Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist

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Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.

Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.

I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.

Conflict Theory Has A Free Rider Problem

Before demonstrating that conflict theory doesn’t explain politics, let’s first notice that there are good theoretical reasons why it can’t work.

Suppose you are a rich person who wants lower taxes. We can be more specific: you make $1 million per year, and you want a policy which lowers taxes 5% and saves you $50K. How much work should you (selfishly) be willing to invest in this?

I think the conflict theorist imagines the rich person should put in up to $49K of resources, whether that’s literal money (in the form of donations), time and energy (maybe by creating an activist network like the Koch Foundation), or just posting about it on Facebook.

But this ignores the free-rider problem. Suppose there are one million rich people already fighting for this issue. Taking that number up to one-million-and-one hardly changes their odds. Any particular rich person could relax on the beach, and still have pretty much exactly the same chance of getting the tax break he wants.

On the other hand, if zero other rich people are already involved, then it still doesn’t matter whether our particular rich person joins in - one person fighting a lonely battle won’t get too far. Why should he spend tens of thousands of dollars and hours of his time each week to increase the chance of his chosen tax break from 0% to 0.000001%?

So in theory, selfishness alone shouldn’t be able to drive political action, except in extremely rare cases when you’re so powerful that you can personally put a coalition over the top (Elon Musk might be in this category). For everyone else, including the merely very-rich, there must be some motivation beyond self-interest.

The SALT Cap

And empirically, we find self-interest is surprisingly weak.

Before 2017, Americans could deduct State And Local Taxes (including property tax) from their federal taxes. If you lived in a high-tax blue state and made $150K, this deduction probably saved you about $10,000 per year.

In 2017, the Trump administration weakened the deduction. Although Republicans are usually anti-tax, this particular tax fell on high-earning people in high-tax blue states, ie the professional managerial class, ie coastal elites. The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary.

In 2020, the Democrats - party of coastal elites! - came back in power. They considered undoing Trump’s SALT cap. But they thought it would look bad to cut taxes on themselves at the same time they were expanding government, so they decided against.

This coming year, the 2017 tax bill will expire. The new administration will probably renew most of it, but rumor says they don’t plan on renewing the SALT cap. Maybe they’re satisfied with the amount they’ve screwed over coastal elites already.

I know about this mostly because I noticed my taxes going up. I’ve seen a few articles about it here and there. But it’s not a big national issue. People don’t hold protest marches about it. The Republicans couldn’t bother getting enough of a coherent opinion on it not to let their own cap expire, and the Democrats didn’t care enough to change the Republicans’ cap during their four years in power.

But why wasn’t it a bigger deal? The PMC ie coastal elites run the media, and more or less shape politics in their own image. This cap costs them 5% of their salary per year. If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else. It should completely dominate the airwaves and Intertubes. Instead, crickets.

The Vaccines

Unlike the SALT cap, there is no conflict here.

If the vaccines are good, nobody benefits from pretending that they’re bad. Anti-vaxxers aren’t protecting their material self-interest. They’re putting their kids at risk of deadly diseases for no reason.

And if the vaccines are bad, maybe a few pharma companies benefit from shilling them. But no real people do. None of the hundred million or so pro-vaxx Americans love pharma companies enough that they’d risk their kids’ health to help them out.

Here there’s no plausible explanation except that one side or the other - the hundred million people who really want themselves and their kids to be vaccinated, or the hundred million people who really don’t - is making a terrible, tragic mistake.

If you’re anti-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by pharma company propaganda. If you’re pro-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by grifter/conspiracy-nut propaganda. But in either case, the hundred million people who have fallen for the propaganda have honestly fallen for it. If “someone is producing propaganda about it” qualifies as conflict theory, then conflict theory is meaningless - or at least consistent with the vast majority of believers in an issue being simply mistaken in their reasoning, rather than personally standing to gain from either side.

Unlike the SALT cap, this issue is a big deal. People get emotional about it, elections are won or lost on it, people will spend millions of dollars or entire careers pushing their view. And there’s no conflict theory angle that makes sense.

…And Everything Else

These are just two examples, but the overall profile of issues that people care about look more like the COVID vaccine than the SALT cap.

Wokeness is the single issue that makes people most passionate. It has some direct material consequences - affirmative action gives some jobs to blacks rather than whites. But nobody cares about it because of the consequences - affirmative action lasted fifty years, and Richard Hanania ably chronicles how none of the five Republican administrations during that period bothered to shut it down, because it would have cost them political capital which they preferred to save for higher priorities. People only started caring about wokeness once it started interfering with non-material, seemingly trivial issues. Pronouns in bios. Statues torn down. Trans women in sports. Disabled LGBT Women Of Color Awareness Months. On-site sensitivity training.

Likewise, there might be some material consequences to immigration - jobs taken, crimes committed. But these consequences probably aren’t happening in Kentucky and Tennessee - two of the states most passionate about supporting Trump in his role as immigration-enforcer-in-chief. And the positive consequences of immigration - taco trucks, cheap labor, etc - cannot possibly benefit the average liberal enough to justify their fervent support.

Ukraine is equally immaterial to most Americans. There is some financial cost of supporting them, but not as much as people think, and certainly not as much as random programs that the people who freak about Ukraine “because of the deficit” never question. Nor can the deficit explain why people become actively pro-Russian, condemn Zelenskyy as a dictator, etc. And once again, it’s even harder to think of material consequences direct enough to justify the liberal passion for supporting Ukraine. Even if we could think of them, it doesn’t seem like these consequences would disproportionately fall on one group of Americans rather than another, such that the first group should passionately support Ukraine and the other group passionately oppose it.

Most of the other issues you’ll find people talking about on social media - Gaza, refugees, Trump’s various court cases - are similarly irrelevant to the life of the average American. Even other issues, which seem self-interested on first glance, lose the conflict angle on closer inspection. For example, many people would like to think of abortion as pitting women (who may need them) against men (who won’t). Recent polling might seem to justify this theory. But look back only fifteen years, and:

Men are equally (or, for a brief moment in 2007, more) likely to be pro-choice as women! This only changed when women started getting further left than men in general! The gender difference on abortion is about the same as for climate change. People only focus on it for abortion because conflict theory narratives sell newspapers (they mean your enemies have no argument, and are just trying to screw over people like you).

Or consider COVID lockdowns. Nothing could be easier than framing this as a battle between the young (who want to work, study, and party) and the old (the demographic at significant risk of actually dying from COVID). I saw this narrative on both sides (“Young people are so selfish that they think their partying is more important than our lives!” - “No! Old people are so selfish that they would ruin our youth in order to cling to life a few years longer!”). But in fact:

…old people were slightly less likely to support lockdowns than young people, although realistically the differences were tiny and overwhelmed by random other things like race and gender.

Or what about inflation? Surely that’s absolutely classic self-interest, nobody wants eggs to go up in cost. But if everyone’s on the same side, where’s the conflict? Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both. But if you look at concern about inflation by income level:

…there’s no pattern.

There are some issues where one side can be justified by material self-interest. I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them? There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals. If a real conflict requires two sides, these don’t qualify either.

Does anything rise to the level of a true material conflict? I think some stuff about taxes, labor unions, and health care might qualify. But I haven’t checked this rigorously and maybe these will break down too. There certainly aren’t enough of these to justify the conflict theory thesis that they’re the main driver of political disagreement.

So What Does Drive Political Disagreement?

If you’ve read The Psychopolitics Of Trauma, you already know my answer to this: it’s all psychological. People support political positions which make them feel good. On a primary level, this means:

• Successful people want to hear that they deserve their success.

• Unsuccessful people want to hear that successful people don’t deserve their success, lied / cheated / nepotismed their way to the top, and are no better than they are.

• People want to knock down anyone who makes a status claim to be better than them.

• People want to feel like their own identity group is heroic net contributors, and that their outgroup are villainous moochers.

• People want to feel like their own identity group deserves more power.

• People want to feel like their preferred lifestyle and policies have no negative implications at all and they don’t have to feel guilty about them.

• People want to feel like they’re part of a group of special people poised to change the world, and everyone else is hidebound bigots who resist temporarily but will eventually be forced to recognize their genius.

• People want to virtue-signal: demonstrate that they have the good qualities that their ingroup considers most important.

• But people also want to vice-signal: demonstrate their willingness to breezily dismiss the supposedly good qualities that the outgroup considers important.

On a secondary level, it means:

• People want to hear that they were right to support whatever positions they supported before.

• People want to defeat and humiliate anyone who has previously tried to defeat and humiliate them, especially anyone who succeeded.

• People want their friends to be proven right and their enemies to be proven wrong.

This is not a claim that “people really want status, not money” - at least not for any objective sense of the word “status”. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties. It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!” In the same way, people don’t strategically support political positions that raise their status later, they’re support whatever lets them feel good about themselves right now, however destructive it may be to their social standing

Now we can explain why, despite the free-rider problem, rich people successfully band together to promote low taxes on the rich. It’s not (just) because they want to keep the money. It’s because fighting for lower taxes gives them a rush of self-esteem by letting them defend their self-perception as job creators / heroic entrepreneurs who have played fair, benefitted their country, and deserve their fortunes. They view the “tax the rich” movement as threatening that - as trying to tell them that they’re parasites who need to give something back to the people who really did the hard work. If they let the tax-the-rich movement win, it will be like a slap in the face for them - like being forced to admit they are bad people who only take and never give.

And they’re right to think of it this way! Most of the socialists advocating taxes on the rich really do care more about saying “rich people suck and don’t deserve their money” than they care about having a couple of extra dollars for social services. There may be a “conflict” here, but it’s the conflict of rich and poor both trying to award themselves a #1 Social Class trophy at the same time.

The usual story is that the socialists wanted some extra money for social services, came up with the idea of taxing the rich, and - in order to defuse opposition to this idea - started talking about how the rich were parasites who didn’t deserve their money. This may have been true in some sort of original-position-state-of-nature that basically never happened. But if it was, it insulted (if you’ve read Psychopolitics Of Trauma, feel free to substitute “traumatized”) the rich, who then naturally reacted by lashing out and saying “No, you poors are the real parasites!” And this naturally insulted/traumatized the poor, who then redoubled their attacks on the rich to psychologically compensate. By the nth round of this cycle - ie all human history other than the original-state-of-nature - the mutual animus / self-defense / trauma-enactment was driving the cycle more than the original desire for money.

Or maybe it’s useful to think of this as happening in parallel rather than serially. In the old days, when lines of communication were few, this process only had a chance to go a couple of rounds before dying down; maybe things were a little more grounded in material reality. After the rise of the Internet and social media, everyone had the opportunity to instantaneously get attacked and insulted and traumatized by everyone at once, and to shoot back retorts of their own within seconds; the dynamic intensified. Anyone with an X account is living part of their life in a weird psychodrama where millions of bullies are brute-force-attempting to find the most enraging possible attack on the most intimate parts of their identity at all times. This will naturally multiply the importance of the psychological component of politics relative to the material one.

But What About All The Actual Issues?

As written, this fails to explain some of the issues discussed earlier - for example, COVID vaccines and Ukraine. How do these help people feel better or worse about themselves?

I think this requires a historical answer. In the early days of social media, the coastal elites led a coalition including experts/academics and minorities. To hold that coalition together, they had to flatter the coalition members. In order to flatter the experts (and other well-credentialled college-educated people), they spread a message of “trust the experts, they’re smarter than you.” As social media transformed politics into a game of humiliating the other side, this inevitably drifted into “You utter idiot, you absolute moron, how dare you think a pathetic worm like you should be allowed to challenge the EXPERTS?”

Every bad thing that happened in the past five years is downstream of these two cartoons, sorry.

In some other time, comics like these might have been accepted as friendly teasing. But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much. The working-class white people, along with everyone else caught in the crossfire (tech, religious people, etc) reoriented their entire politics around trying to humiliate and enrage the experts. If the experts like vaccines, the rest of us have to prove them wrong (so that the experts’ power is shown to be undeserved, we can be the smart ones, and it’s the experts who should feel humiliated). If the experts got caught flat-footed saying COVID couldn’t be a lab leak, when in fact they secretly knew that it could be, we’ll reorient our entire lives around arguing again and again that COVID is a lab leak with 1000% certainty, the most certain anything has ever been in all of history. If the experts and libs support Ukraine, the rest of us must at least make a favorable reference to Putin in the House of Commons.

An alternate objection: sure, you can explain any position through epicycles like these. But isn’t this theory so powerful that it can explain anything? In particular, the virtue-signaling vs. vice-signaling thing alone seems to cover all possible signaling, and maybe all possible policies.

I don’t think it’s realistic to ask a sociological theory like this one to be infinitely elegant with only one main driver and zero epicycles. Political positions need to be explained in historical terms. This doesn’t make such a theory disprovable - the examples above at least claim to discredit conflict theory. But debate would have to be at a similarly careful level of analysis and not just a simple predictive checklist.

I hope this theory is natural enough that most people will be less interested in demanding a formal test than in discussing whether it effectively captures a position which is already widely shared but rarely put into words.

Why Identity Alignment?

I think this solves one of the things that confused me when reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Klein talked about a fairly recent process of “identity alignment”. That is, people used to have unpredictable beliefs from all over the political spectrum - someone might support the environment but want lower taxes, or oppose abortion but support gun control. Over the past few decades, this complexity has collapsed, so that most people are pretty representative of their chosen party.

Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups.

So What Of Mistake Theory?

If this is true, it’s at least half-unconscious. Anti-vaxxers will (usually) admit that they don’t like experts, or that they feel like the experts betrayed them, or that they get a thrill out of owning the libs. But they’ll also insist that they honestly believe vaccines don’t work.

I believe them when they say this. Partly because nobody would give their child measles just to own the libs. Partly because - instead of merely talking about how many libs they’re owning - they talk about thimerosal and neuroimmunology and autism diagnosis rates, and study these things carefully, and seem very interested in defending them. And partly because when I’ve been wrong about political or scientific questions, even in cases where looking back it’s obvious that I had ulterior motives for my position, I know I wasn’t making it up - at the time, it just seemed like the arguments in favor outweighed those against.

But this is normal cognitive bias - specifically, motivated reasoning. It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time. The Miller-Rootclaim debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. Some people who promised never to vote for Trump changed their minds in November, and some of them have changed their minds again after he took office.

Why does this happen?

• Because biases can put their finger on the evidentiary scale, but sufficiently strong evidence can still break through. It would be flattering to Democrats if they had won by a landslide in 2024, but this was obviously false, and there was no way to spin it to be true, so they just accepted the humiliating defeat.

• Because people are flattered not just by individual political positions, but by a general sense that they are good and reasonable people. If you can disprove a position so thoroughly that it’s impossible for its holders to continue to feel like good and reasonable people, they’ll switch sides.

• Because sometimes you can shuffle things around so that you achieve the same psychological goal some other way. The anti-global-warming position gradually shifted from “global warming is fake” to “global warming isn’t caused by humans” to “global warming is actually good or at least not bad enough to be worth stopping”. All of these enrage and humiliate liberal experts about the same amount, so it’s not that hard to make people switch from one to another.

Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s easy or even plausible, this is just the usual trapped prior mechanism. So I think political persuasion is possible, both by reasoning about the issues themselves and by trying to address the underlying psychological needs.

In fact, I think this is a white pill for our ability to potentially persuade others. In some cases, there are material reasons why a certain policy must flatter or humiliate certain groups - it’s hard to raise taxes on the rich without it seeming at least a little like “the rich should have less money”. But it seems like there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly “We like the rich and are happy to give them World’s Best Job Creator medallions in exchange for an extra 1% of their money, we just need some extra cash to fund government programs”.

That is, this theory predicts that a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates.

But it also predicts that nobody will try this in real life.