Midterms again - the wave election

I have to thank Rand Simberg for this fascinating find from Stuart Rothenberg, in April 2009: "April Madness: Can GOP Win Back the House in 2010?" Here's how Rothenberg answers his own question:

Yes, Republicans have plenty of opportunities in good districts following their loss of 53 House seats over the past two cycles. And yes, there are signs that the Republican hemorrhage has stopped and even possibly that the party’s fortunes have begun to reverse course.

But there are no signs of a dramatic rebound for the party, and the chance of Republicans winning control of either chamber in the 2010 midterm elections is zero. Not “close to zero.” Not “slight” or “small.” Zero.

Why? Well, because --

Big changes in the House require a political wave. You can cherry-pick your way to a five- or eight-seat gain, but to win dozens of seats, a party needs a wave. 

...

Waves are built on dissatisfaction and frustration, and there is little in national survey data that suggest most voters are upset with President Barack Obama’s performance or the performance of his party.

Granted, this was a year and a half out, but over a year later he was still saying, "At this point, Republicans appear poised to gain two or three dozen seats but fall short of the majority." In the end, of course, they gained 64 seats, a bigger swing than anything seen since 1948. It's not just, in other words, that it was a "wave" election, and not just that it was a wave of historic proportions, but that it was a monster wave that developed so fast and so apparently mysteriously.

Not that losing politicians, pundits, and spinners don't have their usual assortment of hind-sight explanations --  bad economy, bad communications, "outside" money, fear and anger, bitter clinging, racism, blah, and more blah. Any of which would be fine for a more normal mid-term "correction", but none of which seem sufficient to account for what actually happened.

Now, I think, on a kind of meta-political level, the only thing that can really account for it is the idea of a longer-term shift in the political fulcrum, as I posted previously. But on the surface, what's the one explanation you don't hear from anyone on the liberal left? The answer: bad policies, or at least a rejection of Democratic policies by the electorate. But, as Mickey Kaus points out with reference to a distinctly odd, and even misleading column by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, that's an explanation that actually accounts for some statistical correlations: "the more [the House Democrats] opposed the Obama agenda on health care, the stimulus, and cap and trade, the better they did given the makeup of their district." Well, no doubt the lib-left is a little shell-shocked, and even grief-stricken -- but, if they're going to make opportunistic adjustments in time for the next electoral tide in 2012, they'll need to emerge from the denial stage soon.

How to get out from under BigGov

An interesting article  by Janet Daley in The Telegraph: "The West is turning against big government - but what comes next?".

On this side of the Atlantic, there is now a broad understanding that the social democratic project itself is unsustainable: that it has grown wildly beyond the principles of its inception and that the consequences of this are not only unaffordable, but positively damaging to national life and character. The US, bizarrely, is running at least 10 years behind in this process, having elected a government which chose to embark on the social democratic experiment at precisely the moment when its Western European inventors were despairing of it, and desperately trying to find politically palatable ways of winding it down.

The American people – being made of rather different stuff and having historical roots which incline them to be distrustful of government in any form – immediately rejected the whole idea. But in Britain, too, among real people (as opposed to ideological androids) there is a general sense that governments – even when they are elected by a mass franchise – become out of touch and out of control, and that something essential to human dignity and potential is under threat from their overweening interference.

So a generation after the collapse of totalitarian socialism, its democratic form is finally crumbling as well.

A good diagnosis generally, though one should question whether the principles behind the social democratic project didn't doom it from the start. And her prescriptions -- lower taxes, lower immigration -- are predictable. (Immigration, particularly, is a troublesome issue, and while I'm sympathetic to concerns regarding cultural change -- especially re: cultures antipathetic to Western values -- I'm not sympathetic to employment protectionism.) At the end, though, she at least puts her finger on what's really needed, while leaving its actual content entirely vague:

Finally, government must make us an honest offer. The rhetoric needs to be turned into a systematic programme that takes the moral instincts of ordinary people as its starting point, but goes on from there to outline a feasible idea of what it will be like to live under this new dispensation – which makes clear that there is as much to be gained as will be lost. Get past the threats and the vague hopes: give us a clear picture of where this is all going, and what is expected of us.  

 Except, of course, that there is much more to be gained than lost, and that it's not government that must do this, but we ourselves.

More Midterm reaction

And a nice contrast to the deranged screed a couple of posts ago -- here's what the BBC's Paul Adams describes as "one minute and nine seconds of pure advertising genius":



See, what I like -- nay, what I love -- about Sarah Palin is just the effect she has on the so-called "elite", on both left and right. She grates, she baffles, and she just generally messes with their heads -- look what she's done to poor, excitable Andy Sullivan, for example. Now, like David Gergen, I doubt that she'll actually run for President -- though the temptation to be the first female candidate for the office might be enough to do it -- but I think she's having a great time making a lot of people nervous just by threatening to run.

Why take such schadenfreudean delight in the discomfort of the putative elites, you might ask? Oh, just because they tend to treat political ideas and values as they treat fashion -- something merely to be donned and displayed as status symbols rather than thought about seriously. Which is true more on the liberal, bien pensant side, of course, as distinct from the conservative, snobby side. But on both sides the fun is mainly just in seeing an obstreperous opposition get in the face of complacent orthodoxies, and stay there.

So you go, girl.

UPDATE: While we're doing videos that spook the liberal elite, I might as well add this one, called "Fire from the Heartland":


Fire From The Heartland from Citizens United on Vimeo.

Why capitalist societies are not like casinos

I have great respect for Virginia Postrel, and particularly for her book, The Future and Its Enemies. But in this essay, "In Praise of Irrational Exuberance", she makes an important mistake -- important, both because it's seriously misleading in itself, and also because it indirectly illuminates an important truth (or two). The mistake is to compare entrepreneurs in a capitalist society to gamblers in a casino:

Entrepreneurship is not, in this view, a rational risk calculation. It is, as critics of capitalism sometimes charge, a bit like gambling. The few big winners are usually people who shouldn’t have bet their time, money, and ideas. They overestimated their chances of striking it rich. But they beat the odds — to everyone’s benefit. These “lucky fools” create new sources of wealth, new jobs, new industries offering less-risky opportunities, and new technologies that improve life. Society plays the role of the casino, enjoying the spillover benefits from foolish bets.

Now, Postrel is not, in fact, a critic of capitalism, and in making this comparison she still, as the passage above makes clear, wants to make the point that a free market economy is greatly beneficial to all -- to spell it out: just as a casino itself is enriched by the gambling of its customers, so capitalist society is enriched by the gambling of its entrepreneurs.

Capitalist societies are indeed rich, and entrepreneurs do indeed take risks, or gambles, but this comparison nevertheless goes astray for the following reasons:

First, casino gambling is rightly looked upon as of dubious value because it's a zero-sum game -- the only way for the casino to make money is for the customer to lose, and vice versa. In fact, from the point of view of the customer alone, the game is negative-sum, or a net loss on average. Capitalist economic activity, on the other hand, is positive-sum -- individuals may sometimes lose, but on average everyone gains, and gains considerably. This is because, unlike casino gambling, capitalism actually creates wealth.

The second important difference has to do with the nature of the entrepreneur's risk itself. Unlike gambling on the fall of dice or a roulette ball, where the odds are known in advance, the entrepreneur is constantly active or engaged to influence the outcome of the gamble, so that the actual odds of success depend heavily on those actions and the planning behind them -- in other words, on the abilities and character of the entrepreneur herself. It's certainly true, as Postrel points out, that most such enterprises ultimately fail, but that statistical fact obscures the real differences between those enterprises and the people behind them -- differences, for example, that venture capitalists try to discern, with varying success -- and it's precisely those differences that determine the real odds of success.

This is why Postrel's title, asserting the entrepreneur's "exuberance" to be irrational, is a kind of misuse of statistics -- no doubt the exuberance is irrational for some, but not for others, and neither she nor econometricians are able to say which is which. But the difference is crucial, since it's that rather than "irrational exuberance" that really drives the whole wealth-creating machine.

"Our ankles survive."

For other reactions to the Midterm results....

This couldn't be funnier if it were in the Onion and were it not for its context, you'd probably take it as satire -- but, given where it is, I think we have to take it as symptom, with a soupçon of pathos added. See "An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum" by tim wise (note the self-effacing lower-case) in Daily Dementia (or, more formally, Daily Kos: State of the Nation):

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity--they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.

And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Think there might be a little, you know, bitter clinging in all that (and it goes on)? Well, but that's not really adequate, is it? More like deranged death-grip, if it's the outpouring of anyone past early adolescence. Which is maybe a point in timmy's favor -- no idea of his (and it's pretty likely a "he", right?) own skin tone or age, of course, but if you had to guess wouldn't you say white, male, and maybe about 14? Could be younger, but then a bit precocious, because I will say that if the level were just dialed back to maybe 10 or a little less, screeds like this would be a perfect candidate for Stuff White People Like.

Thanks to Instapundit (seems like I'm always sending him traffic)

Congratulations, America

Maybe about as expected overall, but a very good night, with some disappointments in the Senate, but a possibly historic (see Nate Silver, the electoral guru) result in the House, and big gains in Governorships, and state legislatures. A genuine political star in Rubio, and an interesting trio of Rubio, Allen West, and Nikki Haley. And speaking of the new Governor of South Carolina, a pretty good night for Sarah Palin too -- kind of amazing to see how, just a couple of years after a big defeat as a running mate to John McCain, she's now a national political force in her own right, while McCain's just back to being a Senator. The Tea Party in general had mixed results -- and needs to draw some lessons from that -- but I actually think McConnell was right to say that it's changed the Republican Party for good. More interesting, perhaps, has been it's impact on the Democratic Party, scaring a good many into repudiating their own left wing, and defeating many others who tried to buck that tide.

So, after a couple of setbacks starting in 2006, another substantial swing to the neo-progressive right -- now on to 2012.

Taking the Rally to Restore Smart People seriously!

Funny at any time, but in the context of people who describe themselves as "smart", funnier:

Thanks to Doug Powers at  Michelle Malkin
and of course  Reason TV

Taking Jon Stewart seriously

See Taranto, Best of the Web, "Rally to Restore Authority":

The "sanity" for which Stewart claims to long is the authority of the old mainstream media--their ability to set the boundaries of newsworthiness and respectable debate, claiming to be above politics while actually skewing leftward--though not so far or so intensely leftward as, say, MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann.

Stewart mimics this authority by insisting that he is nonpartisan and nonideological. In truth, he is no more above politics than were Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather. But he's clever enough to know that a Ratheresque assertion of authority would make him look ridiculous. So instead he makes an appeal to antiauthority, escaping scrutiny by insisting he's just a comedian. "If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to," he smirked at Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire," back in 2004.

The kind of "sanity" for which Stewart claims to be nostalgic is a thing of the past. Its last redoubt is National Public Radio, which by firing Juan Williams has made itself look more like the Radio Moscow of a half century ago than the CBS.

Not that anyone should take Stewart seriously, but others do. Also, he did a good number on Olbermann once.

Anti-cultural relativism

From Nicholas N. Eberstadt, "The Global Poverty Paradox" -- read the whole thing, as they say, but here's an abridged narrative:

First, the world as a whole and the poorer parts of the world more specifically have generally done very well under capitalism and global trade, especially in the last half of the last century:

In the half century between 1955 and 2005, by Maddison’s reckoning, the planet’s per capita income levels nearly tripled, growing at an average tempo of more than 2 percent per year, despite the unprecedented pace of population increase in the Third World over those same years. The expansion of international trade—and thus by definition, of markets for export produce—was even more dramatic: on a worldwide basis, real per capita demand for international merchandise and commodities jumped almost tenfold during those same years....

There should be no doubt whatsoever that the health revolution facilitated by the postwar era’s knowledge explosion, and all that has accompanied it, has been fundamentally “poor-friendly.” ...

The worldwide surge in prosperity over the past two generations has been nothing like the winner-take-all race that some insinuate it to be. The plain fact is that countries at every income level have benefited tremendously from the global economic updrafts of our modern age. 

But, a significant fraction of the world's population, in the worst regions, have not only not shared in this improvement -- they've actually regressed:

By the World Bank’s calculations, nearly two dozen countries suffered negative per capita economic growth over the course of the quarter century from 1980 to 2005. ...

Thus, it is not just that an appreciable swath of humanity today lives in countries that have not yet managed to customize, and apply, the global formula for sustained growth that has been propelling the rest of the world out of poverty and into material security, or even affluence. No—hundreds of millions of people in the modern world live in places where the development process is manifestly stuck in reverse....

National examples of prolonged economic failure dot the modern global map: in the Caribbean (Cuba, Haiti); in Latin America (Paraguay, Venezuela); even in dynamic East Asia (North Korea). But the epicenter of prolonged economic failure is sub-Saharan Africa.

And foreign aid won't help:

The MDG [Millennium Development Goals] project avers that the primary impediment to more rapid progress against poverty in low-income countries nowadays is the lack of funding for practical, tested programs, and policy measures that would reliably and predictably raise living standards in the world where they are lowest today. ...

The trouble with this narrative is that foreign aid is not exactly an untested remedy for global poverty in our day and age. To go by figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, total flows of development assistance to recipient countries since 1960, after adjusting for inflation, by now add up to something like $3 trillion.

... since 1970, sub-Saharan African states have taken in the current equivalent of more than $600 billion of official development assistance—over three times as much aid on a per capita basis as Marshall Plan states received. As we know all too well, these subventions neither forestalled long-term economic decline for the region as a whole nor prevented the rise of poverty in many “beneficiary” states in the sub-Sahara.

So what will? Well, cultural change might:

The proposition that a local population’s viewpoints, values, and dispositions might have some bearing on local economic performance would hardly seem to be controversial. Decades ago, the great development economist Peter Bauer wrote that “economic achievement depends upon a people’s attributes, attitudes, mores and political arrangements.” The observation was offered as a simple and irrefutable statement of fact, and it would still be unobjectionable today to most readers who have not been tutored in contemporary “development theory.” But for development specialists, discussion of “culture”—much less its relationship to such things as work, thrift, savings, entrepreneurship, innovation, educational attainment, and other qualities that influence prospects for material advance—is increasingly off-limits.

But at this point, Eberstadt becomes pessimistic, and maybe unduly so. He sees that much of the problem stems from corrupt and often evil regimes that have imposed themselves on a populace, thinks that only outside intervention can get rid of such regimes, and doesn't think that the world is willing to undertake such intervention (no doubt rightly). But what he doesn't see, or rather sees but doesn't connect to the problem, at least emphatically enough, is just the politics of international aid that he identifies above. This willing blindness to dysfunctional cultural/political attitudes turns aid agencies and governments into a kind of enabler, as in dysfunctional drug dependencies -- the aid becoming simply a way of prolonging the misery of a terrible cultural, political, and economic cul-de-sac.

At one point, Eberstadt quotes from the MDG project's overview document: "'many well-governed countries [today] are too poor to help themselves.'", and then adds: "Social-science and policy-research literature, to be sure, has committed a fair share of howlers during the past century, but this may be the single most empirically challenged sentence of the new millennium."

Multiculturalism and the right

And now for some Canadian content. A little while back there were two surprising elections here, even though both were predicted by polls -- in Toronto, perhaps Canada's most liberal (small-l) city, a fat, white, presumably heterosexual, male conservative (small-c) soundly defeated a liberal Liberal (also white and male, but not so fat, and openly gay); and in Calgary, perhaps Canada's most conservative major city, a Muslim was elected as the first Islamic mayor in Canada. Now, in themselves, these results might be a bit unusual, but hardly that interesting -- it's what they suggest about that familiar theme of multiculturalism that's significant. For reasons both naive and opportunistic, liberals have made this theme a pet project, viewing it in the former sense as perhaps just "more pavilions at Folkfest" (thanks to Kate at SDA for the expression), and in the latter, more cynical, sense, as the source of an easy supply of immigrant votes in any given election. But the naivete is rapidly falling away, as the previous post indicated, and now even the electoral opportunism seems threatened -- Rob Ford, the Toronto conservative, apparently outpolled his liberal rival by about 52% to 30% of respondents born outside of the country.

Granted, these are just a couple of Canadian municipal elections, but sometimes small events can portend larger things. Here, for example, are some possible take aways:

• Liberal attempts, both in Canada and the US, to pander to new immigrants, including bribing them with tax-intensive programs, may finally be reaching the point not just of diminishing returns but of negative returns -- more than most, immigrants as a group tend to be hard-working family people who dislike seeing their earnings taken from them to fund easy election-time promises as much as anyone.
• Conservatives recognize cultural diversity, once no longer a fetish, as indeed a rich source of vitality and energy within any society, as are a continual influx of new immigrants -- but add two general provisos: first, that the rate of cultural change be contained within supportable limits; and second, that the most general principles of a free society be recognized by all, including the supreme value of the individual.
• And immigrants, so many, as I say, from family-oriented, hard-working backgrounds, are increasingly finding contemporary conservatism a more natural political expression than contemporary liberalism -- indeed, the small government emphasis on freedom, tolerance, and opportunity is frequently a primary reason so many left their homes to seek this society out in the first place.

Multiculturalism and the left

A while back now, German Chancellor Merkel caused no small amount of consternation within the liberal-left everywhere with her announcement that the German experiment with "multikulti" was a failure (e.g., Yahoo News: "Merkel says German multi-cultural society has failed"). Now, partly this failure is just a result of some short-sighted labor policies that Europe in general, Germany in particular, has followed for years after WW2, of using immigrant labor to first rebuild, and now maintain, their societies (a policy that the US is having trouble with now as well). But little or no effort was made to assimilate these workers into the Western societies, and, whether out of necessity or a naive idealism, an ideology of "multiculturalism" was used to justify this, the idea being that "tolerance" will allow all the world's cultures to mingle freely while still preserving intact their distinct customs, beliefs, values, and practices. In Canada, this ideology underlay the use of a new metaphor for this mingling -- the idea of a cultural "mosaic" as opposed to the supposedly less tolerant American notion of the "melting pot". As a mosaic, however, it's a facade that's crumbling here as  everywhere.

One reason for this failure, which one would think would have been obvious, is that mixing cultures in this way changes them -- not a bad or insupportable thing in itself, but there is a rate of change beyond which people everywhere begin to feel that they are foreigners or aliens in their own land, and they resist this. But there's a larger and much more significant reason as well -- it can be seen in an essay by a self-described liberal, Susan Jacoby, entitled "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents": "I am an atheist," she writes, "with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect."  After quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the effect that "'All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.' (italics in the original)", Jacoby goes on to lament the fact that so many of her fellow liberals have failed to grasp this about what's supposed to be their own cultural heritage.Worse, it's as though they're unnerved by such a clear and frank statement and are driven to a perverse sort of relativism that forces them to disavow it as a result. And this leads Jacoby to make some observations that, perhaps unwittingly, also say much about the relative positions of the political left and right in the contemporary world:

Finally, it is a politically strategic error as well as a form of moral blindness for liberals to push people like Hirsi Ali into the eager arms of the political Right. ...

This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. More important, reflexive liberal multiculturalism fails every child being denied, in the name of faith and family, full access to the promise of this nation.

 At some point, it may be possible for Jacoby and many others like her to come to a realization that perhaps the American right today is representing itself accurately as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. And at that point a choice will be necessary -- between continued allegiance to an old but now reactionary political label, or to the values they thought that label stood for.

On moral bullying

This came up in a comment exchange from an earlier post, and I thought it was important enough to post on its own:

We all would like to think of ourselves as good people, right? And to be thought of as such. But this is exactly what provides the leverage point for the moral bully -- the ones who, big with a sense of their own swollen rectitude, like to morally push around anyone they think might be vulnerable. This is an old story within religions,  with the self-righteous inflating their own egos and sense of power by denouncing the sins of others. But it's a modern story too, especially within the quasi-religious politics of the modern liberal-left, where the sins take the form of failing to re-cycle, for example, or exhibiting one of a number of "phobias" (homo-, Islamo-, etc.) or -- the most popular form of denunciation by far -- of racism. Some of which, of course, may well be genuine forms of bad behavior or consciousness, but that's not the point here. Because the characteristic of the bully is his/her focus -- it's not really on the sins as such at all, but rather on the putative sinner, and the point is not to correct or change anything, but rather simply to morally dominate. This is what makes such tactics so prominent and ugly a part of political debates, after all, and all the more so when one side or the other is losing the debate on substantive grounds.

Now, in order to be a target for such bullying, whether of the older religious sort or the more recent political sort, you have to have bought into the mind set from which it emanates, and this is what makes the pseudo-elite of the fashionably orthodox today, the bien pensant, so easy to herd -- that reflexive anxiety that they might have strayed  in their mind from the path of correctness, and so in danger of stepping on some lurking social landmine by expressing one of the many forbidden thoughts. As, for example, did Juan Williams quite publicly recently, and look what happened to him. So in order to build a defense against the moral bullies, the first thing you have to do is reconsider your engagement with the socially fashionable, particularly in politics -- and this is true on both political wings, by the way, depending on your social context. That is, the first step is a declaration of personal independence from the tyranny of political labels and fashions. The problem is that the next steps will require some thinking on your own, as opposed to the ease of simply putting on whatever everyone else is wearing.

A week out from the midterm

I should preface this with a reminder that I'm a Canadian, and so an observer rather than a voter. But US elections have a significant impact north of the border too -- the effect is more indirect, obviously, than our own elections, but it may well be deeper, in the influence on our political culture generally.

In any case, while I think of myself as a long-range optimist, in shorter ranges I'm inclined to prepare for worst-case scenarios. So, a week away from the mid-terms, I'm concerned that predictions of a huge Republican sweep are over-confident, and anything short of a monumental overturn will be taken as a Democrat "moral victory". Not that that means much except in the immediate aftermath, but it would have been better to see more modest expectations, and be pleasantly surprised, rather than the opposite. My own sense is that the Republicans should retake control of the House, and make gains in the Senate but be short of a majority -- that seems to me a reasonable expectation, with anything significantly more than that being a genuine Republican victory, anything less a genuine Democratic victory.

My real point, though, is that it's a mistake to look upon any one election or set of elections as some epochal, climactic, make-or-break event. That's an understandable tendency when things seem dire (and I don't doubt it's easier to say when you're out of the fray yourself, as I am) but it invites all the risks of triumphal overconfidence when things go one way, and despairing resignation when they go the other. When what's really needed is a long-term focus on changing the underlying political culture I spoke of above.

Along those lines, it can be helpful to stand back a bit and look at the real nature of the political alternatives before us, or the dimensions of political space. Elections tend to force alternatives into the single dimension of left and right, but political realities are usually more complex. So, for example, despite the general BigGov/smaller-state distinction between Democrats and Republicans, there is a BigGov, corporatist wing of the Republican Party too, just as there is limited state, free-market/capitalist wing of the Democrats. And on both sides there are the usual divisions over "social issues". But the social issues needn't separate people politically, unless they see the state as a means of enforcing their particular views or values -- in other words, it makes sense to pursue a long-term strategy of forging alliances among smaller government proponents, who are prepared to use persuasion rather than power to advance their values. And that, as I've said elsewhere, would be truly progressive.

How do people change their politics?

One of the more interesting comments to come out of the Juan Williams brouhaha (as opposed to a foofarah) is this one  by Doctor Zero, "Juan Williams And The Preference Cascade". A "preference cascade" is a phrase he borrowed from Instapundit himself, Glenn Reynolds, and the good Doctor defines it thusly: "a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts." That consensus might be "manufactured" in a variety of ways, some crude, some subtle -- e.g., a crude totalitarian surveillance, or a more subtle social imposition of "right thinking" -- but however it's done, it becomes increasingly fragile under circumstances that undermine it, including, obviously, those who question it. At some point, there need be only a small event, a single voice, to trigger the "preference cascade" that suddenly shatters the consensus. Doc Zero's contention is that Williams was fired because he threatened to be that voice, with the firing intended to shore up the consensus by sending the message that such sentiments, such "feelings", cannot even be expressed within the confines of the bien pensant liberal orthodoxy that NPR symbolizes.

Whatever the case may be with respect to this episode, however, I think the idea of a preference cascade is a handy one, in the way it can be used to explain fairly sudden, and otherwise quite surprising, changes, not only in political groups, but within individuals as well. It's not just a social consensus, in other words, that gets undermined or hollowed out by disconfirming events, it's also one's own overt beliefs. One can continue to think of oneself as liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, even as one's opinions about this or that particular issue are the opposite of one's long-standing self-labeling -- until something occurs, and it may be quite small in itself, that precipitates a kind of internal cascade, and the old labels just don't seem to have the same relevance any longer. It's why change sometimes seems to come in lurches.

Rehabilitating Herbert Spencer?

This is a curious but interesting sequence -- starting, approximately, with this post by Brian Tamanaha, "Racist Progressives, Meet Hard-Hearted Libertarians", which references, going back a further step, a couple of posts by libertarians asserting that the forebears of contemporary left-liberals or "progressives" were often bigoted and racist. Okay, says Tamanaha, but your forebears were often cold-hearted social Darwinists willing to let the poor starve in the streets, and he uses Herbert Spencer, apparently the originator of the phrase "survival of the fittest", as exhibit one -- e.g., taken from Spencer's Social Statics:

It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.

As Tamanaha says, "That's cold".

Now, as a tu quoque argument this is maybe a bit silly, but it does go to the way in which older and uglier predecessors continue to affect or influence contemporary inheritors. Ilya Somin, in a response post on Volokh, "Of 'Racist Progressives' And 'Hard-Hearted Libertarians'" largely agrees with Tamanaha about Spencer's social Darwinism, but argues that

Few modern libertarians even cite Spencer or other social Darwinists at all. By contrast, modern liberals do often cite early 20th century progressives as inspirations for their ideology. And until recently, few of them paid much attention to the more unsavory aspects of early 20th century Progressivism (though I should add that some far left radical scholars, such as Gabriel Kolko, were much more critical).

The other noteworthy point that Somin makes is that bigotry against whatever minority group is out of favor at the moment becomes much more dangerous when backed by an interventionist state, and along these lines he quotes his colleague David Bernstein:

“[a]s a matter of American history, activist government was often used to oppress minority groups. As a matter of world history, the record of “activist government” with regard to minorities is even worse. And as a matter of political theory, it’s not at all clear why one would expect public policy in a democracy to necessarily be helpful to minority groups.”

And then Damon Root steps in with a defence of Spencer himself, in a post on Reason's blog, "Battle of the 'Embarrassing Grandparents': Racist Progressives vs. Herbert Spencer" (that Somin referenced in an update):

As for the much-abused phrase “survival of the fittest,” Tamanaha seems ignorant of what Spencer actually wrote. By fit, Spencer most certainly did not mean brute force. In Spencer’s view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus any increase in private charity and “the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other” count as prime examples of the “survival of the fittest” as articulated by Spencer.

 So, I have a couple of responses myself to this little teacup tempest. First, I'll admit I've never read Spencer and never thought to do so, but I think Root makes an interesting case for him -- enough that I'm inclined now to look him up. But I also think that the extended passage Tamanaha quoted is indeed "cold", as he says, and what's worse, wrong. It's wrong in the same way that the cruder versions of contemporary evolutionary psychology are wrong, in overlooking or dismissing culture as the primary system for environmental adaptation, as opposed to the biological organism -- and cultural adaptations that build upon  compassion or a desire to help the weak may well make for a stronger or "fitter" social structure within which we all can thrive. What Root says about Spencer above mitigates this criticism, but doesn't eliminate it.

The second point, though, is just to point out that the state is by no means the only way we have of acting together, being social, exercising compassion, or helping the weak. Indeed, the state, because of its inescapable connection with force, will always have a tendency to devolve into either tyrannies large or small, or wasteful, dehumanizing, dependency-inducing bureaucracies, or both. This too Spencer apparently saw, and partially integrated into his case. And here is where we can really use some of that willingness to think outside of accustomed limits that we saw in the parable of the traffic lights, to find more creative and human approaches to providing for human needs than the state.

Have cold - can't blog

To put it in the manner of that snobby elitist, Homer Simpson. Back soon though, promise.

Well, what about traffic lights?!

Any time you try to talk about reducing the intrusive role of the state in human affairs, that's the question that almost always comes up at some point, right? We need state regulation of behavior, as symbolized by traffic lights, or there'd be, you know, chaos! Anarchy! The end of civilization as we know it!

So take just five minutes and have a look at the video below (thanks to David Zetland, at Aquanomics):



Surprising, no?

Now, of course, not that much hinges on traffic lights per se one way or another -- but, as in the question in the post's title, they're a symbol, and so the video above operates as a kind of parable, with a meaning beyond its face value. I don't want to make too much of it, but I think there really is a sense that, as we've become accustomed to, and dependent upon, an increasingly dense mesh of rules and regulations, requirements and proscriptions, our sense of what's possible becomes shrunken, our imaginations stunted. As a parable, this just asks that we question those acquired reflexes again, allow for the possiblity of regained, or even new kinds of freedom. Which might  just make us not only more free, but also richer, and even safer. It's a thought.

Oh, and if you're interested in a little more context, here's Part 1: "Roads unfit for people".

The moving fulcrum

In a previous post I talked about some signs of a slow retreat from statism in terms of an ebbing tide. But I'm thinking now, because of the cyclic aspect of tides, that wasn't quite the right metaphor. It's not that there aren't cycles in historical change, because there are, in political change especially, as we can see in the oscillations between left and right in most democratic polities, and in, for example, US Presidential politics over the last few decades. But those cycles tend to obscure deeper movements that are more directional -- a spiral would be a better model than a simple cycle, and a pendulum whose hinge or fulcrum is moving would be better still. A pendulum swing, after all, is a familiar trope in politics, and we saw it illustrated in the 2008 election that swept not just Obama but Democrats everywhere into power after the Bush years. The swing seemed to have enough momentum that liberals and so-called "progressives" could be excused in thinking it would carry them and their statist agenda into a new era. But when the pendulum's fulcrum itself is moving, and moving in a direction contrary to the swing, the momentum is dampened considerably -- and that's exactly what the statist liberals have run into, with the startling rise of the Tea Party phenomenon and the sharp resistance to additional state intrusions, spending, and taxes.

In other words, the primary movement of the American polity, over and above the usual back and forth oscillations, is to the right, and this is shifting the terms of the debate on both right and left. Marxist terminology, once common on the left, has now almost completely disappeared, apart from some zombified remnants on college campuses, and Hayek and markets are at least more widely understood than ever -- as Brad DeLong nicely illustrates with this post, "How Much Does the Market Organization of Economic Life Matter?", and its revealing little chart of the results of an historical experiment. And even more telling is this confessional article by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones, on "Schools and Poverty":

I'm going to get the ed people mad at me again — and I guess I'll add the poverty people too this time — but I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. Movies like Waiting for Superman (which I haven't seen), along with an endless stream of credulous punditry, keep suggesting that the answers are out there if only we'll fund them and take them seriously. But they aren't.

His despair goes beyond the usual left lament that people are maybe tapped out when it comes to yet more tax increases -- he actually begins to question whether the taxes would do any good anyway:

... the tolerance of the middle class for raising its own taxes to improve education is pretty low. One reason, I suspect, is that people have largely lost faith that their taxes are being used for anything useful. If they pay more, they won't get better schools, they'll just get higher teacher salaries as the teachers unions hoover up all the dough.

And this is in Mother Jones!

Of course, as Adam Schaeffer says, in the post from which I got the link ("Why Won’t this Pig Fly? We’ve Tried Everything to Fix Education and Poverty. . ."), there actually are some answers or approaches that can address these problems:

We know what improves education, allows success to scale quickly, and saves money as well; a real market in education, aka private school choice, the freer and broader the better. The education problem is intractable only if the government continues to monopolize education services.

But getting to such solutions will still require a change in fundamental political mindset -- the hinge of the pendulum still has a distance to go.

Fractals

Since the sub-title of this blog is "On fractal change", and since, as Jason Kottke notes, the inventor of the concept of the fractal, Benoit Mandelbrot, has died, I thought this might be a good moment to expand a little on what I mean by the word, and what the word means for me. First, here's Wikipedia's entry, and here's its initial definition, borrowed from Mandelbrot himself: "A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,'[1] a property called self-similarity." ([1] The Fractal Geometry of Nature). Which may not be all that helpful by itself, but that last word, "self-similarity", is a clue to why the concept has spread so widely, to cover things like the shape of leaves or clouds or coastlines or financial charts or culture.

Mandelbrot gave the term a technical and mathematical meaning, but what I want is its metaphoric aspect. As a metaphor, "fractal" describes things in which similar, though never identical, patterns reappear at all scales large and small. And this can help in two ways: first, by providing a kind of handle or way of grasping the structure of systems that otherwise appear monolithic and either chaotic or complex; and second, by alerting us to the way in which patterns, whether spatial, temporal, or otherwise, can change in scale abruptly or discontinuously -- Mandelbrot's book on financial markets, for example, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, was in many ways an early insight into the "black swan" phenomenon that Nassim Taleb has popularized. So, in speaking of "fractal change", I'm referring to historical patterns that repeat on scales varying from an individual's day to day job, to vast "phase changes" in the very structure of human societies. And I'm also referring to the way in which change can surprise us by sudden shifts in scale, as in a televised rant becoming the seed of an anomalous political movement.

But here, with a hat tip to Jason Kottke again, and in memory of Benoit Mandelbrot, is a journey into the infinite depths of the greatest fractal ever, the Mandelbrot Set:


Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

Transitions to capitalism

The economic system we call capitalism was a kind of cultural discovery, and, in terms of its consequences, probably the greatest cultural discovery in human history. Like the advent of urban civilization thousands of years ago, capitalism opened up a whole new continent, a new world, for development, and we're still just in the process of exploring that space. It was, in other words, a huge and relatively quick success, despite introducing some new strains associated with alienation (as I sketched in the theme).

But in the transition to capitalism, other kinds of issues arise, associated with a period in which an old order is disintegrating even as a new one is still not fully formed. Before a stable establishment of capitalist legal and property relations,  in other words, not to mention some kind of democratic government, the rule of law rather than people, and the status equality of everyone, there is ample opportunity for abuse, which is usually realized. We see this both historically and currently, in the three major transitions to capitalism:

• The first, of course, occurred in the West, starting perhaps as early as the Renaissance, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and gave rise to issues surrounding the enclosure of formerly common land, among other problems.

• The next was the transition from non-Western traditional cultures to capitalist that occurred along with Western expansion and imperialism, starting from perhaps the mid-18th century and still continuing today, and this has had some severe problems associated just with the encounter between cultures.

• The third one was, and is, the transition from socialism to capitalism, starting at the end of the 80's of the last century, and still to come in the case of Cuba and North Korea. The worst case of abuse here has obviously been the rise of an oligarchic kleptocracy in the remnants of the Soviet Union, and it remains to be seen whether China's autocracy will be able to avoid that fate, or will be just another form of it.

These sorts of transitions, by their nature, can't be easy, and in some cases in the past -- thinking of tribal and aboriginal cultures in particular -- have been, or still are, tragic. But change happens, at all levels, and while we can do our best to mitigate its bad effects, I don't think we can realistically hope to eliminate them all. And certainly, though I'm by no means any sort of historical determinist, I do think that efforts to halt or reverse such overwhelmingly beneficial developments as arise in the wake of the emergent, modern individual -- emancipation, equality of status, democracy, rule of law, individual rights, freedom of trade, etc. -- would be a tragic error of vastly greater scope.