Thursday, July 7, 2016

A Nation Divided Against Itself

Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein must count among the intellectual elites. Despite his not having any background in behavioral science he has happily joined the behavioral economists who believe that they should be telling everyone how to life their lives.

According to Sunstein, those who know best need but nudge others to do what they consider to be the right thing. He does not say it, but if nudge does not work, you go to push and shove. Since Sunstein worked for the Obama administration, and since, for the record, his wife is Samantha Power, current U. N. and one of the architects of the administration's Libya policy, he must count as one of those whose superior judgment has been repudiated by the British electorate.

As I and many others have suggested, the transnational and rootless elites constitute a class of guardians who, as in Plato, believe that they know what is best for everyone. They reject the marketplace; reject science except when its results suit them; and cling jealously to their own poser and authority.

After Brexit they threw what may properly be called a temper tantrum against the ignorant low-class people who voted to leave the European Union.

The brilliant calculations of behavioral economists notwithstanding further research has shown that if someone gets the impression that you are trying to influence his decision or even to push him toward one or another decision, he will react by rejecting your advice... at times in a most unfriendly fashion. If you tyrannize people, even by using a soft tyranny, they get angry.

On the other hand Sunstein did offer a cogent analysis of the state of the American body politics a couple of years ago in Bloomberg. His point at that time, point that we see enacted on the political stage is that prejudice on the basis of political party (and, I add, ideology) has turned the parties into warring camps. The opposition if never just the loyal opposition, but counts as enemy combatants. Engaging in conversation or discussion with a member of the opposing army counts as treason. Far more people would allow their children to marry outside of their race than would allow them to marry outside of the political party.

Since the data cited goes back to 1960 we note that when conservatives and Republicans took out after communists the left retorted by demonizing Richard Nixon. Eventually, Nixon was shown to have been corrupt and those who hated him with a passion came to believe that their hatred was rational and justified. They did not consider Nixon's policies on the merits; they simply hated him and blamed him for everything... including the Vietnam War.

Of course, the same people had the same feelings about Ronald Reagan. It was almost as though the password to enter their club was: I hate Ronald Reagan. This allowed them to dispense with all rational thought and to allow themselves to be carried away with their passion.

The hatred is so strong that even so mild mannered and upright citizen as Mitt Romney was vilified and demonized in the 2012 presidential campaign. The habit has become so pervasive that even Republicans have denounced Ted Cruz as Lucifer.

And, of course, the Obama administration has fed the fire with its divisive politics and its willingness to underwrite political correctness. After all, the Obama administration Department of Education has decided that anyone who has been accused of sexual assault must be deprived of all his rights under the law and should have his case adjudicated by an administrative panel.

Obama was happy to demonize Republicans and to take every opportunity-- even terrorist attacks-- to set one group of Americans against another. Obama looked mild-mannered but his policies and his conduct of his office were decidedly divisive. While the data does not suggest that Obama created the problem, it does suggest that he aggravated it.

The American experiment in self-governance depends primarily on political virtue. It requires that people respect their opponents, that the loyal opposition really is loyal. Once you start saying that your opponents have ulterior and evil motives, you have stepped off the virtue train into the slough of despond.

In a country where political virtue has gone out of fashion, people are now worried about what they can and cannot say. They are worried that their words or opinions will be counted as racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever. Thus they are constantly on edge, fearful of the arrival of the thought police.

When virtue ceases to exist, a society becomes divided against itself.

More significantly, as I have had occasion to point out, a society is held together by a uniformity of customs and manners, by a uniform culture. When different groups have different manners and customs, you cannot easily tell who is friend and who is foe. Thus, you will lose the sense of belonging to a nation by respecting its traditions, its history, its virtues and its successes. By now, no one is really allowed to take pride in America, lest it offend one or another of the different cultures that are fighting for influence.

And yet, when a culture is based on public behaviors it is relatively easy to tell who belongs and who does not. When good behavior has been undermined as a tyrannical force, people will be judged on the basis of their ideas and beliefs. And, as was discovered during past inquisitions, it is hellishly difficult to know who really believes what.

12 comments:

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Great post, Stuart. Hear me now, believe me later: Hillary will refuse to publicly debate Donald Trump on the grounds that he is a contemptible human being who is not worthy of debate. Consider there is no upside for her in debating him, only great (terrific, incredible) risk. And the media will never hold her accountable for her refusal. After all, she can lie about emails, what's a lousy debate series? Unless... the major news outlets know the ratings for such a debate would reach Super Bowl levels, and they challenge her stance so they can get the money. But there are other ways for Hillary to pay them off (make it up in advertising spend, infomercial, etc.). But I cannot see her debating him.

David Foster said...

"Experts" in the social sciences, political science, and to some degree in economics and even in business, have unjustly appropriated the credibility that rightly belongs to genuine experts in other disciplines.

You can almost always trust to the expertise of airplane designers, pilots, mechanics, and air traffic controllers to get you to you destination safely. You cannot trust the expertise of economists and MBAs to predict the safety of a mortgage-loan pool with anything like the same degree of certainty….and when it comes to predicting the true effects of legislation driving massive social changes, the opinion of an ‘expert’ is probably no better than that of a random guy down at Joe’s Bar.

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: The brilliant calculations of behavioral economists notwithstanding further research has shown that if someone gets the impression that you are trying to influence his decision or even to push him toward one or another decision, he will react by rejecting your advice... at times in a most unfriendly fashion. If you tyrannize people, even by using a soft tyranny, they get angry.

Stuart: ... When virtue ceases to exist, a society becomes divided against itself. ... a society is held together by a uniformity of customs and manners, by a uniform culture. When different groups have different manners and customs, you cannot easily tell who is friend and who is foe. Thus, you will lose the sense of belonging to a nation by respecting its traditions, its history, its virtues and its successes. By now, no one is really allowed to take pride in America, lest it offend one or another of the different cultures that are fighting for influence.

Those two quotes seem a curious contradiction. On the one hand, if a culture however softly sets standards of individual behavior, the instinctual response is apparently to resist and rebel. On the other hand, if everyone would just conform to some single standard of good behavior we'd be better off.

Something is fishy.

My guess is that there are two human drives - one for connection, and one for autonomy, and they both influence behavior in positive and negative ways, so whether we react with resistance or cooperation to a request depends on our own state of being, and this reaction may be largely independent of the virtues or integrity of the request.

Donald Trump reminds us how dictators like Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq because he kept an iron hand against all dissention, criminal or otherwise, and everyone there learned to cooperate as a matter of life and death, because it was. If you can keep people afraid, if you can make your actions as the sole basis of law and order, you can create order, but you won't have justice.

On the other side, we can learn from the disaster of Social Justice initiatives like BLM, if you assume all authority in society is corrupt, and all victims of state violence is unjust, you're equally disempowered from finding common ground. Unless you can see the evil in yourself AND in others, you're part of the problem.

AesopFan said...

Ares: There is not quite the contradiction you are seeing.
Having the same customs and manners (culture) is not identical to having the same opinions (ideology) and preferred courses of action; it just means you can recognize and talk about each other's choices with some confidence that you understand and (hopefully) respect each other -- not having the same culture makes even benign behavior look suspicious or dangerous.
The nudging and pushing is directed to influencing opinion and behavior; the kicker here is that the elites are doing that while at the same time deriding and mocking the culture of the people they are nudging and pushing.
That creates a powder-keg that is only waiting for a spark.

AesopFan said...

Curiously, the next post I read today was this one by Scott Adams (I have been following his discussions of how & why Mr. Trump gained his ascendancy through skill at persuasion):
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/147045002381/the-fbi-credibility-and-government

I don't agree totally with Scott's conclusion (although I do understand his reasoning), but the preliminary to discussing Comey's FBI decision is apt to this discussion:
"The primary goal of government is its own credibility.

That notion needs some explaining.

Governments do many things, including building roads, providing social services, defending the homeland, and more. But no matter what the government is trying to accomplish, its macro-responsibility is to maintain its own credibility. Governments without credibility devolve into chaos. Credibility has to be job one.

Consider all the different government systems around the world, and all the different laws they created. The Chinese government is different from the United States government, which is different from Jordan’s government, which is different from Great Britain. But each of those governments is credible to its own people, and that’s the key. The specific laws and the specific forms of government don’t matter too much, so long as the public views its own local system as credible.

The notion of credibility is why my political preferences don’t align with either of the candidates for president. I look for credibility in government, not for my personal agreement with a particular policy."

Anonymous said...

https://youtu.be/r3z6IZdeZYA

Ares Olympus said...

AesopFan said... not having the same culture makes even benign behavior look suspicious or dangerous.

That statement is a simple summary is the problem between police and citizens in poor neighborhoods who see police as the enemy to be avoided. Although the two cultures are not entirely compatible - police having a job to do, and people who have lives to life without police harrassment.

So each side is intensely aware of the transgressions by individuals on the other side, and assumes everyone on the other side is not to be trusted.

I see Frontline has a new program on "Policing the police" in Newark New Jersey.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/policing-the-police

So it shows me some people already live in a "police state" or "police culture" where absolute authority exists in law enforcement officers, and there's no one to hold them to account.

Even though the show didn't focus on drugs specifically, it does seem that illegal drugs is the easiest way that police bully people, that is if you assume 50% of a population is using illegal drugs to some degree, that justifies illegal searches on no objective suspicion, and a 50-50 chance of catching someone, and then they can take their money or legally owned gun or anything else.

I can see perhaps we need two states of law - normal state and police state, the second can be invoked whenever crime hits a certain level, and citizens have one set of constitutional rights under the normal state, and lower rights under a police state. And so if police state is declared, then everyone ought to know their freedoms are diminished, and the police are going to be extra aggressive to anyone who fails to submit to their authority.

And when a critical mass of hoodlums are captured, then the police state can be ended, and everyone can go back to normal again. At least something like that would justify excessive force by police under conditions that demand it. And citizens could be "trained" how to survive "police state" conditions, and it would be tolerable for having an ending, like a thunderstorm warning.

And if cities like Newark New Jersey ends up in a "police state" over 50% of the time, that would be a sign that we need more state or federal resources to get that under control.

Ares Olympus said...

Anonymous at 12:19 PM...

Yes, a good video find from Tom Woods.
https://youtu.be/r3z6IZdeZYA Jonathan Haidt - The Tyranny of Social Justice Warriors

From the Tom Woods Show, Jonathan Haidt (Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business) explains the philosophy of intolerance demonstrated by social justice warriors.
-------

I see Tom Woods also has a recent video for calm and clever White people at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHyUbMGz004 When Police Pull You Over
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Former Deputy Sheriff Ernie Craig has devised a script that should be learned for any driver seeking to protect his rights from the pry of state agents. It is a comprehensive guide as to what you should say and do if you are pulled over for a traffic stop.
-----

Anonymous said...

A few thoughts on Nixon.

1. The 1960 election was blatantly stolen. Many influential people said Nixon had every right to demand an investigation. He refused. Citing damage to the country.

2. His "corruption" was trying to save idiot low-level underlings. Using illegal means, true. He should have left them hang. He'd be free & clear if he did.

3. Sen Howard Baker said he'd win the Impeachment if he fought it. The votes were there. Nixon refused. Again, citing damage to the country.

Not a bad man. Not a bad POTUS. Or am I wrong? -- Rich Lara

Dennis said...

Rich Lara,

No, you are right. Like many a president Nixon did a number of good things like opening a dialogue with the Chinese and he did a number of bad things like wage and price controls. I suspect history will, after many on the Left die, give Nixon the credit he was due. Far more good than bad which most of us can only hope that our actions will be judged in the affirmative.

Unlike a president, and administration and political party have done more to exaggerate and inflame racial tension and divide us into warring groups mostly to cover incompetence and that they cannot afford to lose an issue by bringing people together as the Americans they should be. The Department of Injustice has done more to convince people that there are two systems of law; one for the establishment and one for the rest of us.

Nixon looks postively presidential compared to our current president whose only answer to any question is racism and gun control with an overall propensity to toss anyone who might work for him "under the bus."

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

The Democrat Party is a coalition of victim groups with myopic interests. The "good of the country" be damned. That kind of thinking is passé. Will Hillary ever be held accountable for anything? BLM had been one of her pet interests. No wonder we're a nation divided. We are splintering because anything cohesive is labeled racist/bigoted, and the conversation stops. We talk about safe stuff like test scores. Our problems are spiritual and cultural, and quantitative analysis and bureaucratic processes can't help with that.

Sam L. said...

Thomas Frank, please come to the white Courtesy Telephone. Mr. Kansas wants to speak with you.