E-Pluribus | July 9, 2024

The philosophy of politics; life, the universe and everything; and the politics of 'leave me alone.'

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Stephen Harrop: The Concept of the Political Belief

These days, it’s easy to assume everything is political. At City Journal, Stephen Harrop reviews Oliver Traldi’s new book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. Traldi, in part, tries to pin down what “political” really refers to. While Harrop is not sold on Traldi’s answer, Harrop says the book is nonetheless a valuable look at the philosophies that shape much of our modern public discourse.

This is a philosophical book, so we need to begin by defining our terms. What are political beliefs, and what does “political” mean, anyway?

The book is short on a precise definition. Traldi is aware of this, but he surveys three characterizations, each getting us a little closer to the truth: that politics is about power, conflict, and order.

Consider the social contract tradition in political philosophy, which sees the formation of states as the result of free persons leaving a “state of nature,” characterized by relative freedom and equality, to incarnate a political body. That transition is assuredly political (what could be more political than the creation of a state?), and one can see features of each characterization in it. In banding together in a state, each citizen loses some power over his own actions and cedes it to the sovereign or governing body. In joining together, he also gains a means to adjudicate disputes with minimal conflict. And in the process, he passes from a life Thomas Hobbes called “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” to one marked by stability and order.

None of these concepts can define “political” by itself, but each seems to give us the right idea. What, then, are political beliefs? Traldi’s theory goes something like this. For a belief to be political, it must both be in dispute (what he calls the “dispute-necessity thesis”) and have the right kind of connection to politics (what he calls the “connection-necessity thesis”). Perhaps your belief has practical relevance to a disputed political action. Or perhaps your belief is a shibboleth, a means of identifying who’s in a political group and who’s out of it.

The trouble with this theory lies in that pesky dispute clause. Roughly, Traldi thinks that for a belief to be political, it must be in dispute. Put in another, logically equivalent way, if a belief isn’t under dispute, it can’t be political. This proposal has a significant drawback, what I’ll call the context problem.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s suppose you’re an anarchist and like to hang around with some fellow anarchist friends. Presumably, you and your friends agree that there should be no state. This isn’t at all in dispute between you. Thus, according to Traldi’s dispute-necessity thesis, in this context, the belief that there should be no state isn’t political. (This by itself is a strange result, but let’s run with it.) But in a broader political context (your neighborhood or borough, say), the undesirability of forming states is probably under dispute. So now it counts as a political belief all over again.

So we have a context problem: there are many beliefs which, when we look at them in differing contexts, change from being in dispute to not being in dispute, perhaps a few times. Here’s another example: it might be the consensus of a specific city (Austin, say) that a certain candidate for president is preferable. But when you switch to a larger context in which this city is embedded (in this example, Texas), the belief becomes disputed again. And when you switch to a national context, you might get even more variation.

Which of these contexts is the correct one for assessing whether this is a political belief?

Read the whole thing.

Matt Johnson: Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’

Every generation struggles with the meaning of it all. In the 1980s, author Douglas Adams concluded that the answer was 42, and this generation is no different. In Quillette, Matt Johnson takes a long and detailed look at some of the major schools of thought on how modern Western societies are coping with the age-old questions.

The New Theists, [David] Brooks, and [Alexandre] Lefebvre all agree that there’s a crisis of meaning in liberal societies. This view has become increasingly common as Western countries have gone through a period of rapid secularisation in recent decades. In 2000, 86 percent of Americans reported that they were Christian. Since then, the proportion has collapsed to 68 percent. Other indicators of religiosity have plummeted as well—while nearly two-thirds of Americans said religion was “very important” to them in 2003, 45 percent now say the same. Church membership was around 70 percent in 2000, but it’s now 45 percent. Since 2007, the proportion of Americans who say they’re atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” jumped from 16 percent to 28 percent.

A similar trend is sweeping Western Europe, which has seen significant declines in Christian belief. In Belgium, 83 percent of respondents to a Pew survey say they were raised Christian, but just 55 percent remain Christian. Many other countries have followed a similar trajectory: 79 to 51 percent in Norway, 67 to 41 percent in the Netherlands, 92 to 66 percent in Spain, 74 to 52 percent in Sweden. Every Western European country Pew surveyed followed this trend.

[. . .]

Liberalism is primarily concerned with “peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies,” as Fukuyama puts it. There are certain basic rules that cannot be violated in a liberal society (such as the state’s monopoly on violence), but more than any other system, liberalism allows citizens to live their lives as they see fit. Lefebvre believes liberalism can offer more than this. He draws a distinction between what he calls “political liberals” and “comprehensive liberals,” and he places himself in the latter category—those for whom liberalism is the “basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation.” Lefebvre believes the citizens of mature liberal democracies are already living in a “liberal monoculture,” which has shaped them from birth to adopt certain assumptions about how to treat one another and organise society.

According to Lefebvre, “We who are liberal all the way down lack adequate models to understand how we came to be who we are.” He believes the model that most closely approximates comprehensive liberalism was developed by John Rawls, whose 1971 treatise A Theory of Justice, 1985 essay “Justice as Fairness,” and 2001 book Justice as Fairness: A Restatement are among the most influential works of modern liberalism.

Rawls’s conception of liberalism rests on the assumption of what he calls “reasonable pluralism”—the idea that citizens with competing values can live together under a shared political framework. According to Rawls, this framework is normative to the extent that it calls for citizens to be free and equal to the greatest extent possible under a fair system of cooperation. But because each of these concepts—freedom, equality, and fairness—is so open to radical divergences in interpretation, there can be many competing liberal doctrines. There are liberal conservatives and liberal progressives; liberal socialists and liberal capitalists; liberal Christians and liberal atheists. Liberals can derive a sense of purpose and meaning from vastly different worldviews—the only requirement is that they don’t foist these worldviews on anyone else.

[. . .]

New Theists believe the hole in the liberal soul is God-shaped, and they know exactly which god should fill it. According to Jordan Peterson, the Bible is the “foundational document of Western civilization” and it contains a repository of narratives that are central to Western identity and morality. In his 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland writes: “For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom.” Whether we know it or not, Holland observes, the inhabitants of the West belong to a civilisation that is “thoroughly Christian.”

[. . .]

While diversity can provide benefits such as economic dynamism, the free flow of ideas, and cultural richness, it is also a product of liberal societies. When citizens are free to express themselves, organise politically, and worship (or not) as they see fit, they will naturally segment into diverse social and cultural groups. There’s a reason the top destinations for migrants around the world are liberal societies like the United States, Canada, and Germany—beyond the promise of better economic circumstances, migrants recognise that these societies are uniquely capable of assimilating new arrivals while allowing them to retain their identities. They don’t just seek economic freedom in the West—they seek political and social freedom, too.

Liberal societies are strong enough to be diverse—they’re capable of accommodating radically divergent viewpoints and ways of living under a single set of norms, rules, and institutions. The repression in illiberal countries isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign that the authorities are terrified of what will happen if minority groups organise politically to demand fairer treatment. Authoritarian rulers know that this sort of mobilisation can be contagious—if one group successfully agitates for more rights and freedoms, other groups will follow.

Read it all here.

Jane Coaston & Mary Katharine Ham: ‘Regular People Are Not That Ideological. A Lot of Voters Don’t Think That Way.’

“Live and let live” isn’t an official motto of the United States. But in Jane Coaston’s recent conversation with Mary Katharine Ham in The New York Times, they generally agree that many Americans would like to live by it anyway. Conflict is oxygen in today’s political discourse, though a lot of people just want to be left alone.

Coaston: [. . .] I’ve been, increasingly, thinking about how there’s a very large constituency of people who think of themselves as being Republicans, but they’re not populist, they’re, “You can’t tell me what to do”-ist, which I think it’s a general American sentiment.

You see the social conservatives trying to make inroads, and yet the social conservatives are trying to tell people, essentially, what to do, and they’re being responded to by someone like Barstool Sports basically saying, “No. You’re not going to tell us what to do about anything that we want to do.” What does that conflict look like? Where does it go? Conservatives can’t really be the cool mom that says you can do whatever you want —

Ham: But also neither can liberals, at this point, right? There’s a very puritan streak to much of liberal policy.

But, to your question, I would say that a bunch of people in the center-right, Republican-leaning, “You can’t tell me what to do”-ist categories, they are sometimes just reacting against the left. I think one of the principal things they’re reacting against is the idea that America is this bad force, that it is not a force for good in the world, that it comes from this irrevocably broken beginning. And its original sin is not capable of being redeemed. Slavery is what I’m referring to, obviously.

I think a lot of people reacting to that, they look at the left, and they think, “Well, that’s not where I belong. I’m a bit of a flag-waver. I like to stand for the Pledge. Love the military.” They feel like they don’t fit there. So, that’s one thing.

Two, I think we’re in an arms race of people telling each other what to do. One of the things that I find difficult about arguing for a more libertarian position on many issues and a more, “Leave us the hell alone” position is that I think more populist right-leaning people argue, not incorrectly, that the left will ratchet up on school policy, on curriculum, and if you don’t fill the gap with your own values, you will be overtaken.

I think Trump was a desire to fight that tendency. Like, “We’re not laying down for this.”

Read it all.

Around Twitter (X)

Clearly mis- and disinformation are bad. But if the problem is overblown, efforts to “fight” it can actually amount to censorship. Excerpts from a longish thread by Jacob Mchangama are below:

Patrick Chovanec isn’t buying the “how bad can a second Trump term be?” line of argument:

And finally, via the Free Speech Union, a new front in the battle for the right to free expression - facial expression, that is: