2020 and America's Political Culture
I know you're tired of hearing about the election. But, here's one more post about it before election day. Here is how I think about what this particular election means.
I notice two trends in America's political culture, both of which are very bad.
(I)
In American politics, the conventional wisdom used to be that
(i) virtually all Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate,
(ii) virtually all Republicans vote for the Republican candidate, and
(iii) therefore, the winner is he who captures the few swing voters in the middle -- i.e., independents and moderate Democrats or Republicans.
Recently, an alternative strategy has emerged: just play to your base and encourage cynicism by attacking the other side personally. You hope that this causes higher % turnout among your party and lowers turnout among the opposing party's voters.
(II)
American politicians used to be outwardly well socialized. They used to talk normally, with some sense of being restrained by the social norms, by the traditions of our society, by the traditional understanding of how our institutions work, and by what non-stupid people would think. They would also have at least some minimal standard for respectful discourse. (All this was perhaps not obvious until these norms started being flouted.)
E.g., even the most mendacious politicians of yore would not just blatantly lie in your face if they knew that the lie would immediately be exposed to every intelligent person in the audience.
Today, we're moving toward complete lack of restraint, more like the way leaders operate in Third World dictatorships.
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Trends (I) and (II) are most strongly exemplified by the Trump Presidency. I also think that these trends are far more important than any particular policy objective. The most valuable thing that the U.S. has is not some particularly smart laws or policies. The most valuable thing the U.S. has is its culture and institutions. Those are the main reasons why things are going well in the U.S.
And if you don't recognize that, that is really the first, fundamental thing you need to get about this society: Things are going WAY, WAY BETTER in the U.S. than in the overwhelming majority of human societies throughout history. You have to recognize that, and recognize something about why that is.
That is mostly down to our culture and institutions. E.g., if you try to put similar policies in place in Iraq, or Somalia, etc., to those we have here, the policies will just completely fail, because the culture is messed up, and it is extremely difficult to change the general political culture. (That's why nation-building exercises fail.)
If you have something that is disrupting our traditions and culture, you should expect that to move us back toward the mean for human societies -- which is something much, much worse than what we have now. The average human society is unbelievably awful. Which is why the current penchant for disrupting the system is completely insane. (I say this as a person who has some fairly radical ideas about what the ideal society would be -- but I'm not dumb enough to think we would get there by chaotic disruption.)
To me, this election is about trends (I) and (II) above. Are we going to continue them, or are we going to go back to what used to be the norm for America? Trump represents more of (I) and (II). Biden by comparison represents more of the earlier approach in American politics, where you try to capture moderates and act like a well-behaved person. If he wins, people are likely to draw lessons accordingly.
Several years ago, I read a story about some political leaders who visited America from Iraq. This was following the Iraq war, when they were trying to build a functioning democracy. So these Iraqis came and observed the debates in some American city hall. And what they said was most striking to them was how respectful our discourse was, despite our disagreements.
Until then, I hadn't realized that our political discourse was respectful. I think that was one of the keys to understanding why democracy was working well in America, and why it was almost impossible to make things work in Iraq.
Today, though, we're self-destructing: we have lots of people who are working to make America's political culture more like Iraq -- just completely unrestrained, vituperative attacks on the other side. From that point, everything else is going to start going worse. When we get there, I don't know how we're going to get back.