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Last Friday (the 20th) I went to the 2018 Moral & Ethical Leadership Conference, put on by the BYU Management Society. They had a pretty impressive lineup of speakers, including Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, or as he liked to joke, the “other senator” from Arizona, given that he has been overshadowed by John McCain the entire time he’s been in the Senate. And as it turns out, this is unlikely to change since Senator Flake has decided not to run for re-election (also McCain died recently.) He didn’t get into his reasons during his speech, but most people agree the biggest was that he was unlikely to win the Republican primary. And why was that? Well despite both of them, in theory, being Republicans, Flake and Trump do not get along, at all. And for good or bad (probably bad) these days it’s difficult to win a Republican primary if you’re anti-Trump. Which Flake definitely is, and, unlike most Republicans, has not been shy about expressing, going so far as to write a book, Conscience of a Conservative, where he declares Trump to be a domestic and international menace.
I picked up a copy of Flake’s book while I was at the conference, though I haven’t a chance to read it yet, so I can only speak to what I heard him say, and his primary theme seemed to boil down to a call for greater civility. In fact I would hazard to say that the need for greater civility was the unofficial theme for the conference as a whole. Given the nation’s current political climate and leadership, this is not exactly surprising. Of course, if Flake’s call for civility was entirely unobjectionable he wouldn’t need to give a speech defending it, let alone write a whole book on the subject. But lately, even this principal is controversial, and under attack. I thought that looking into why might make a good topic for a post.
To start, let’s look at the area Senator Flake presumably knows the most about, congress. What does civility look like in congress? Is it just people saying things like, “I graciously yield my time to the Honorable Senator from Kentucky”? I suppose that this sort of etiquette is a small part of it, but only a very small part. No, I think civility in congress, as Senator Flake described it, is more about people calmly working together despite having very different ideologies.
That does seem to be an admirable goal, but unless all members of congress are saints (which clearly isn’t the case), then in order for this type of civility to be present it has to provide some benefit. In the past it may have been enough that it made them look noble and statesman like. But these days, at least among the base, it does the exact opposite, and makes them look traitorous and cowardly. In the past it might also have been driven by a sense of duty, a duty to put aside differences and work together for the good of the country, but the general concept of duty has been on a long slow decline since the early 1800’s (at least according to the Google Ngram Viewer.)
No, getting members of the two parties to work together, no longer makes them look good, and it’s definitely going to require something a lot more concrete than the fading idea of duty. It’s going to require something like money, money for something they want, something that will make the people back home happy, and which will, in turn, help them get elected. Maybe something in a bill? Something set aside specifically to this purpose? Something… “earmarked”?
This history of earmarks is interesting. You can find things which fit the basic criteria going all the way back to 1789, though initially such things were definitely rare. By the end of the 1800’s the practice was common enough that it started to be called pork-barrel politics, but apparently things really took off between 1994 and 2005 (the most memorable example being the Bridge to Nowhere). As you might imagine some people took issue with the practice and in 2010 they were banned (though not for non-profits). And who lead the charge on that? Who was the most ferocious opponent of earmarks? As it turns out, it was Senator Flake. Here’s the relevant section from Wikipedia:
Flake is “known for his ardent opposition to earmarks.”He has been called an “anti-earmark crusader,” and frequently challenges earmarks proposed by other members of Congress. Since May 2006, he has become prominent with the “Flake Hour,” a tradition at the end of spending bill debates in which he asks earmark sponsors to come to the house floor and justify why taxpayers should pay for their “pet projects.” He is credited with prompting House rule changes to require earmark sponsors to identify themselves.
Until September 2010, Flake issued a press release listing an “egregious earmark of the week” every Friday. Usually the earmark will be followed by Flake making a humorous comment; as an example, Rep. Flake once said of Congressman Jose Serrano’s $150,000 earmark to fix plumbing in Italian restaurants, “I would argue this is one cannoli the taxpayer doesn’t want to take a bite of.” The “earmark of the week” releases were ended and replaced with the “So Just How Broke Are We?” series of releases. In March 2010, the House Appropriations Committee implemented rules to ban earmarks to for-profit corporations, a change Flake supported. “This is the best day we’ve had in a while,” he said to the New York Times, which reported that approximately 1,000 such earmarks were authorized in the previous year, worth $1.7 billion.
Senator Flake’s opposition to earmarks is not only easy to understand, it’s laudable. But in retrospect, some people have started wondering whether it might be part of the reason why congress has become so “uncivil”. Their theory is straightforward: Earmarks were one more thing that could be offered as part of the negotiation for a congress member’s vote. One that’s particularly useful when you’re crossing party lines and the member is otherwise opposed to or at least unsure about the bill. You overcome their reluctance by, in essence, offering to “pay” them if it passed. It’s a basic law of economics that you get more of what you pay for and so naturally you ended up with more bipartisan support for bills which contained earmarks. Eliminate earmarks and you have less bipartisan support. And if civility means working together across party lines, that means you have less civility.
Now, I’m not here to say that earmarks are actually good. Or that banning them is solely responsible for the breakdown in civility and working across the aisle. Or to make any insinuation that Flake is a hypocrite, or that he screwed up. Rather, what I want to do is point out how complicated even a simple call for civility ends up being.
As I said, civility seemed to be the unofficial theme of the conference, so what did other people have to say on the subject? Well I just got done asserting that it was complicated, so I guess I should move to the speaker who offered a very simple definition of civility. This was Eric Dowdle, an artist who specializes in drawing very interesting landscapes and cityscapes and then selling them as puzzles. He defined civility as character plus diversity.
You may wonder what qualifies him to make such a definitive proclamation. (Though as a blogger with no especial qualifications myself, I don’t.) Or at least you may wonder what prompted the invitation to speak from BYU Management Society. Well Dowdle, in addition to being an artist, is the founder and chairman of the board for the proposed George Washington Museum of American History. This is an effort to assemble an exhibition of the 250 “Greatest Moments in American History” and then take them on tour of all 50 states in 2026 (the 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). After which it will have a permanent home in Utah. As you can imagine the Museum has many goals from increasing historical literacy, to a celebration of the Founders, but included in there is a goal to educate people on, what Dowdle feels, are the twin pillars of America: character and diversity. Which, when combined, create civility.
As you can imagine he is also worried about the ills of the nation and the increasing polarization. And he hopes that by educating people about these twin pillars that he will help bring about a return to civility, much like Senator Flake. And, once again, this is another clearly laudable goal, though I’m not sure that his definition entirely captures the full nuance of what civility is. That said, I nevertheless think that it captures something important about what civility means at the present political moment.
I’m a big fan of “character”, but I think it’s place in the equation leads to some weird conclusions. Would he say that people who push diversity, while ignoring civility, must therefore lack character? If so that would be a fairly incendiary claim, and if true would immediately lead to a question of what sort of character do they lack? What aspect of character is not present in their advocacy for diversity? Does character equal a respect for a certain set of ethics? Could it be extended to mean respect for the rule of law? On the other hand, and probably even more inflammatory, are we meant to conclude that people who civilly rail against diversity do it because they have a lot of character? It is interesting to ask what ramifications this equation has if taken to its extreme, but, unfortunately, I think it breaks down pretty quickly.
If we leave aside character, then I still think he makes an important point about the connection between diversity and civility, and the need for increasing civility as society becomes increasingly diverse. (In fact, if we hold character constant then this is certainly one way to read his formula.) And it’s also interesting to draw inspiration, as he clearly is, from the founding of the country. So much of what made it into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was designed to create civility among diverse groups. In that vein, allow me to offer another equation, one that might have been on the minds of the founders: diversity minus civility equals violence. Before the American Revolution there was a lot of violence generated by ideological diversity, something which would have been on the minds of the founders. I refer you to the European Wars of Religion:
The conflicts began with the Knights’ Revolt (1522), a minor war in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 to counter the growth of Protestantism. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the war by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Although many European leaders were ‘sickened’ by the religious bloodshed by 1648, religious wars continued to be waged in the post-Westphalian period until the 1710s.
I understand the explicitly religious wars were over by the time of the Revolution, but if you draw a graph from “killing one third of the population”, through continued bloodshed up until 1710, and zero it out at the election of JFK, who won despite people wondering if he was going to take orders from the Pope you’ll see that in 1776, things were still pretty heated, and the founders knew that the only way to avoid violence in the diverse republic they were creating was to bake a lot of rules for civility right into the Constitution.
This is not to say that we’ve always been civil, or that there hasn’t been violence, for example you may have heard of a little thing called the Civil War (which, despite its title was very uncivil). Further, this doesn’t mean that the rules the Founders added were perfect, or that they were were always followed. And it most especially doesn’t mean that there weren’t any trade-offs. A subject I’ll be returning to shortly. But, I think if you look back on things, especially relative to other nations at the same point in history. The US did pretty well at accommodating a diversity of nations and peoples and ideologies with a minimum of violence. In fact, it may be argued, we did so well that people no longer see the need for some of the rules the Founders came up with, in particular Freedom of Speech.
I’ve talked about free speech a lot in this space, and while I tend to be pretty vigorous in it’s defense, I can also acknowledge that much like the other two endeavors we’ve considered, defending free speech is laudable, but, particularly in this day and age, can be complicated as well. This also takes me to another of the speakers from the conference, McKay Coppins, a columnist for the Atlantic. I also picked up his book, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House, and even had him sign it, though, once again, I haven’t had time to read it.
As a columnist you might imagine he is a strong supporter of free speech and opened his talk with a Thomas Jefferson quote that’s a favorite of journalists everywhere. (Back to the Founders!)
The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
As I recall he only recited the last bit, but I think it’s worth quoting the first part, since one of the things which has definitely changed since the time of Jefferson is what “full information” means, what “channel” they get that through, and the way it “penetrates”. Which is to say, would Jefferson be as confident in saying, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without social media or social media without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” I suspect he might not.
As I said things have become more complicated, and Coppins did acknowledge that in his speech. In particular he talked about fake news, and the waning power of the larger media outlets. To combat this he urged us all to be individual media outlets. To civilly work to combat misinformation when we see it, and help move the national conversation in the direction of the truth. The Jeffersonian idea that more speech is preferable to less speech and that if we encourage as many people as possible to speak that this will create the “full information” necessary for truth to triumph.
I currently agree with Coppins that this strategy is probably the best way forward, but I also know that when presented with this strategy many people argue that it’s largely a continuation of the status quo and as such will allow those with the biggest microphone to continue to dominate the discussion, and that whatever power imbalance which currently exists will continue to exist. Given the overlap in our proposed strategy I was curious to get Coppins take on it, and asked him about it during the question and answer period. He pointed out that when you’re encouraging more speech you’re also encouraging those who haven’t had much of a voice. In fact, you may even offer them more encouragement, and that hopefully as this process continues it won’t be the same individuals and organizations doing all the talking.
All of this finally takes us to the arguments against civility. As I already mentioned, there are those, traditionally on the left, who feel that civility is just an excuse to continue to silence and oppress those who are already powerless. For example this quote my friend Stuart Parker, who’s running for office in British Columbia:
I read a post by a fellow socialist running for office today and I feel I need to make a point about calls for civility: liberalism is about civility. Socialism is not. Socialism is about meeting people who are being screwed-over by the system and hearing them out. And a crucial part of hearing them out is hearing their anger.
And we, as socialists, should share that anger. A full debate, a debate that encompasses the global extinction event, the affordability crisis and the opioid epidemic is a debate that confronts pain, death and loss. It confronts injustice. Our discourse today should not seek to suppress people’s justified rage but to channel it, to hone it, to express it with precision without losing one iota of the urgency and conviction it contains.
British Columbians are outraged. And they are seeking candidates to articulate their rage for them. Let’s not let them down.
Instinctively you’ve got to have sympathy for this position. But as he points out, liberalism, particularly classical liberalism, the liberalism of the Founders, does place a high degree of importance on civility, and I don’t think we should casually toss that aside. It’s been a long time since we’ve experienced true incivility, and as I pointed out in a previous post, we imagine that we can tolerate small amounts of incivility, and censorship and it won’t lead to violence or repression. Or that if it does it will be righteous violence and repression of only evil people. But that’s not how it works. Rather once things start it’s less like a righteous cleansing and more like Godzilla trudging back and forth through your city. In other words, once those norms get broken it becomes difficult to draw a line. I think this is the lesson the founders had learned from the several hundred years before the revolution, and it’s the lesson they tried to impart to us.
To be fair, it is not only people on the left that have turned against civility. It’s also happening on the right, particularly the alt-right, who insofar as they have a point, believe that conservatives have very civilly and very politely lost every single battle in the culture war. Whether or not this is true (though I’ve already written about how it’s basically true) it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should abandon civility. (Though, i guess, there’s always a chance it might mean that…) In fact if it means anything I would opine that it means we need to be more civil and less censorious, especially with respect to the typical Trump supporter, lest we inadvertently confirm this exact belief, the idea that there is no point in being civil. Of course, as far as I can tell this is the exact opposite of the direction we’re headed. In fact, I just barely saw that apparently James Woods has been locked out of Twitter. (Though, as usual with stuff that just happened this may turn out later to be incorrect.)
Putting everything I’ve said together I suppose my central point is that the current situation is more complicated than it may at first appear, and that a simple return to civility may be more difficult and less effective than people think. But, that we should push for it anyway, because the alternative has the potential to be much, much worse.
Every week I try to civilly and with humor ask for donations, but perhaps the week I write about civility should be the one week I abandon all that and just say, “GIVE ME MONEY!” Or maybe not.
The earmark theory makes sense, but I wonder if it makes a bit too much sense. The US Constitution was built on affirmative action and social engineering. That strikes people as odd but it is absolutely true. Except the affirmative action and engineering is embodied was geographical. The US split power along geographical lines, carefully making sure it was impossible for one region to dominate the other. For example, the Constitution demands the President and VP be from different states. We more or less ignored that under Bush as both he and Dick Cheney were from Texas…Cheney dodged it by claiming he was the resident of some other state he happened to own a vacation home in… this is a relic of an earlier age when people worried about states feeling left out and incorporating all types of mechanisms to make sure they were included.
For most of US history this made a lot of sense. Geographical divisions drove a lot of US political dissent. Slavery in the South was a big one but there were lots of others. The Gold standard favored by the Eastern banking class versus midwest farmers who wanted monetary inflation. Tariffs were favored by industrialists in the north but the south was an export centered agriculture economy and tariffs just drove up the cost of goods they couldn’t make for themselves.
Geographical affirmative action meant small states could be seduced between larger factions so that policies could shift around. Civility and courtesy were a norm because people were playing an infinite rather than finite game.
Then something started to change. Geography stated to become less reliable. A state filled with poor people without health insurance, for example, refuses Medicaid even with the Fed’s paying 90% of it because that’s part of ‘Obamacare’. A high speed rail project between two cities in a state is rejected because the rural areas see no reason to connect two ‘elite cities’ together.
Geography is losing its potency, especially and ironically on the right. Ideology has become more important. This kind of makes sense. Communication makes it easier for ideologies to unite and ignore geography. Alt-rightists, for example, probably know more about white farmers in South Africa and the crime rates of immigrants in Eastern Europe than their hometowns. Fighting for or against Obamacare rallies a large portion of the population, even though maybe only 10% of the population is actually in Obamacare.
Ideology, however, is a bit problematic because it tends towards finite rather than infinite games. the question of whether manufacturers should be protected by tariffs, or consumers should be be able to get lower prices, is a bit like the fight between unions demanding higher wages and management trying to control cost. On both sides the incentive is, of course, to win as much as possible but at the same time everyone has to remember the game will be played again tomorrow. If you ruin the playing field today, you’ll just have to play on it tomorrow and the day after and forever.
Ideology is finite. Nazism, Fascism, communism, capitalism, mercantilism, racism, these are all finite games. The capitalist doesn’t imagine tomorrow the feudal lord might reasert his control of the means of production, the capitalist replaces. Ideologies naturally incline one away from civility and instead to ‘go for the kill’. Only if that is not possible might a peace be entertained but it will always be just a tactical peace, not a strategic one. When the opportunity presents, the peace should be broken. ideology is not all that different from religion, at least religions starting with Christianity onwards. They all presume a finite game that ends in universal conversion. A ‘balance of power’ is intolerable. Geographic balance makes inherent sense. There will always be a north and south and they will never have the same interests so where they conflict with each other, some balancing will have to happen. Ideology assumes it is the truth and it should supplant inferior truths. Why should the feudal lord reign over serfs who have to farm by hand while the rest of the world gets 401K’s and credit cards?
Alternate definition: civility is when both sides perceive they have something to be gained through cooperation with the other side. Every example you cited above has a civility lever with the fulcrum of “how much do I gain by cooperating with the opposition?” In 2008, when Democrats won a super majority in the Senate and believed the idea of a permanent majority through demographic trends, they alienated and isolated their opponents. The Right, in return, perceived the was nothing to be gained through cooperation and we get gridlock. Meanwhile, all the centrists of both parties were voted out. These are people who need to demonstrate more than “I stood strong on principle” but have to run a reelection campaign based on results. Again, incentive shifted against cooperation.
The American Founding? Classic case of ensuring everyone has skin in the game.
Civil War? South perceived they were going to lose a protracted battle for slavery if they remained in the union.
Biased news? The Right perceived they weren’t going to get a fair shake from an increasingly ideologically skewed media and stopped playing along.
Socialists? Their party sold them out last election. What do they have to gain playing along?
I’m not sure diversity is part of the reason here. I’m thinking of that classic psychology experiment where they took two groups of boys at summer camp. They made sure the boys were identical but paired off. The boys formed strong, combative group identities based on nothing tangible.
If skin in the game is the prerequisite for civility, the solution to boosting civility and cooperation is to boost skin in the game. Cash is a superficial way to do this, and it appears to nominally work on Congress, though it comes with its own problems. I suspect there are more substantive ways to improve cooperation and civility, both in politics and in society more broadly.
This is the mechanics of civility declining but not the explanation. My perception was that this became very noticeable in the Obamacare debate. The normal progression of bills is that they attract some votes from the other side by incorporation some elements of concern. For example, the tax cuts under Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act, Medicare part D.
Under Obamacare I noticed that stopped working. Concessions would be made to the right, yet the bait and switch continued. “I’ll vote if you get rid of a public option”. “Ok it’s gone” “Hmmm naaa I’m not voting for it”. I thought perhaps the problem was by staking out a moderate ground (I.e. taking Romney’s plan more or less unchanged), That left Republicans no way to signal their influence. If the bill had started out much more to the left, perhaps changes could have gotten some few Republican votes because then their influence would have been noticeable.
Instead now I see the issue as ideology became much more important. Ideology is all encompassing hence it becomes a finite game. I win to establish my view and that’s the last battle. As Islamists sometimes said about Democracy, “One vote for Islam, then no more”. The game is finite to the ideologist because the goal is to convert or destroy you leaving no need for the game going forward. It’s interesting that Paul Ryan’s major influence was Ayn Rand. Note that Rand’s ideology is sterile, divorced from place and culture and ultimately if you take it seriously it destroys politics. If you have more or less a formula for deducing all policies, the whole idea of congress, elections every two years etc. seems rather tiring.
In order to work, ideologies must be forced to incorporate the infinite game of politics or only finite ideologies may be tolerated.
An infinite game, BTW, is one that you are supposed to keep playing over and over again. A finite game is one that comes to an ultimate end. For infinite games, the value of the game is more important than winning any particular round. For finite games, winning the round is the only thing that matters. Consider the NFL Commissioner versus an NFL player who has a single season in him. Cheating makes more sense to the player. To the Commissioner it undermines the game in the long run. One of the reasons Americans soured on Communism in the 1900’s was not about the policies but about recognizing that many Communists had no interest in the infinite game. Democracy was a means to an end, to be dismantled as soon as enough climbed up the ladder to power.
Ideology favors finite games because they are infinite in ambition. Because all people are eventually expected to become libertarians, communists, Christians, Muslims once they are shown it so obviously true even the really stupid and stubborn get the idea, games must be finite. Not to needle our host but you can see this in the history of the Mormons as well. Demanding freedom of speech and religion but when power was fully obtained in an area, those values were demoted. In fairness some (but I won’t say all) of the hostility they faced was because people realized they were playing a finite game. Losers in a finite game don’t get infinite lives, their lives get cut short. There as well civility declined rapidly.
The observation that politics is an iterative, not a one-off game is a good one, but I would draw different conclusions from it than you do. The point of Game Theory is not to tell someone they’re playing the game wrong, or even necessarily to identify the “optimum strategy” (given that this can change if the strategies of the other players changes). In this case, game theory would best be used to answer the question, “What would be the expected results of a given strategy?”
In the case of politics, or any other infinite, iterative game (iterative, because each iteration impacts future iterations, thus your strategy should change to reflect that), there is a clear game theoretical implication to the strategy of playing to win one round to the detriment of future iterations. You will be expected to lose in the long run to other strategies. So if this is the case, and if politicians – who are famous for promising during election season to play a one-off game strategy, only to “betray their constituents” by switching to an iterative strategy after the election – are suddenly abandoning that strategy and sticking with strict ideology; we shouldn’t ask, “why are they so stupid?”, but rather, “What has changed, such that the most successful strategy (in terms of election victory) has shifted?”
I don’t think the answer is, “ideology wins out over cooperation”, since those elements have been constant features of the system. And it appears that large numbers of politicians are finding this new strategy is successfully able to gain them election victories, and in multiple districts the opposite strategy, one of cooperation, has repeatedly proven unsuccessful.
Perhaps it’s gerrymandering? But that, too, is not a new feature of the system, and in many districts that have not been gerrymandered we see the same strategic shift. Indeed, if this were a matter of a couple of districts changing, we would expect to still have a centrist movement, but that movement would be smaller. Instead, what we saw in 2010 was that the centrists completely disappeared. The “Blue Dog Democrats”; who were the actual reason Obama, Pelosi, and Reid dropped the public option; are completely gone from Congress. Their complaint during the ACA debate was that voting for the bill would cost them their seats. The Democratic party’s rejoinder was that this would be a new 3rd rail program that would win Democrats election victories for years to come.
“Yes, but I need to win reelection in two years, not ten.”
“Take one for the team.”
“Not unless you give me something.”
The Blue Dogs played along because they had skin in the game. The rest of their party had a LOT of skin in the game, and played along as well. The Republicans had NO skin in the game, as Obama had essentially told them, “Elections have consequences” and they perceived there was no benefit to cooperation on their part – so they didn’t.
I don’t think the little $5 million “experiments” built into the bill – the ones Democrats pointed to as “trying to cooperate” were really seen by either side as anything other than political theatre. These bills are all written behind closed doors. You agree to changes in the bill AFTER you secure pledges for votes. Anything else is there for the spectators.
I think it’s also important to remember that for individual politicians, politics is BOTH a one-off and an iterative game. A politician who ignores this will not be a politician for long, as we saw in 2010. This phenomenon was recently highlighted by an author the Host frequently cites, Nassim Taleb, in his new book Skin In the Game. He relates the example that if I’m a gambler and I have a strategy that will net me solid gains over 100 iterations, but that has a 2% probability of wiping me out completely, I have a strategy that will eliminate me from the game. It doesn’t matter if I would have come out ahead by round 37 if i am no longer able to play the game after round 18 because I pursued a strategy that includes catestrophic risk.
So you can blame the politicians, but I think they’re either responding to the shifting rules of the game, or being wiped out and replaced by politicians who are willing to play a game that requires shifting strategies. And for some reason, the Public is shifting their preferences in the direction of ideological puritanism, and rejecting cooperative problem-solving. Identifying ideology as a factor doesn’t explain why ideology – which has always been with us – has suddenly polarized in the way it has.
Take for example the 2016 election. Though it’s fair to say Donald Trump claimed victory in the election, it’s also fair to say that this was not because he was a good candidate who appealed to the voters. Rather, he did not appeal to voters nearly as much as Romney in 2012, as evidenced by the fact that vote totals in states Trump needed to win in 2016 were lower than for Romeny in 2012. Trump won states by convincing FEWER people to vote for him than had previously voted for Romney. Thus, it wasn’t an election where one side’s ideas prevailed so much as an election where the other side’s (the Democrats’) ideas were insufficient to convince voters to support it.
What were the hallmarks of Clinton’s campaign? In part it was moderation toward the center. “I’m the candidate with the most experience in Washington. I’m well-qualified, and capable of leading on day 1, because I know how this city works from every level.” That wasn’t what people wanted in 2016, when the national sentiment rode a wave against incumbency. It wasn’t that Clinton was a bad candidate, it was that she was the wrong candidate for the political mood of the time. Voters rejected centrist politics by not showing up to vote for Clinton.
Why would the public turn against centrism toward ideology? Perhaps they perceived that they weren’t getting from centrism anything of value. They had cooperated with Bush/Obama in economic measures meant to save the economy writ-large, but then ended up with economic stagnation – especially for those in the middle and at the bottom. No reason to continue supporting that strategy, let’s try something new. Nobody could agree on what that would be (Sanders/Trump had wildly different views of how to boost economic development) but they all agreed it would NOT look like status quo. Thus, we have polarization against the center, toward ideological extremes.
Perhaps economic prosperity will bring a return to the center, but my greater concern is that any renewed economic difficulties will cause another shift toward extremism on both sides. Or perhaps a different type of ideological extremism shift, on a libertarian/authoritarian axis. And we’re probably due for another recession – especially given we’ve expanded on some of the high-risk strategies that seeded the last recession, all while crafting a counter-productive trade war.
Thus, I maintain my original point: when people perceive they are no longer in a position to benefit from cooperation, they will turn to other strategies. If cooperation is perceived as having caused economic stagnation, they’ll turn to non-cooperative strategies, which is exactly what we’ve seen in multiple cases.
Individual incidents like Obama saying “elections have consquences” or ‘Blue Dog’ democrats not wanting to vote for the ACA shouldn’t matter to the underlying dynamics of the system. I agree many of the tools for abuse today were features of the system in the past (Gerrymandering for example).
But what were the motives? What animated voters? I suspect geographic linkages, which acted as a check on ideological motivations have gotten weaker while social media has made ideological linkages stronger. Ideology is a binary affair while geography is a spectrum. Ideology means abortion is legal or illegal depending on a coin flip every election. Geography means half the country that likes free trade and half that likes protection averages out to modest tariffs.
I suspect the solution in the long run would be to adopt tools to shift the Constitution’s affirmative action for geography to some type of affirmative action for moderating ideology.
Interesting. Our views about the causes of incivility color our proposed solutions. My preference would be to reinstate some of the protections that originally ensured minority opinions retain influence and therefore a reason to cooperate. This has slowly eroded for decades, with recent developments exacerbating the trend.
So my short list would probably include things like:
– reinstating the filibuster for both SCOTUS (bad Republican move) and other judicial nominees (bad Democratic move)
– returning power from the executive branch back to Congress; the experiment of “Congress will cede all power and provide oversight” clearly failed, as Congress doesn’t do oversight well at all
– repeal direct election of senators; the original intent of senatorial appointment was to ensure the will of state legislatures was reflected in Congress. Changing this has the unexpected consequence that people stopped caring as much about state and local elections, and all focus turned to the national elections. This is unfortunate, because experience demonstrates that most solutions come from the person closest to the problem. So nudging the system back in that direction would be expected to provide more solutions, and give people more direct influence and therefore incentive to participate at all levels. Sadly, this is highly unlikely to happen, since the current balance of power in state legislatures skews one direction, and most people think senatorial appointment was some bourgeois plot to keep rich guys in power at the expense of the people.
I wouldn’t go for your last item. Your middle item is rhetorical unless you have some more real details (Congress never passed a law ‘ceding all power etc. etc.”).
I would lower the power of Scoutus nominees. I would do 12 year SC terms with each President getting two terms expiring during her or his administration. Congress would be required to vote on nominees or they will pass automatically to the court.
Even more advanced, I would consider something of a blockchain judicial system. Basically decisions would be written to a blockchain and judges would sign on or not. Much like bitcoin, the consensus would drive the ‘ledger’. The SC would have more weight but ultimately it wouldn’t be the ultimate decider. An offbeat decision that the bulk of justices find unworkable would be discarded despite it coming from the SC. How you implement that, I have no idea.
You might have read my thoughts about switching the gov’t to 100% deficit financing. One interesting idea might be to add an IMF style ‘Super Senate’. States would get representation based on their bond holdings. Hold more bonds, you get more votes. Sell them you get less. A state with a huge ideological commitment, like anti-abortion, would have to throw ‘skin in the game’ by taxing its citizens to build its holdings. That would likewise leave it with less funds for other interests but if it’s really important to them they must demonstrate a willingness to pay a price. The SuperSenate can veto acts of the gov’t but cannot approve or propose anything itself.
In order of what’s reasonable, I think my first proposal could be accepted today. My third would work but be harder to get people on board. My middle one, IMO, makes a huge amount of sense but whether you could encode judicial philosophy into a blockchain type ledger is unclear (BUT keep in mind Common Law is essentially just that, judges making rulings and the ones the consensus deemed sensible getting picked up and used as principles for deciding future cases).
Ultimately I think solutions have to be centered on systems that cost. Ideology tends to drive all issues into binary life or death struggles. Whether it’s icons in Church or transgender bathrooms or killing 6 million Jews , ideologies tend towards rallying the tribe as if all these things are of equal weight. I think the way to work around that would be to allow accumulating a type of capital for forgoing an ideological crusade and forcing that capital to be spent in going forward with one.
Just fleshing out the blockchain idea. I read an article once about using blockchain as a fact checking tool rather than professional top down sites like Snopes. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/07/civil-future-media.html
Here’s how it would work in terms of journalism. A story is published and readers can be charged to read it. The blockchain’s token is a coin called CIVIL. A story can be challenged as false, the challenger puts up some of his tokens. Those wishing to vote on the story must also submit tokens. Whichever side wins takes the tokens staked by the other side and splits them. Successfully challenging or defending stories (success here means having a sense of what the community feels is true AND is willing to put skin in the game) will build your tokens.
The way I could see this working with a judicial system is to say precedent/case law is the blockchain. Any judge can challenge the addition to the blockchain. SC judges simply get more token than others but do not automatically ‘win’ all arguments with the rest of the judiciary. A very insightful justice who garners a lot of respect from other judges can end up with more power than a SC Justice. She will just have the handicap of having to earn her tokens the hard way and write decisions the rest of the community consistently endorses. An eccentric SC Justice or even majority of Justices could end up powerless if they put forth a bunch of decisions the rest of the community finds blockheaded and unworkable.
I think the cool thing about something like this would be:
1. It moderates ideological battles by making people choose how much of their capital to stake on their ideology rather than treating everything as an all or nothing battle.
2. It taps into a market mechanism to diffuse power and control. Right now we have a President and Party that is trying to stack the court by rejecting norms (refusing to vote and Garland) and rushing through super young nominees with minimal real vetting. By adding a market mechanism, though, you still keep a chunck of power with the market. The gov’t can decide to give a company a subsidy but that doesn’t guarantee economic success if buyers nonetheless don’t like the company’s products. In that case instead of being power, the gov’t is actually wasting its power by giving the subsidy. Attempting to pack the court then would be countered by diminishing the reputation of the decisions of the judges who are part of the ‘pack’ and could likely backfire.
The most recent episode of the McKinsey Podcast discuss blockchain, and when it is more valuable versus legacy options. Here, I’m not sure it’s being leveraged according to the specific benefits versus costs very well. I’d also like to avoid hanging supreme judicial authority on the latest tech fad.
The other issue I have with this is that not everything is solved well by using market forces, and law is a particularly good example of this. As are families. In a family, you don’t do everything by the will of the people because when you get to small enough good that kind of decision-making is inefficient and often unfair. It’s also not as good at getting equitable results because of the ability of one or two disproportionately powerful actors to swing every decision their way. Many of these same interpersonal dynamics are also present in the law.
Don’t get me wrong, you can already clearly buy a judicial decision if you’re willing to put enough money into it. I’m just concerned that this type of system, whether based on blockchain or an equally capable legacy technology, would be more susceptible to a bad faith takeover by someone willing to buy it.
Congress can clearly be bought, why not the judiciary?
In the old days you had the King and judges. If someone wronged you, like a fellow farmer let his cows eat your field, you could go to the king but he would be unlikely to care. Such cases fell upon judges. What they did was make a decision and if other judges liked that decision it would be referenced by them. The decisions that got reinforced over and over started to be called ‘Common Law’ even though no one ever actually wrote down a specific law. When novel questions erupted, judges tried to reference established decisions, failing that they tried to see if the ‘spirit’ of previous decisions could be applied, failing that they ventured to put forth a new idea or principle. In other words, it was a blockchain of sorts.
The economic incentive was also similar. Yes if you put forth a new principle, you could become famous and highly respected. However if your novel decision is quickly overturned by higher judges who see how established case law clearly applies, you look bad. Hence you had to choose your battles wisely and decide if you really wanted to die on this particular hill.
I think the issue with ideology is that it tends towards absolutism. Everything starts to look equal, trivial cases about bakeries and gay wedding cakes are seen as equal to state funding of churches or abortion. Compromise becomes impossible since the way to signal tribal loyalty is by demonstrating perfect orthodoxy in even the smallest things
The mechanism I’m thinking of would require one to actually allocate capital and put capital at risk. In that sense it’s a market mechanism but you could also call it a betting mechanism (the CIVIL example I provided is a bit like a poker game where the guy who enters with a few chips may have all of them by the end of the night.
Ideology could still exist. There might still be a conservative view of arcane patent law as well as a conservative take on abortion, for example. But the judge who wants to stake all his tokens on a patent law decision is probably going to be the type that specializes in that narrow niche leaving others to toss around abortion. In the more general areas, though, a broader consensus would need to be reached to be safe from challenge.
In the case of CIVIL you might bet your tokens to challenge an article on a very technical area, a place where you have some expert knowledge. Otherwise tossing them around in more general fights would probably cause you to waste your capital
Of course I don’t think this requires one to be able to buy and sell tokens.