E-Pluribus | March 13, 2024
Coming together on polarization; liberalism versus liberalism; and how our minds talk us into things.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Yascha Mounk: You're Thinking About Polarization All Wrong
Just because our country often appears to be two big groups shouting at one another, Yascha Mounk of Persuasion says there’s considerable crossing back and forth between the two sides. Mounk believes politicians who seek the middle ground will find a much larger constituency than they might think.
Given how deeply polarized America is, it is tempting to compare the country to Northern Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina—to places, that is, where how your father voted twenty years ago reliably tells me how you vote today and how your child is likely to vote twenty years hence. But that is simply wrong.
Yes, over the past dozen years American politics has been highly competitive: by historical standards, national elections have been unusually close-run. But over the same time period, American politics has also been extremely fluid: a very large number of voters have changed parties. They have moved from Democrat to Republican, or from Republican to Democrat, or from the ranks of non-voters to either, and so on. It’s just that the different streams of this mass migration have, at least so far, roughly canceled each other out, creating the false appearance of a country divided into two stable blocs.
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The change in American voting patterns turns out to be more remarkable the closer you look. Trump’s toxicity among women was supposed to be an insuperable obstacle; but the vote of women is now equally divided between the two front-runners, with each candidate supported by 46 percent of women. Hispanics were the key demographic whose growth was supposed to fuel the Democrats’ “inevitable demographic majority”; but, according to current polls, they favor Trump over Biden by 46 to 40 percent. Finally, African-Americans were long treated as a monolithic voting bloc, as over 90 percent reliably favored Democratic candidates; it now appears that nearly 1 in 4 black voters will support Trump in November.
The extent of the fluidity is even more profound than these figures suggest; after all, people within demographic blocs also frequently change their views in ways that contradict top-line trends. In keeping with the overall trend, I have numerous white, college-educated friends who moved from voting for Mitt Romney in 2012 to voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. I also, however, have two white, college-educated friends who reluctantly voted for Clinton and Biden, but are now determined to vote for Trump.
The recognition that American politics is highly fluid as well as deeply competitive has important implications for how to understand this political moment.
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[I]f you gather the foresight to look around the next historical corner, it is not difficult to imagine what a transformative candidate might look like in 2028. For there is now a clear ideological center of gravity in American life, one that either a Democratic or a Republican candidate could capture if only they had the courage to try.
On the economy, most Americans remain deeply committed to capitalism and free enterprise; but they also want politicians to take on special interests, to ensure that big corporations pay their fair share of tax, and that people without a college degree can earn a decent livelihood. On culture, most Americans are much more tolerant and open-minded than they were a few decades ago; but a growing majority is sick both of the moralistic hectoring that has become the natural habitus of the country’s cultural elite and of the performative boorishness that dominates that MAGA movement.
Read it all.
John Rogove: Saving Liberalism From Itself
In The Music Mann, Professor Harold Hill fears a girl who “wants to trade my independence for her security.” On a larger scale, societies have an independence-security tradeoff as well. The very freedom liberalism grants can be used to undermine liberalism, but that just comes with the territory. At Discourse Magazine, John Rogove writes about the challenges liberalism presents itself and what can be done to mitigate those challenges for the good of all.
Everyone knows that American civilization is in crisis, but no one can seem to agree on why. Diagnoses of this societal crisis from the left and from the right are diametrically opposed, and this is part of the problem. Indeed, the vehemence of these differing diagnoses is what we usually call polarization: an increasingly radical intolerance for differing ideas and values, and an incapacity for civil exchange of ideas and opinions. The seemingly sensible, and classically liberal, reaction to this state of affairs is to call for a return to the long-standing liberal basis of American civilization: the freedom of every individual to pursue whatever goods he or she values most.
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American political discourse has always been marked by a high degree of partisan polarization, and such polarization has always paradoxically been the hallmark of a society with little real ideological difference between the two major parties, as compared with, say, Europe. But it seems a sort of tipping point in the disintegration of the possibilities of reasonable civil discourse and political disagreement was reached sometime between 2014 and 2021.
One of the most alarming and brutal manifestations of this phenomenon has been a growing tendency to “dehumanize,” rhetorically, those with whom we disagree or those perceived as belonging to the opposing camp. Our political opponents are no longer people with whom we have (sometimes vehement) disagreements on what policies are best for the common good, and against whose wrongheaded ideas the appropriate course of action is voting, lobbying, campaigning and impassioned debate.
Rather, our opponents have morphed into hateful, barbarian enemies of the human race and of the possibility of civilized life—into Satan-worshipping pedophiles who want to use vaccines to implant us with microchips, or into racist homophobes guilty of cis-Christian-white-male privilege, no better than Nazi Klansmen. To engage in civil dialogue with such fiends is already to have conceded far too much to their evil worldview and only lets them spread their venom. If the pesky vestiges of liberal institutions such as due process don’t allow us to outright kill or imprison them, social death at the very least seems the only fate they could possibly deserve.
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The specific risk to epistemic liberalism in a democratic society is the suffocating tyranny of majority opinion—the majority either of society at large or of one’s in-group. As Keith Whittington puts it, citing John Stuart Mill, “every sect, every nation, every generation is convinced of its own shared opinions, even as those outside the boundaries of those communities think that those ideas are ‘not only false but absurd.’ It is easy for the Christian in a Christian nation, the democrat in a democratic nation, the liberal in a liberal polity to imagine that their most cherished commitments are obviously true.” Education, both secondary and higher, is the most critical and effective, if not the only rampart against such homogenizing and stultifying tendencies.
The purpose of free speech in a republic is to check power, to allow for free, informed and vigorous debate concerning elections and policies. In one sense, free speech is not suffering at all today. From colonial times through the last quarter of the 20th century, free speech was limited: Obscene and vice-inducing speech were restricted or suppressed, but the range of acceptable opinions expressible in raucous and contradictory debate was, outside of a few specific periods, broad. Now, it is the opposite: Obscene and vicious speech (which more often than not does not mean “speech,” as in logos, at all, but rather images and acts) suffers not only near-limitless toleration, but an almost sacralized encouragement in the name of self-empowerment and free self-expression; whereas the range of ideas it is acceptable to express has drastically dwindled—whether because some ideas are considered beyond the pale in the way that obscenity once was, and expressing them will bring social and professional death, or because we increasingly lack the ideas and language to describe and defend them.
Read the whole thing.
Michael H. Bernstein: The Placebo Effect’s Evil Twin
Most of us are familiar with the placebo effect, but writing at Quillette, Michael Bernstein introduces us to the lesser known “nocebo effect.” (And it’s not just “cebo” with “no” tacked in front of it, like “no-kay” instead of okay.) If the effect Bernstein describes can work to make us feel physically sick when we’re not, certainly a steady diet of negative media can have the same impact emotionally and psychologically.
The term “nocebo effect” derives from the Latin word nocere, which translates roughly as “to harm” (as in the Hippocratic injunction, primum non nocere—first, do no harm). Whereas the better-known placebo effect is typically positive (the alleviation of pain or malaise through treatments that otherwise have no inherent therapeutic value); the nocebo effect is negative, often manifesting as headache, skin irritation, or nausea.
No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” It can be more formally summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from conscious or subconscious expectations.” Or, more simply: When you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick.
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The placebo effect is real. It’s measurable. It’s why we have placebo trials in medical research—because the hope buried inside that sugar pill has a measurable medical benefit. Hope is literally medicine, and it’s powerful stuff.
The roots of our understanding of the nocebo effect are more obscure. But we do find an early precedent involving the work of eighteenth century German physician Franz Mesmer, best known for his interest in the eponymous proto-hypnotic therapy known as “mesmerism.” In the salons of Paris and Vienna, he promoted the idea that illnesses could be alleviated by using magnets to govern the flow of fluid in patients’ bodies. (If this sounds like obvious quackery, which it is, bear in mind that Mesmer lacked any of our modern-day tools of science. He lived in an era when bloodletting with leeches was still seen as state-of-the-art medical treatment.)
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The mind’s unfortunate ability to create suffering ex nihilo can sometimes affect large groups of people though a process of social contagion (or, in the more indelicate language of the past, hysterical contagion). One such example, known as “The June Bug,” occurred in a U.S. textile mill in 1962. Many employees began to feel dizzy and nauseous. Some vomited. Rumors of a mysterious bug that was biting employees began to circulate, and eventually 62 workers became ill. Yet a subsequent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation determined that no bugs could be identified. Nor could investigators find any other physical cause of the illnesses. This type of phenomenon is now referred to as psychogenic illness—sickness caused by belief.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
John Sailer goes after the National Institutes of Health in the Wall Street Journal for subjugating science to ideology:
Are we really in the dark about what to teach young people? Jacob Allee and Bryan Gentry argue it’s not as difficult as Yuval Harari thinks.
And finally, Harvard strikes again: