E-Pluribus | December 15, 2021
Admitting when we're wrong, defining conservatism, and do Twitter's new rules handicap citizen journalists?
A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Ronald Bailey: Why Is It So Hard To Admit When You're Wrong?
I’ve often said I would be happy to admit when I am wrong should the occasion ever arise (I kid, I kid!) At Reason, Ronald Bailey asks the question, specifically regarding our political and cultural discourse. Bailey writes that our desire to confirm our beliefs blinds us to new and different ideas and distorts our perception of those who may disagree.
Today, if you are a member of one of the two major American political parties, you are statistically likely to dislike and distrust members of the other party. While your affection for your own party has not grown in recent years, your distaste for the other party has intensified. You distrust news sources preferred by the other side. Its supporters seem increasingly alien to you: different not just in partisan affiliation but in social, cultural, economic, and even racial characteristics. You may even consider them subhuman in some respects.
You're also likely to be wrong about the characteristics of members of the other party, about what they actually believe, and even about their views of you. But you are trapped in a partisan prison by the psychological effects of confirmation bias. Being confronted with factual information that contradicts your previously held views does not change them, and it may even reinforce them. Vilification of the other party perversely leads partisans to behave in precisely the norm-violating and game-rigging ways they fear their opponents will. It's a classic vicious cycle, and it's accelerating.
[…]
Why do Americans increasingly think ill of their political opponents? To some extent, people may be taking their cues from political elites. Parsing the roll call votes of Democratic and Republican legislators reveals steeply increasing partisan polarization in Congress since the 1970s. In a 2018 Electoral Studies article on how party elite polarization affects voters, the Texas Tech political scientist Kevin K. Banda and the University of Massachusetts Lowell political scientist John Cluverius find that "partisans respond to increasing levels of elite polarization by expressing higher levels of affective polarization, i.e. more negative evaluations of the opposing party relative to their own."
Read it all.
Matthew McManus: What is Conservatism?
Though the question asked in the title of Matthew McManus’s essay at Arc Digital is simple, the answer is anything but. McManus discusses conservatism while reviewing a new book by Edmund Neill and notes that not only is the definition of conservatism far from a settled issue among political theorists but even those who consider themselves conservatives have widely varied opinions on what that means.
Neill’s book opens with a long chapter discussing many of the theoretical ambiguities highlighted above, admitting that it makes the task of defining conservatism extremely difficult. Ironically for a doctrine that often claims to articulate “organized common sense”—what us critical types call ruling hegemony—it is actually quite a bit harder to define conservatism than liberalism and socialism. This is in part because the latter two emerged from the Enlightenment as principled doctrines committed to a set of universalizable abstract ideals. Most anyone would agree that a liberal who doesn’t support liberty is no liberal at all, or that a democratic socialist who is a militantly pro-capitalist anti-egalitarian needs to consult a good political dictionary. But one can find conservatives supporting positions on all sides of these issues as well as many others.
One theoretical response to this criticism has been to activate the via negativa: defining conservatism by what it is not, or more precisely, what it reacts against. This is close to the argument of Corey Robin, who defines the political right in The Reactionary Mind as “a mode of counterrevolutionary practice.” And Neill agrees that conservatism is indeed a “fundamentally reactive ideology,” relative to its more muscularly principled opponents. This has had benefits and drawbacks for conservatives from the beginning. It constitutes a theoretical and strategic deficiency since, being more committed to matters of principle than their right-wing opponents, liberals and leftists are more frequently able to set the ideological terrain for major debates about politics. One point that Neill doesn’t discuss is that this feature may account for the political right’s longstanding simultaneous distaste for progressive intellectuals and thinly veiled envy at their creativity, novelty, and bold ability to capture and redefine the politics of what is possible. But one benefit of this reactive disposition has been a surprising adaptability which goes a long way in accounting for conservatism’s longevity and variety. This may seem paradoxical, given that conservatives are superficially thought to be defenders of the status quo, while liberals and progressives have at points welcomed even radical change. Yet the hyper-principled nature of liberalism and progressivism can easily turn into inflexibility and puritanism resulting in endless internal disputes and moralistic denunciation. On the other hand, Neill claims conservatives have been free to learn from conservatism’s opponents and that the program of providing “symbiotic opposites to progressive concepts in order to rebut them has proved extremely durable.”
Read it all here.
Katya Sedgwick: Citizen Muckrakers
Twitter’s new rules regarding consent for images or videos of private individuals is complicating the mission of some amateur as well as professional journalists. Katya Sedgwick writes at City Journal of the ongoing problem of public drug addiction in San Francisco and what those attempting to inform the public are now up against.
[T]he corporate media is merely playing catch-up to the citizen journalists who for years have chronicled the Bay Area’s crime problem on Twitter. I was thinking of this when I learned of Twitter’s new rule prohibiting publication of images or videos of private individuals without their consent.
In 2018, when I started blogging about San Francisco’s misnamed “homelessness” problem, local TV news stations continuously pushed the idea that income inequality and steep rents were the cause. Without a doubt, San Francisco is an unnecessarily expensive city because of the myriad regulatory measures hindering both new housing construction and commerce. But any honest casual observer in the Bay Area knows that something other than high rents lies behind the phenomenon.
And so I found, on Twitter, a group of locals posting cellphone pictures and videos of their unhoused neighbors prostrated on the sidewalk, trash and tents blocking the streets, violent psychotic breakdowns, and drug deals in progress. The images inspired a discussion of how our once-lovely city had turned into a desolate zombie land. San Franciscans were putting two and two together, figuring out that Proposition 47 had gutted the law and that the people in charge were corrupt. Our group of citizen journalists tagged elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and the corporate news media on Twitter, inviting them to participate (they rarely did).
[…]
But following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Black Lives Matter used its clout to oppose the “racist practice” of releasing mugshots. In June 2021, California governor Gavin Newsom banned the publication of mugshots of nonviolent criminal suspects. Had he done so a few years earlier, it’s possible that we would never have noticed that drug crimes go unpunished in San Francisco. The cops would not have alerted the public, and the public would not have pressured journalists to cover what should be considered one of the biggest scandals in San Francisco’s history.
Just as BLM was unhappy with police posting the pictures of suspects, socialist activists and nonprofit leaders like Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness consider pictures of street people disrespectful. Some Bay Area citizen journalist Twitter content has already been flagged for reporting, and it’s guaranteed to happen more in the future. Bay Area TV stations like KTVU Fox 2 have acquiesced to the activists’ demands and begun blurring out the faces of drug addicts. So much for guerrilla journalism.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter
Via Heterodox Academy, a call from Science Magazine to keep politics out of science and higher education:




Via Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, do colleges have any business tracking the social media accounts of college students?





Finally, presented without comment via Christopher Rufo: