Analytics wrote: ↑Sun May 30, 2021 5:18 pm
That's an interesting perspective. I happen to live in Kansas, which is pretty far on the conservative end of the scale. For example, in 2005 the state board of education decided that evolution had been proven false and Intelligent Design would now be taught in high school biology classes. Or the 2012 "
Kansas Experiment" where some Republican true-believers apparently sincerely thought that by giving massive tax cuts to rich, business owners would "shoot adrenaline" into the state economy, which would magically balance the budget.
Perhaps my liberal bias is best explained by an old Scott Adams observation--the stupidity surrounding you is easier to perceive than the stupidity in the distance. Maybe if I was on a college campus dominated by unchallenged liberals who thought America was fundamentally evil, then I would be oversensitive to liberal stupidity.
I share a lot of your frustration with Republican stupidity. The capture of the Republican party by this free-for-all libertarianism (on a generous interpretation) and the slash-and-burn approach to government isn't an alternative to what we see with the current Democratic party because it's animating spirit is primarily destructive rather than constructive.
Analytics wrote: ↑Sun May 30, 2021 5:18 pm
But isn't a fundamental part of this simply tribalism?
People choose a side, and then their views across the board are molded into the views that are preached by that side.
People didn't sit down and rationally decide they were in favor of obscene military spending, prayer in school, cheap energy (with a dirty environment), low taxes for the rich, and an inefficient healthcare system; they didn't then shop around and become Republicans.
Rather, for psychological and sociological reasons they came to the conclusion that Republicans were the God-fearing true patriots, and conformed to what "their" side--the good side--was preaching. It isn't a coincidence that, for example, Sean Hannity begins his show with patriotic music, continuously compliments the patriotism of his guests, and is never seen without a flag pin--these are all deliberately engineered cues for his audience about his side's righteousness.
I wouldn't call it tribalism per se, at least not initially; this is just the coalition dynamics of electoral politics. I agree with most of this but the bolded parts need some commentary. What is rational depends on different factors. For example, it was and remains a rational choice for religious people or people who think that a traditional family life is best for society as a whole to choose the Republican party because these things are highly important to how they live their lives, how they view the world, and how they maintain their communities. For someone who believes that abortion is a form of murder, it is a value-based rational choice when one party openly celebrates abortion, particularly when those same people say that men can have abortions and call you a bigot for disagreeing or even failing to acknowledge that. But it is not an interest-based rationality as it turns out, though, because the Republican party doesn't actually care about these things between campaigns. And in the meantime, people who don't have a pre-existing allergy to higher tax rates or whatever have, over decades, moved to support positions that have nothing to do with their traditional beliefs and practices and are even hostile to them. It takes on a tribalist tinge, by necessity, because the other party is interested neither in adjusting its position to attract these voters nor in moderating its hostility to them. They have structural incentives for this.
Analytics wrote: ↑Sun May 30, 2021 5:18 pm
Given how that tribe has so annoyingly appropriated patriotism for their partisan purposes, it shouldn't be surprising that their antagonists knee-jerk against it.
I can see that to an extent, but I think this is not a function of partisan politics and reaction. The hostility to the United States is much deeper than that; it is a hostility to a lot more than just the United States, not a reaction to flag pins and "freedom fries."
Issenberg’s book, then, serves as a 900-page case study of what the sociologist Tina Fetner refers to as the “symbiotic” relationship between conservatives and queer activists. The religious right told us we couldn’t have marriage, so we decided we needed it.
If that’s the case, gay couples owe no organization more than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In great detail, Issenberg demonstrates exactly how the Mormon Church constructed a secretive campaign in Hawaii, built an ecumenical alliance of anti-marriage churches and led the mammoth crusade in favor of Proposition 8, the California ballot proposal that added a gay marriage ban to the state Constitution in 2008. In that brawl, Mormons contributed half of the $40 million raised to support the measure. Later, after being accused of “money laundering” and concealing the sheer magnitude of their political activism, the Latter-day Saints paid a fine of just over $5,000 to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. (Emphasis added)
"Anti-marriage" churches? Yes, there's just opposed to marriage in general. Whatever. This as ideologically charged as anything in a conservative news-entertainment rag. Do you see how the framing works? Same-sex "marriage" is just taken as part of the ordinarily understood and widely practiced "marriage," which it is not for most people on this planet or even in this country. And as for the rest of this paragraph, the only criterion that people apply when it comes to church involvement in politics is whether they agree with the position a given church takes. This is completely self-serving, but it is farther down from the shifts I am talking about.
Let me use this to try to illustrate what I'm talking about, an example of a process: notice that, among the justifications made for polygamy by the Church in the 19th century, none of them were "love is love" or other such tautological jingoism. There's a reason for that: it wouldn't have made any sense. The idea that marriage should be the culmination of the romantic affection between a man and woman was a shift in the consumerist cultures of the European west starting in the early 20th century, but it is quite opposite to how marriage had been understood not only in western countries but still is in most cultures. It was a shift that privileged individual desires and emotions (temporary at that), just like a market transaction, and minimized the stabilizing good that marriage was supposed perform for society. The fumes of the old understanding were breathed in until the end of the 20th century, but by the time of the first genuinely post-Christian generation (the late millennials), it been nothing but an affirmation of individual desire: we privilege individual autonomy so greatly, that we have a special ceremony to mark when a person decides to cede just a little bit of it to some greater cause beyond themselves—at least until they decide to take it back in a few years. If that's what marriage, so there is no coherent reason it should be man-woman and not man-man or woman-woman.
One can agree that this is progress or not, and one can ask how far that understanding of marriage actually reflects the reality of family life and serves those needs, but this is basically the attitude that everyone has towards marriage—including the LDS church. So on what basis can they tell a gay couple that they can't also fulfill their desires? So you see the point is that a general social shift, seen as innocuous, has created a cultural split when led to one of its logical conclusions. Where does one draw the line once that shift has happened? Now, cultural conservatives, by buying into the premise that the maximization of individual autonomy should form the basis of social interaction could naturally ally themselves with libertarians on economics, premised on the same understanding of the individual in relation to the community. And what have they conserved all these years as a result? When I hear conservatives complain about "Critical Race Theory," I have to wonder what their alternative is. They see it as an attack on American culture but what is that culture? At the same time, I am amazed that liberals are fine with using state power to enforce their conception of the maximization of individual autonomy but not for conservatives but not in the economic sphere. Liberals really have no coherent response as to why this should not be so either.
One can go through this issue by issue, but if it all boils down to individual preference, de gustibus non est disputandum. "As long as you don't hurt anyone else..." is not a governing framework for an ordered society, because what constitutes "hurt" will depend inversely on one's individual preference. This is why liberals increasingly are comfortable using institutional power to enforce preferred pronoun usage (in the 3rd person, so when the subject isn't even around). There is no shared conception across of what the good is across the whole, only within demographic and sub-cultural silos. All of this is item A.
Add this to the structural changes to politics, which is item B. You mention the fact that a representative can't introduce legislation without the endorsement of party leaders. That is not exactly true; they can write whatever legislation they want and market it to the public and their colleagues. Whether it comes up for a vote is different, though, and you are right here. But the structural shift was the movement away from the committee system (which by nature are bipartisan) and towards the centralization of power in the Speaker's office and Majority leader in the Senate. Republicans started that with Gingrich, but Democrats held power from 2007-2011 and now from 2019 to today—show me the steps they have taken to decentralize power. They didn't make the rules; they just enjoy them.
This has a further consequence: candidates who are interested in problem-solving are discouraged from running at all because of this fact, and a significant portion of new house members (and even in the senate) instead use these institutions to build their own celebrity careers. Jason Chafetz is an excellent example, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the champion brand-builder. The boundary, indeed, between entertainment and politics continue to blur. The party leaders you think are so powerful are actually beholden to media narratives; during the Trump presidency, the most powerful person in the world was whoever controlled the teleprompter at
Fox and Friends, and more than once we have already seen the Biden administration shift course because of a bad day on Twitter instigated by journalists. Consider the issue of the supposedly undemocratic nature of the senate and filibuster: this is an issue entirely driven by the agenda of journalists. Hardly any voter could tell you much about the filibuster, and few would know that the word "cloture" is not Mitch McConnell's Kentucky pronunciation of the word "culture." Yet Joe Manchin is daily asked by journalists about this, something no voter in West Virginia knows or cares about. One could find other issues that are driven by journalists and media organizations.
One can find many of instances of political operatives moving into the media sphere (George Stephanopoulos being the most successful, but there have been many before him, like Jack Valenti, Diane Sawyer, and so on). How can anybody see him as impartial moderator in these debates? But then there are small time attempts to break into media: retired military and national security types becoming "commentators" on Fox and CNN and elsewhere. One hardly needs to mention the collusion in tech media that led to the suppression of the
New York Post story and the removal of a former president from Twitter on grounds that it ignores in the case of, e.g. Khameini. It's not just an influence on politics but a blurring of the boundaries between media and politics. A former president but one has started his own media company now and joined the ranks of the ultra wealthy, and the preeminent example of all of this is of course Donald Trump, whose only real accomplishment was maintaining media stardom for having done nothing but being a convincing everyone that he was a media star. We may not have a state-run media in the US, but we don't need it, because we are a media-run state.
I don't know whether things are worse than when an elected president had to leave the White House to go to J. P. Morgan in his private train and ask for money on behalf of the American government. Surely they are not better. But it is not just that the scale of American power is so much greater now than it was then; these structural changes in government are such that the framework of traditional party politics—item B—might not be able to contain the conflict that is breaking out in item B. I'm sure that sociology has nothing to help here because sociology in the American context is completely politicized. This will be instantly obvious to a conservative who peruses the bios of your typical sociology department, especially the "public scholarship" that is all in vogue there. I don't now about game theory though. I know nothing about it, so I welcome your explanation of how that could explain these phenomena and predict where it is going. To me, the question is whether the political system and manage the metastasizing cultural conflict in a post-Christian USA.
