Ask Me Anything—Feb. '23
I answer questions about links between data science and intersectionality, why so many conservatives are drawn to Catholicism, and how to cut through the "bad faith and bullshit" in our politics
Roughly once a month, I invite paying subscribers to pose questions about pretty much anything. When I run the responses, I drop the paywall so all subscribers (paying and non-paying alike) can read them. That means today’s post is open to everyone.
Peter
As a reader from Australia, it has always puzzled me why U.S. politics is so obsessed with grouping voters into racial or cultural categories. You hear pollsters talking about the Hispanic vote or the black vote — where does this come from?
Good question. The first step in trying to understand it would involve reading a book like Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Distilled into a sentence or two, Igo shows how American social scientists in the immediate postwar period attempted for the first time to grasp public opinion in quantitative terms. Their hope was to figure out with great precision what “the American people” really wanted so their representatives could become more responsive to it. But the information these researchers compiled also had all kinds of other applications, including in advertising and the manipulation of public opinion for a range of purposes.
Fast forward a few decades later and the next generation of more sophisticated data crunchers attempted to drill down more deeply into public opinion. They no longer sought to understand what “the American people” as a whole wanted, but now it was women, men, white women, white men, black women, black men, Hispanic women, Hispanic men, LGBT women, LGBT men, Republican women, Democratic men, and so forth across every conceivable mixed-and-matched category and subcategory.
If you know anything about identity politics and intersectional discourse, you’ll notice the parallels here. The “woke” movement and the rise of data politics are closely connected: Americans are now educated to think in terms of the country being made up of all these discrete but sometimes overlapping demographic categories and subcategories, and everyone from dispassionate social scientists to savvy political strategists to left-wing activists have adapted to this way of thinking. I think it’s bad, but I’m unsure what to do about it. I also assume it's more likely the rest of the democratic world will follow our example on this than that Americans will stop thinking this way.
Kevin Bowe
Can you recommend a good political philosophy for dummies book?
Not really. Political philosophy is difficult, so it’s not especially forgiving to dummies. But no paying subscriber to “Eyes on the Right” could really be a dummy. So I’ll offer, instead, a 400-page introduction to political philosophy, from Plato through Nietzsche, by two of the smartest Straussians around: Thomas Pangle and Timothy Burns. They write like a dream. Their introductory essay is an excellent place to begin thinking about the history of political philosophy and its crucial importance to living an examined life. They include short excerpts of the works they discuss. And the paraphrases and analyses they offer are both cogent and deep. I honestly can’t think of a better starting point. I hope you’ll dive right in.
Chuck Burbank
There has been great tumult in our political system during the pandemic. How does our current period compare to other pandemics or significant health scares in our nation’s past?
Despite pointing to a work of history in response to a question above, I’m not really a historian—and certainly not a historian of American medicine. But my wife is. And that makes me even more hesitant to attempt a response to your question, because I’m quite likely to say something ignorant or stupid. But I will say one brief thing: American politics is polarized in our time, and our media ecosystem, as I recently wrote in a passage quoted by a reader below, encourages “a public culture pervaded by bad faith and bullshit.” That touches everything that happens in the country these days, very much including the pandemic. I think a lot of what’s distinctive about the public-health dimension of the past three years follows from the interaction of these broader trends with the spreading of a deadly contagion throughout the country.
George Scialabba
I can't remember if you've ever posted some detailed advice for the Democrats about how to campaign on economic inequality. It seems to me the most important issue in American politics, and certainly the most exasperating. Though I'd love to see the bottom 90 percent declare class war, I would be willing to see very gradual progress as long as a permanent consensus can be created for reducing inequality. Why can't or won't the Democrats do that?
My answer is bound to leave you unsatisfied, since it follows from the fact that I don’t consider economic inequality to be the most important issue in American politics. I consider the billionaire class a potential problem, but not a dire one. I think billionaires are a potential problem because it’s not great that certain private citizens have so much power to influence the political and economic system. But this problem isn’t a dire one, in my view, because unlike Karl Marx and others on the anti-capitalist left I don’t think one’s economic class determines one’s political views. So we’ve got billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Charles Koch on the right, but we also have billionaires George Soros, Dustin Moskovitz, and Warren Buffett on the left.
Now, all that said, Democrats do talk about imposing a wealth tax on the richest of the rich in order to combat economic inequality. Why do they have trouble passing such a tax? And why don’t they propose to do even more? Because Americans as a whole dream of getting rich themselves. They aspire to be one of those billionaires some day. That will never go beyond being a fantasy for most, of course, and I assume most people know that. But they like to dream, they want to live in a country where it’s possible for some, and they think (perhaps rightly) that a country in which the wealthy get to keep a relatively large portion of their riches will be a place where more people achieve that level of success.
What I think matters more than levels of economic inequality is whether the American standard of living in the aggregate is rising, stalled out, or falling. Are people doing better over time? Not everyone, but most people? Or are they working harder and harder for less and less? If we look back over the last century, I think it’s indisputable that living standards have risen enormously for most people. But over the last few decades? Maybe not as much, or only in some respects and not others. Or only for certain races or classes or regions or education levels and not others. Those are the issues that matter more, because they reveal potential structural problems with the political economy of the country that can breed resentment and lead to a class war or some other kind of factional conflict—which is something I would very much like us to avoid.
Gerald Fnord
During the presidency of George W. Bush, Leo Strauss got the reputation in some of the leftward press of arguing that certain truths were best reserved to the wise, who as possessors of these truths ought to conceal them from the masses and share them privately with the powerful. To what extent was this a fair or unfair portrayal?
I don’t think this is a fair account of Strauss’s views, but not because Strauss denied that some truths need to be concealed in politics. That’s a view affirmed by anyone who knows anything about politics, including Strauss. Governments engage in espionage. They negotiate secretly with other governments. Our own government classifies (probably overclassifies) enormous quantities of documents. One way to describe this is to say that certain truths are best reserved to … the small number of people near the pinnacle of power. Strauss affirmed the truth of this proposition, and he had a huge amount of company in doing so.
But Strauss also held the different and more controversial view that philosophical reflection poses skeptical questions that place it at odds with political life, which always and everywhere requires that certain questions remain unasked and certain publicly affirmed truth claims are never doubted. For the most part, these aren’t questions whispered into the ears of political leaders and concealed from the masses. They are questions that no philosopher would utter within earshot of anyone who isn’t a fellow philosopher. The philosopher would even conceal them from his own students, who would be introduced to partial questions, arguments, and riddles that point in the direction of the possibly dangerous truth but that they have to puzzle out for themselves as part of their philosophic education.
As I said, that’s a controversial position on the relation of philosophy to politics—one that that may be wrong. But it’s not the one Strauss was accused of affirming back when people who had read nothing of his writings came to believe the ridiculous proposition that he (a man who died in 1973) was the guru behind the Iraq War.
Karl Straub
What circumstances do you think would be necessary for the GOP to mutate back to a non-performative party with no authoritarian tendencies, reliance on principles rather than conspiracy theories, etc.? And is it realistic for us to hope for such a shift in our lifetimes?
The only thing I can think of is the party losing several elections in a row by substantial margins—much bigger margins than its losses since 2016. As long as the party thinks it might win this way, and continues to win or come very close to winning this way, it will have no incentive to stop. How likely is this to happen? I have no idea. So far I’d have to say “not very.” But things could change. Or not.
Ken Silber
Where do you think political polarization over science is heading? On some issues (for example, climate, vaccines) Democrats have positioned themselves (credibly, in my view) as defenders of science against the right. Will the alignments change one way or another?
It’s hard to know how things might change, because the science will be interacting with government and with each party’s distinctive suspicions about government, which will differ somewhat based on which party is in power at any given time. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, I wouldn’t have predicted that the left during the Trump presidency would become strongly attached to Anthony Fauci, mask-wearing, school closures, and vaccine mandates while the right would fall prey to anti-vax skepticism and come to despise Fauci, masks, school closures, and mandates. Yet that’s where we ended up, because of a complicated series of pre-existing assumptions on each side and how people on each side reacted to what the other side came to affirm.
Politics is increasingly about identity, and identity is increasingly a function of defining oneself as not being this or that—the thing they are. When science gets wrapped up in that, we end up with the mess of the pandemic, climate change positioning, and much else that interferes with enacting policy that advances the public good.
Russell Arben Fox
Your Oscar picks, of course. Preferences if you have them, predictions (and criticisms of such) if you don't. Love to read your thoughts.
I’m very slightly embarrassed to say that I can’t answer this question because I’ve seen a grand total of one Oscar nominated film over the past year! That would be Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I didn’t like at all. So I guess I can say with some confidence that I hope that film loses in the many categories in which it’s been nominated. But besides that, I don’t have an opinion.
I used to be a much more frequent moviegoer, but that waned with parenthood, and it absolutely collapsed with the pandemic. I will also say that I very much want to see Tár and am mildly curious about The Menu. So I might end up having informed opinions about those within the next month or so. But I can’t speak to them now—and the latter film isn’t even nominated for anything as far as I’m aware. (I’m glad you didn’t ask me about the Grammys a few weeks ago, because I wouldn’t have done much better with those.)
John Kerber
As a one-time convert to Catholicism, can you explain what is it about Roman Catholicism that's attracting so many conversions from conservative intellectuals? It seems more than coincidence that several prominent conservative leaders, not raised as Catholics, have embraced Catholicism as adults, such as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Rod Dreher, Adrian Vermuele, Sohrab Ahmari, and J.D. Vance, to name a few. (Note: I'm aware that Dreher is now an Orthodox Christian but I've included him in this group because he left the Catholic Church over how it handled the pedophilia scandal rather than theological disagreements.)
There are more! Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich, Charlie Kirk, ….
This is actually an easy one. The Catholic Church tells an incredibly appealing story. There was God’s creation, and God’s chosen people, and then God himself came into the world as one of the members of this chosen people and lived and taught among us. After Jesus Christ was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, his disciples founded the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church in his name, and this church became the authoritative source for God’s moral and spiritual teaching on Earth. The priests, bishops, and cardinals who run the church have codified this teaching, and they pass it on from generation to generation, down through the ages. The sum and substance of this teaching can be found in the thousand-page Catechism of the Catholic Church. The answer to every moral and spiritual question that might arise can be found in its pages—or in the writings and lived experiences of the saints. The church also administers the sacraments that make possible a holy Christian life and prepare the way for eternal life in unity with God.
Many conservatives long to find and live in accordance with absolute, comprehensive, unchanging moral and spiritual Truth. The Catholic Church claims to embody exactly that, and to be its only true home in the world. It makes perfect sense that many would be powerfully attracted to that promise. I know I was.
Ronald Beiner
How is it possible that Putin's evil war hasn't punctured the contemporary American right's love affair with Putinism? Specifically, how is it possible that people like Tucker Carlson, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon gesture towards Alexander Dugin as an ally in the fight against "globalism" when (as they surely know) Dugin's ideology has directly contributed to Hitlerite aggression and genocide on the part of Putin?
How is this possible? I don’t know: How was it possible that the German people rallied behind Adolf Hitler? And many Chinese supported Chairman Mao? And Cambodians went along with the Khmer Rouge? And Russians and others living in the Soviet Union deferred to the rule of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and their successors? When we ponder these troubling facts, we tend to revert to talk of intimidation. Of course Germans didn’t resist Hitler; they were terrified of the Gestapo! And so forth. That’s obviously part of the story.
But it doesn’t explain the true belief and self-interestedness that was at work as well. See what I say in response to the last question, about the appeal of the Catholic Church to conservatives. I don’t at all want to draw a parallel between the pope and these ruthless dictators—except in one respect: They claim to stand for and act in the name of one sweeping, comprehensive Truth. That can be hugely appealing, especially if that Truth is also a hugely effective truth in the world. Meaning: It will help to accomplish a set of strongly hoped-for goals.
In the cases of Carlson, Flynn, and Bannon, they either despise liberal democracy (its politics and culture) and think Duginite ideas can help to discredit and even possibly topple it in favor of an alternative in which they and their allies will have much greater power and prestige—or they think liberal democracy is so firmly entrenched that it’s perfectly acceptable to monetize attacking it for their own profit. Either way, Putinism is extremely useful to them, as a sledgehammer they hope to use to help smash their political enemies, or as a means to building a highly engaged audience for their respective grifts.
That’s how it’s possible.
R. Holt
Regarding your post, “Rethinking the Centerless Society”: Is it possible for a society to have no center? Seems to me a society without a center is a society without a definition. Augustine said that a society is defined (or held together) by the object(s) of its love. A society confused about what it loves or cares about ultimately (like Tillich’s “ultimate concern”) has no center. And if it has no center, it has no structure. And if it has no structure, it’s not a society. It’s just a mass of individuals, each with their private agenda (basically, “I’m gonna get mine, and to hell with everyone else”).
You give a nice account of the classical and Christian view of politics, in which the community always has a center of some sort. The idea that modern society is centerless comes from the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Though my own version of it, in my second book, didn’t go as far as his. My adaptation was a modified version of Aristotle’s account of the centered society. Whereas Aristotle claimed that all polities aim toward both mere life (public safety and prosperity) and some overarching account of the good life, I suggested that modern liberal democracy is a form of government that relegates concern for the good life to the private sphere while focusing the public sphere entirely on achieving mere life. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a vision of a centerless society so much as a society without a comprehensive, metaphysical orientation. The misgivings I expressed in that post were about whether even that is possible—or if, instead, a more comprehensive, metaphysical orientation is always implied and so can never be entirely relegated to the private sphere of life.
Bluchek Mark
In your post on February 6, you referred to “the way the media ecosystem and political incentives now combine to facilitate a public culture pervaded by bad faith and bullshit.” You said that this was "something new" (e.g., beyond barstool bloviating, etc.). It seems to me that there are serious ramifications of this "something new" in terms of both epistemology and ethics. How can communication of true information, justified belief, or moral commitments occur in a political environment pervaded by “bad faith and bullshit”? That seems like a formula for, at best, sociopolitical stalemate, at worst, a complete breakdown.
I agree. It’s distressing. As I said in response to Karl Straub’s question above, I think the only effective way to push back against the “bad faith and bullshit” is to defeat it politically. If political actors begin to see that this way of doing politics gets punished rather than rewarded in elections, that might encourage them to pull back from the nihilism. But that requires lots of voters to reject it rather than cheer it on. There’s the conundrum, and I don’t have any quick and easy suggestions for how to break the circuit.
Richmond Adams
Have you ever read historian Dan T. Carter’s biography of George Wallace? I ask in terms of how Carter’s research into Wallace, his rhetoric, and his actions can help us to understand Trump’s rhetoric and actions. I also might recommend Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (and Sean Penn’s 2006 film adaptation, which as an expression of our politics is better than the 1949 version starring Broderick Crawford), and particularly a quote from Jack Burden to Willie Stark about what and how he needs to express himself to his audience.
I very strongly agree that George Wallace is Donald Trump’s true predecessor, both in terms of political style and the parts of the electorate who find this style appealing. But I haven’t read those books. Thanks for the suggestions.
Linker, your realism is shining through all these responses, especially your trenchant rebuttal to Mr. Scialabba's left nostalgia (no, the right does not hold the exclusive franchise on dreams of restoring a hypothetical golden age; for liberals, that would be the period between roughly 1961 and 1967). He probably does not realize that although he abjures the system that enables the obscene concentration of economic power (I wanted to in days gone by), neither he nor you nor I would be able to endure for very long the absence of the material and social goods it brought in its wake. At least our stomachs would not. If one considers things with a measure of determinism rather than the consumerist lens that late-20th century prosperity conditioned most people to view almost all of life with, we come upon the insight that we cannot always choose certain aspects of an ideology to accept or reject like produce at a salad bar (remember that analogy?). We usually have to take them wholesale as a package (especially with the American electoral system, which is not going to change in profound ways anytime soon) and cannot always foresee the downsides--an insight conservatives used to understand but have jettisoned in favor of a raw, crass pursuit of extirpating its rivals, and thus imagining themselves masters of history, as generations of myriad totalitarian, closed worldviews have done.
Now, if my insight makes me sound like a libertarian, I would like to say in Scialabba's defense that, contra your seeming dismissal of the question, inequality does indeed create conditions of resentment and the decline of trust, things that plowed the ground for the recent rise of MAGAism and the post-liberal vogue on the right. That said, the left has increasingly no sense of history (at least an unflinchingly, rigorously disenchanted one). That is especially the case when its doctrinaires refuse to comprehend situations that do not conform to their ideological priors, like the Weimar period. For it was then that the onerous reparations handed down at Versailles undermined any attempt by German pols to build a lasting liberal-democratic edifice that could resist the lures, first, of the "revolutionary conservatives" (roughly the stage where the Republican Party and its cognates elsewhere in the West are now), and then the seduction of Hitler's appeal to the basest human instincts. Woodrow Wilson is the American most responsible for what transpired, from a realist standpoint.
Point being, we now know, or should, that leftist redistributionism is far from the only possible response to maladies like that described above. In cultures shaped by authoritarian expressions of Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox; they all ethically amount to the same here) combined, paradoxically enough, with the same materialist outlook on life that classic Marxism sees as the sine qua non of human civilizations of any kind (namely, that acquisition and consumption of material goods is more important than the inner human life), fascism, or its close cousins like Orbanism or the DeSantis experiment in Florida, is the likelier to appeal to a public reared on notions that certain ideas about life are sacrosanct and should not be subject to the academic-type "acids of modernity," as Walter Lippmann put it.
The resulting political impotence of class-conflict models in such a scenario poses painful questions for the left, to be sure, about whether or not alternatives to an identitarian mode are even possible anymore in liberal culture. That is what Scialabba and his dittoheads out there need to ponder instead of trotting out the tired, dated tub-thumping act that has gotten everyone to the left of, say, Joe Manchin, absolutely nowhere. If you do not believe me, then ask why Bernard Sanders has not achieved public office outside that bastion of squeaky-clean, hyper-liberal New England rectitude, Vermont.
We are, in all likelihood, never going to have Medicare for all or a Green New Deal, because the left has nowhere near the muscle it needs to get beyond its coterie to break through to "the system." The enduring appeal of Horatio Algerism in our supposedly more sophisticated, technocratic age (huh!) is the main reason, as Linker pointed out, and it has perhaps done more than anything to keep conservatism not only alive, but thriving in an age when we were supposed to have done away with clashes over the allocation of scarce resources, if one took the 1990s neoliberal utopians (a la Thomas Friedman et al.) seriously. But I do hope that the same holds true for basic human liberty at the Federal level for what has become the far left's mirror image, although I am not holding my breath any that the Congress or the Supreme Court will be willing or able to retard the steadily growing stranglehold of perpetual culture war on states dominated by non-metropolitan mores in the Midwest and South. Red America is not letting up in the wake of Trump, not a solitary inch. In other words, it "can happen here."
You have nothing to lose but your chains, hell.
This "Ask Me Anything" resulted in a great potpourri of interesting discussions! As a Recovering Catholic, you really locked in for me how their ingrained sense of what is True, drives their omnipotent behavior that at its core is authoritarian.