reasons, is happening more rapidly now.
I think you've got that backwards - people are continuing to urbanize.
A similar thing is happening in England with the cities voting more and more for Labour and the towns and rural areas (even in the North) voting Tory.
One theory of the cause of increased partisanship since the 70's that has been growing on me is transparency/sunshine laws. Apparently, pre 1970's congressional/comittee meetings and votes were all done closed door to the point where we don't even know how specific legislators voted on specific legislation. But beginning in the 1970's a wave of legislation calling for increased "accountability" opened up these proceedings to the general public. But, the theory goes, special interest groups, corporations, media interests etc are a LOT better at holding their representatives accountable than the average joe voter. Where previously they were still motivated to enact regulatory capture, but ultimately didn't know if it was working and couldn't easily organize against someone who defected, now they could. And the legislators now knew that they could.
And where previously they could give a good partisan speech but then go behind closed doors and compromise or acknowledge when someone from the other side made a good point, now there was no longer any backstage. The theatre element of politics is on and you can never be seen to not be treating the other side like they're the bad guys and we're the good guys.
Also with the transparency laws, the media gains power because they are the largest influencers of the only group that can possibly counter the special interest groups, the average voters. So the value of influencing the average voter goes up which, of course, increases competition for that influence. And the more the battle for that influence heats up the more you need to band together to win(media consolidation), the more you gain from demonizing the other side, and the more incentivized you are to do it.
The link I posted above has some really compelling research and arguments that link transparency laws to polarization, regulatory capture, government waste, pork, bill size inflation/obfuscation, wealth inequality, increased campaign spending, decreases in crossing the aisle voting, increases in "bang for your buck" for lobbying spending, wage stagnation/inequality and a whole host of other problems. It's a surprisingly robust theory.
It also offers an easy solution. Closed doors and secret ballots.
https://congressionalresearch.org/TransparencyProblem.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HNmsBaVmZs&ab_channel=CRI
Excellent, I was going to mention this as well. TV didn't show up in the Senate until 1974 for example.
This also ties in with (and is accelerated later on) by the "revolt of the public" a la Matting Gurri in the post 2000-era, as the mediating media institutions have fallen away. Basically, I think at least part of the polarization is tied into the loss of faith in elites and institutional decline over the past 50-60 years, combined with a loss of narrative control.
Add in the decline in religiosity generally, one party grabbing most of the remaining religious voters over time after Roe v Wade (1973), some identity politics, and a few other things I'm sure I missed, and here we are.