On National Review Fred Bauer sort of reviews Democracy for Realists (Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels), wherein the authors try to suggest what has worked before, politically speaking, should work again. Bauer’s summary caught my eye:
Achen and Bartels point to some evidence that partisan rationalizations and misperceptions can be found even more frequently among citizens who are politically engaged than among those who are not. A similar point might also apply to negative polarization. Many of the most prominent theories for why the 2016 election was illegitimate have been formulated and promoted by entrenched political actors. The current culture war is — like many other culture wars — an elite-driven phenomenon. Partly as a struggle within elite ranks, those with significant cultural and political perches have often given fuel to inherent factional tensions.
Which reminds me of Turchin’s observation that the wars characterizing the disintegrative phase of empires’ secular cycles are the preserve of the elite, and are often bloody, cruel businesses as the members of the bloated elite fight to stay in the top few percent of society by imposing their view of reality on society. The described descents into barbarity are both dismaying and salutary.
Stable democratic governance depends on patience, compromise, and the acceptance of loss. If members of a losing faction nevertheless remain invested in the institutions of a given democratic order, they will accept momentary losses as a way of shoring up those institutions over a longer term — and creating the possibility of victory in the future. Meanwhile, to secure democratic stability, a winning coalition must also accept the possibility of loss in the future. This in part means resisting the temptation to transform existing civil institutions into a mere apparatus of a partisan machine and abiding by certain constraints on power (such as longstanding protections for minority parties). Those norms are, of course, in tension with the politics of apocalypse and emergency that has become so fashionable.
I find it fascinating that Bauer manages to write this paragraph without once noting in his article that Biden, early in the campaign, tried to come across as a classic compromiser – and was excoriated for his sins, such as they were. I suspect Bauer would prefer to not highlight the more rigid, yet decadent nature of what passes for conservatism these days. (I should note that Klobuchar also worked to highlight her bi-partisan efforts; I’m not sure about the other candidates.)
If social identity plays an important role in elections, it might also have a bearing on the stability of the democratic process. Securing some of the virtues of democracy might involve citizens seeing themselves not only as members of a given faction but also as participants in a common democratic order.
Identity politics, the bugaboo of Andrew Sullivan (that’s a fascinating piece by Sullivan, and should be read by those with the patience to do so – I know I didn’t fully understand it, but felt wiser for the moments spent), may turn out to be the reversion of the rational reasoning mode of thought that became dominant, or at least popular, during the Renaissance, and has served us well since, to the tribal approach to life. Much like the many parties to war before and after the Renaissance, the adherence to an invariant, sometimes irrelevant characteristic, and the sacrifice of personal dissension for the sense of belonging to that group, seems to lead to indissoluble confrontations.
But a facet of the discussion that went unmentioned in Bauer’s review, and perhaps in the book, is hubris, or its flip-side: the willingness to admit that we don’t know. I know I’ve mentioned this a time or two before, but it strikes me that it’s important to realize that sometimes we don’t know, and compromise is a way forward between competing views which, properly designed, will allow analysis of the result without having put our entire leg into the possibly shark-infested wading pool. For example, the failure of the 2017 tax reform bill to achieve its goals – at least in the judgment of third party analysts – suggest the Republicans have far too much certainty about the Laffer Curve, or, to change the wording, that taxes are always too high. A rational group would look at that failure, and the same failure in Kansas, and reform their view.
Will the GOP? I don’t think so – or only after a few key members are ejected, retire, or die off.
